The Brazilian That Could

 

My favorite player in the Premier League is not one of the top goal scorers like Sergio Aguero nor a playmaking midfield star like Bastian Schweinsteiger. No, my favorite is Liverpool’s Brazilian defensive midfielder Lucas Leiva.

Lucas has experienced highs and lows during his 8 years at Anfield. He’s been relentlessly criticized by pundits and some of the Liverpool faithful. But these challenges have always brought out the best in him. Through sheer force of will and determination, Lucas has overcome many challenges that should’ve ended a career in the Premier League.

He arrived at Anfield in the summer of 2007 from the Brazilian club Gremio after a successful start to his professional career. He was youngest player ever to be awarded the Bola de Ouro (Golden Ball).

Lucas struggled to break into the starting squad because he was competing against world-class midfield talent with the likes of Xabi Alonso, Steven Gerrard and Javier Mascherano. Despite the stiff competition for a midfield spot, Lucas made over 30  appearances his debut year and even notched up a FA Cup goal and five assists. His goal made him the first Brazilian to score for Liverpool.

The 2008-09 season was the first of several major challenges for Lucas. After winning the bronze medal in the Beijing Olympics with the Brazilian national team, many had high hopes for his return to Liverpool. But he struggled to find his form upon returning to England. After several poor performances, Lucas faced criticism from pundits and some Liverpool supporters booed him off the pitch after a draw against Fulham in November 2008. Rafael Benitez, Liverpool’s manager at the time, publicly defended Lucas while he was under fire. “People just don’t know how good Lucas is,” he said. I suspect that since then Benitez has enjoyed quite a few I told you so’s.

 

Lucas makes one his famous tackles.

 

Lucas vowed to improve and after being booed off the pitch his reaction was commendable. Instead of saying—to hell with Liverpool and the supporters, I’m working my ass off and you boo me! Lucas’s main thought was, what can I learn from this? He even admitted in an interview that he understood why some fans had booed him and that he held no hard feelings about it.

Lucas pressed on. By December he was being praised again by pundits and fans after several strong performances.

After Xabi Alonso left Liverpool for Real Madrid, Lucas stepped up to a regular starting spot in midfield where he excelled. His work ethic won over the fans who once booed him and they even voted him Young Player of the Year for the 2009-10 season. His excellent form continued and he established a reputation for consistency, which he maintains today.

After many excellent performances during the 2010-11 season, Lucas was awarded Player of the Year by Liverpool fans. I don’t know of another case of a player who was once booed off the pitch and then won Player of the Year just two years later.

After suffering a serious knee injury in November 2011, Lucas missed rest of the season. By the time he returned to the squad Brendan Rodgers had taken over management at Anfield. Lucas fought his way back initially as a substitute and by March 2013 he was starting matches again.

He suffered two more injury setbacks under Brendan Rodgers. After recovering from the second injury Rodgers rotated him in and out of the squad at the start of the 2014-15 season. But once again with characteristic determination, Lucas fought his way back to a regular starting spot after an excellent display in the Champions League in November 2014.

I was disappointed that Rodgers named James Milner captain after Henderson was out injured. Milner is an excellent player, but I really think Lucas deserved it. He has proven his loyalty to Liverpool time and again and is the longest serving player on the roster.

As late as August 2015, rumors were surfacing about a move for Lucas to Besiktas and Inter Milan. It was widely reported that he had fallen out of favor with Rodgers. This was a new challenge for Lucas. Managers always had some sort of vision for him. Then as chance would have it, Jordan Henderson was injured after only two matches and Rodgers scrambled for a midfielder to replace him; Lucas was waiting in the wings.

He put on an impressive, some have said career-saving, effort against Arsenal in late August and has started every match since. He’s even outlasted Rodgers, who was fired in October. It seems a strange twist of fate that Liverpool got rid of the man who tried to get rid of Lucas.

