On shit-talking

It's not so bad, really.

Over Thanksgiving, my partner and I drove to Cincinnati to spend the holiday with my family. We stayed at my parents’ house, and amongst eating and napping, we played a lot of ping-pong in the basement.

Something you should know before the story goes further is that both my partner and I grew up as intense child athletes. She was training to become a professional skier; I was making a name for myself in the ultimate frisbee world (a small world, admittedly, but a world nonetheless). While neither of us compete in our respective sports anymore, there’s still a baseline athleticism and physical proficiency that graces our bodies, at least for now.

Another thing you should also know is that we both grew up playing ping-pong: she played every summer at her grandparent’s house in Florida, and I competed with my father and brother in our suburban basement in Ohio. Which is to say that we’re not Marty Supreme but we’re also no chumps.

Anyways, there we were in our early thirties, playing ping-pong in my parents’ basement, and I was beating her. Not badly, but consistently, which maybe is worse. She was rusty, it’s true, but she had a stronger forehand and was more aggressive. My strategy, when it comes to ping-pong, is defense. In other words, I return almost every hit and simply wait for someone else to mess up. Not the most daring maneuver, but it is surprisingly effective, because people mess up and get mad, and then generally mess up some more.

At one point, her frustration took over. “You’re not even that good!” she blurted out, after I scored another point. The comment surprised me—my partner is a particularly mild-mannered and gentle human being, and I’d never seen her snap like that. Some part of it was probably true. Is it possible to be good by waiting for someone else to be bad?

“That’s not very nice,” I said, and then scored again. Like any good lesbians, we sat down to debrief the comment afterwards, discuss how it hurt my feelings, what had motivated the outburst, etc. etc.

Although I didn’t admit it then, a small part of me delighted in the insult. It tapped into a competitive energy that I rarely let peek through my life anymore. There’s something delicious about shit-talking to get a rise out of your opponent. When it works, it’s like watching a marble roll down a Rube Goldberg machine. All cause and effect.

I was never much of a shit-talker myself in sports, but my father loved to run his mouth while we battled it out in ping-pong. He wasn’t very good at it, though. His “shit-talking” consisted mostly of silly nursery rhymes that made little sense. “Three to two, you’re a shrew,” is one example. “Ten to three, more for me,” is another. “Fuck off,” I’d mumble, trying not to laugh. Although his shit-talking didn’t impact my performance much, it unnerved my brother, occasionally enough so to throw him off his game. My father was a sore winner in these moments, shouting and whooping with unrestrained glee as my brother stormed up the stairs.

When I was in college, my frisbee coach once told me that every team had to have someone who was the villain, who often doubled as the shit-talker. “They carry the weight of the hate,” he said, “so other people don’t have to be burdened with it.” Not everyone can do it, he assured me. It takes a special type of person to make that sort of personal sacrifice and accept the fact that by making yourself unlikable on the field, you pay for it off the field, too. In the frisbee world, this sort of behavior has always been controversial. It’s often deemed to be out of alignment with “spirit of the game,” one of the core precepts of the sport. But sportsmanship (“sportspersonship?”) can look all sorts of ways. At its worst, shit-talking can be cruel and unusual. During my years of playing club soccer in high school, shit-talking often stooped to the nearest insult at hand. I was called a “dyke” a handful of times, which even then felt like a lazy barb, low-hanging fruit. (Those girlies had no idea that they were predicting the future!!)

But at its best, shit-talking can elevate and sharpen the recipient’s game. There’s nothing better than beating someone who just moments earlier was trying to mess with your head. Nothing. Fucking. Better. It’s like a dance, only your partner is actively trying to trip you, and you have to do everything in your power to keep time with the beat and smile. So yeah, it felt great when I scored against my partner after she accused me of not being that good. Otherwise, the point would just be another number.

I’m not too proud to admit that I lacked (and still do) the courage to fully become a shit-talker. I am too Midwestern, too earnest. In my earlier years, I was a talented athlete, but I was also terrified of being unlikable, a fear that now feels so gendered it makes me wince. There were moments in my sporting life where I knew I was among the best, if not the best, especially in frisbee, but it felt anathema to say it aloud, as if the words might break the trance of excellence or doom me to mediocrity or something. I suspect it was mostly a sense of not wanting to jinx myself in front of other people. It was bad enough to be a prideful young woman; worse, though, to be a prideful young woman who gets it wrong. The author Sally Rooney experienced a similar anxiety during her time as a successful competitive debater in college. “Confronted with my own minor successes, I mostly felt embarrassed,” she writes in one of my favorite essays of all time. “I wanted to be seen as deserving, but I didn’t want to say I was deserving. As a result, I vacillated between a weird self-righteousness and a deceitful kind of self-deprecation.” Girl, same.

So instead of words, I used my body. In soccer and frisbee both, I got good at bracing for impact. I rarely fell when hit, and I became very skilled in knowing how to body someone else out of position. There was so much I didn’t understand about my body back then, but I managed to tap into this innate sense of strength. “You’re like a brick wall,” a teammate once told me. “Everything bounces off you.” Whenever I made contact with someone else’s body, a spike of dopamine zipped through my body. Which is not to say that I played dirty. I mostly didn’t. I liked a clean hit, on either side of the equation—hitting, getting hit. Hard to believe, but it can almost feel like love. Or at least, an intimacy. The same goes for shit-talking, when the conditions are right. For it to work, you have to be truly present. No distractions.

Moments like these are few and far between these days. My life as a non-athlete is mostly a mild-mannered one. For exercise, I’ve started to go for long runs, a feat that feels more mental than physical. No more frisbee, no more soccer. Occasionally I’ll throw in some yoga.

Most of my friends in Iowa know little to nothing about this side of me. They can’t imagine me scoring a point in the end zone, spiking the disc and roaring, “Let’s fucking go!” as my opponent walks away with their head down. They’ve never seen the way my pupils dilate and my ears pull back along my skull when I’m blindsided in a tackle, or the way my body speaks more clearly and forcefully than my voice ever could. How could they? It’s a part of my life I don’t talk about anymore, probably because I miss it more than I’m ready to admit. To them, I am a goofy, friendly writer who loves dogs, easygoing perhaps to a fault. All true. Every once in a while, though, when the mood is right, I get the urge to turn to them and say, with all the dead sincerity in the world, “But also, I’m a shark.”