Feel like I was a bit tough on Brian Phillips in my last review; he's obviously better writing for an audience of cognoscenti than for (if you will) gen pop. This essay takes as a start a long comment on a previous piece about football's 'aesthetic morality'--in brief, the idea that it's important not just to win, but to win in a beautiful way. Further, Phillips argues, it's because of the structure of soccer--the way it can so often seem random and sputtering unless everything really comes together--that makes this morality emerge, separating soccer from other sports, which are just beautifully put together frameworks for physical bodies to do amazing things. I find it mostly convincing, except that I think those lulls, those frustrative moments, are essential to waht makes soccer the king of sports--not just in a metaphor-for-life way, although taht holds, but because you need an ebb and flow. 'swhy baseball is so slow. 'swhy hockey has two breaks and only lasts an hour and has so many man-changes. But soccer buidls it into the very current of play, and that's why it catches you up like a swelling Mahler symphony, as opposed to most other team sports, which just go all yellingbird wankyguitars for the sports equivalent of a three-minute pop single. From The Run of Play. ( )