On the pitch, Lucas has established himself in a position that is unusual for Brazilian midfielders in the Premier League. He once said that Brazilian footballers in England face an inevitable comparison to the tricky, flashy players  like Robinho or Ronaldinho. (Lucas’s compatriot and teammate Philippe Countinho fits much better in such a comparison) But Lucas is cut from a different cloth.

He is aggressive, yet disciplined and always seems to know where to apply pressure in midfield to win the ball. He eschews flashy displays in favor of tactical vision and hard defensive work. His style is not always the prettiest, but it is among the most effective. He was recently noted to be the most successful tackler in the Premier League.

Lucas’s ability to read the game and excellent passing skills make him the heart of Liverpool’s midfield. He is often the critical spark of counterattacks by winning tackles and making long, accurate passed upfield.

I was overjoyed to see Lucas wear the captain’s armband in Liverpool’s last match at Anfield. It’s an honor he fully deserves. He is thriving once again with Jurgen Klopp at the helm at Anfield.

At only 28 years old, Lucas has years to play ahead of him. His current contract will keep him at Anfield until 2017 and I hope he extends it and retires there. To me, he has become as much a fixture at Anfield as Steven Gerrard. It would break my heart if he ever left.

Career threatening injuries, antagonistic managers and booing fans, Lucas has outlasted it all. He is the Brazilian that could.

 

The Persistence of Doubt

I’m haunted by doubt. It strikes me at nearly every turn, no matter what I’m doing. Whenever I try something new that takes a great deal of work, doubt seeps in, oozing through the many cracks in my mental fortitude. It starts with some frustration and then I start to think too much. Thinking is the seed that grows into doubt. I end up not writing anything at all and wondering when I’ll be able to really see a project through.

The simple truth is that I can see it through now, but my doubt gets in the way. It eats away at my will to work and then my lazy tendencies usually finish me off. My doubt is a safety mechanism, if I criticize my efforts than no one else can and I’m safe.

With writing it usually happens like this: an idea grows in my mind and then I try to get it all down on paper and somewhere in between getting the idea and writing it down, the doubt takes shape. Everything I’m doing seems like a waste of time and hope for my future begins to fade. Perhaps my doubts can be more extreme than others, but the battle against doubt is the same for everyone.

I succumb to doubt more often than I’d like to admit and there’s only one way to deal with it; ignore it. This is much easier said than done. I try to remember that I can’t stop doubt from rising but I can choose to ignore its symptoms. It boils down to a choice between succumbing to doubt or ignoring it, fighting or surrendering.

In my darkest moments of doubt, I recall something Han Solo says in Star Wars, as the Millennium Falcon is being pulled to the Death Star by a tractor beam:

“There’re not going to get me without a fight.”

Doubt’s not going to get me without a fight.

If I’m able to pull away from all my doubts and just focus on that next word, everything seems less daunting. I can always doubt that my story or whatever I’m working will be any good, but I’ll never doubt that I can write just one word more.

I break it down, word by word and keep moving. If I stop, doubt will catch up with me and eat me alive.

At the end of the day, doubt isn’t going anywhere, but I am.

The Lost Writer

I was browsing around goodreads.com a few days ago when I stumbled upon a list called “Popular 19th Century American Literature.” As I scrolled down the list, I was disappointed to see that Ambrose Bierce wasn’t included. I know this was only one of many lists on goodreads, but it fed my suspicion that Bierce is one of the most underrated writers in American history.

Bierce was better known as a journalist than a fiction writer during his lifetime and journalists tend to fade from our collective cultural memory sooner than great fiction writers. However, I suspect the real reason that Bierce has passed into literary obscurity is because he was born too early.

Bierce was born in July 1842 on a farm in Ohio. In 1861, he joined the Union army and served on the front lines of the Civil War. He was an outstanding soldier by all accounts and courageously rescued a wounded comrade under fire at the Battle of Rich Mountain. Bierce served primarily as a reconnaissance scout and topographical engineer while in the army. In 1863, he suffered a severe head wound at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain and nearly died. He was sent home to recover and was back on active duty three months later. He served until the war ended in April 1865.

Bierce’s war experience had a profound effect on him for the rest of his life. It left him with a lifelong hatred of war. It’s likely that if Bierce were alive today he would be diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, but we can never know for sure.

Settling in San Francisco after the war, Bierce began his career in journalism. He became famous for his satirical columns in William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner.  Bierce’s journalism is a whole other topic which I can only skim over here and deserves its own post. Anyway, it was around this time that he also began to write short stories, with his first one, “The Haunted Valley,” published in 1871. From this start, Bierce went on to write nearly 100 stories primarily in three genres: horror, war and tall tales.

Bierce’s stories were highly original and unlike anything that was written at the time. In an introduction to a collection of his short stories, Cathy N. Davison wrote, “Given the taste of his contemporaries and the dramatic difference between his own work and anything else written in America in the 1880s and 1890s, it is surprising that Bierce was published in the first place.”

Bierce’s horror stories usually show the frailty of humans in the face of unexplainable phenomenon and to a contemporary reader they might seem like episodes of the Twilight Zone with their unexpected twists and eerie atmosphere. A film adaptation of Bierce’s most famous story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” was actually shown as the final episode of the Twilight Zone in 1964.

But it was Bierce’s war stories that really broke new ground. These were graphic, early surrealist and brutal tales. One of his best war stories, “Chickamauga,” gives a reader a good sense of Bierce’s view of war. It tells the story of a little boy who gets lost in a forest and ends up in the middle of hundreds of maimed soldiers, left to die after a recent battle. The story is graphic even by today’s standards and says much about what happens when innocence (the little boy) is confronted by the horrific reality of war.

Bierce was often accused of being a misanthrope and I’m not sure that he ever denied being one. His stories never glorify people nor do they include heroes. His characters are often dominated by the forces around them and seem helpless. Sometimes, as in the case of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” it’s the character’s own actions that undo them. From the stories he left behind, it’s clear that Bierce didn’t see much good in humanity but I’m not sure I’d go as far as to call him a misanthrope.

I think that if Bierce were born later and fought in World War I  instead of the Civil War, his stories would’ve been much more popular. It’s no wonder that many writers of the World War I or “Lost Generation,” considered Bierce to be a great influence (this was especially true of Ernest Hemingway). The post-World War I period brought a more pessimistic attitude toward war and civilization to mainstream thought that was in line with Bierce’s views. People realized that all the “progress” of Western civilization had, for the most part, led to more efficient ways of slaughtering each other.

Bierce’s personal life began to disintegrate in the 1890s when he separated from his wife and both of his sons died. One died of alcoholism and the other was killed in a gun fight over a woman. Only his daughter, Helen, outlived him. He spent his last few years compiling his collected works and visiting his old Civil War battlefields for the last time.

In December 1913, Bierce left the US for Mexico and was never seen again. To this day, no one knows how he died. Some have speculated that he committed suicide, while others have guessed that he was killed by Pancho Villa’s troops somewhere near the city of Chihuahua. His final letters had a suicidal tone to them:

“My plan, so far as I have one is to go through Mexico to one of the Pacific ports, if I can get through without being stood up against a wall and shot as an American. Thence go across the Andes and perhaps across the continent…Naturally it is possible–even probable–that I shall not return.

In his last known letter dated December 26, 1913 from El Paso, Bierce wrote to a friend back in San Francisco:

As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.

Bierce signed the letter with “So – I bid you farewell,” and was never heard from again. It was a mysterious end–eerily similar to his stories.

Sometimes I wonder if Bierce would be satisfied with his legacy today, would he be angry to omitted from a list of great 19th century American writers?

I’m not sure he would even care. His motto was: “Nothing matters.”