Weston McKennie and the Art of Belonging
McKennie's debut was mostly ordinary, and that is its own monumental occasion.
On average, there are around seven billion billion billion molecules that make up the human body. I know because I Googled it. Here are some other things I Googled: there are enough cubic kilometers of water in the Atlantic Ocean for every person in the United States to be placed in it and not be closer than a kilometer from the next person. The world drinks 500 billion cups of coffee a year (if you’re wondering who drinks the most, per capita it’s Finland, who drink over 25 pounds of coffee per person in a year, on average). By 2022, the Internet will conduct nearly 3 zetabytes of traffic. You know how a megabyte is a pretty small amount of digital space, while a gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, and a terabyte (pretty big!) is 1000 gigabytes? A zetabyte is the number 1 followed by 21 zeroes amount of bytes. There will be three of them.
These are all objective facts that we don’t really know the exact specifics of, but we are aware of in a general sense. Yeah, there’s a lot of molecules around, and water, and coffee, and Internet traffic. The numbers are impossibly large to comprehend, but the facts aren’t really that impressive. They’re simply there. Part of the fabric of physical existence. We readily accept them and move on without much thought or awe, unless we run into a well-shot nature documentary narrated by an old English man with a soothing voice. Or Snoop Dogg.
Weston McKennie played 90 minutes for Juventus in their Serie A opener yesterday, and looked perfectly comfortable playing for the best team in Italy.
That statement contains an opinion, but I believe it is a broadly shared one, so let’s just go ahead and say that that is objectively true, as well. Where we go from there is extrapolation, a land equal parts mathematics and palm readings. There are plenty of people who would like to quantify just how well McKennie played for Juventus today. Maybe that’s because “McKennie looked comfortable” is not the BOOMWOWRAZZLEDAZZLE take that we’re all looking for. It’s certainly not what many non-American Juventus fans were stopping at regarding Weston McKennie today, with opinions ranging from “already 1000 times better than World Cup champion Blaise Matuidi” to “second-coming of soccer style titan Edgar Davids.” If true, those are big statements. Impressive statements, designed to surprise both in their scope and in their unlikelihood.
Full disclosure: I hate lists of numbers like these. Sure, they can be useful, sometimes. But a lot of the time they’re put in a big list, like this, and presented as if completing 88% of your passes, doing a dribble, and getting in a few tackles means much more than it actually does. None of those numbers really tell us much about the game that was played, nor how valuable the player who completed them was to his team. But put all these things in a list and mix it with equal parts delirious hope, and people froth at the mouth for this stuff. They want it to mean something. Often, they will the list to mean much more than it does.
McKennie was good today. He had moments that were very, very good. He had some moments, particularly in the opening 15 minutes of the game, where he wasn’t very good. As Pirlo said after the game, “Today he did well. He could’ve done better… But it was the first game, we can forgive him.” Is that a statement that says Weston McKennie is 1000 times better than Blaise Matuidi? No. Does it indicate that he’s the next Edgar Davids? Certainly not. It is a statement of simple satisfaction.
The point I’m trying to make here is that Weston McKennie was just fine for Juventus today, and that phrase in itself is one of those huge, massive facts that exist on a scale we don’t really comprehend, yet now accept as part of the normal furniture of our lives. Not only did an American man sign for Juventus, he started for them over a high-profile acquisition from Barcelona, and not only that, he looked perfectly ok, and at times even good for them over the course of 90 minutes! That statement, five years ago, would crank open our collective jaw until our chins brushed the floor. It would’ve been paradigm-shifting.
On Monday, September 21st, 2020, Weston McKennie being just fine for Juventus is a fact we can simply accept. It’s a fact so readily accepted that we seek ways to go further, make it even more impressive than it actually was. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Weston McKennie was bad against Sampdoria. Especially when he was buzzing around the field and doing things like this:
Pirlo’s instructions for McKennie in the midfield seemed to be “be safe on the ball, don’t get caught too far forward, and when you see the opportunity to get a tackle in, you’re a bull and this is Pamplona, baby.” McKennie accomplished that. It wasn’t always clean, and he got himself into trouble a couple times, but he did what he was tasked with doing, covering a monster amount of ground in the process, as is his way. I do not think that is an otherworldly game from McKennie, nor do I even think it signals that he is always going to be first-choice for Pirlo moving forward. In fact, I still think there’s a very good chance that he finds himself as a bench option more games than he starts for Juve. That doesn’t take away from just how important a simple “pretty good” game can be.
The fact that Weston McKennie debuted for Juventus and was pretty good isn’t an immediately impressive fact. If I was writing a lede for a real website about it, I would avoid the phrase “pretty good” at all costs. No one really cares about “pretty good.” I would put it another way: Weston McKennie belonged. He belonged on the field on Sunday. He belonged on in a Juventus team that’s looking for a Champions League victory and it’s tenth-straight Serie A. He belonged next to… Aaron Ramsey, I guess.
Belonging isn’t immediately sexy or impressive verbiage, either. But it’s vital in this game. It’s the type of underpinning that we accept without realizing how incredible it actually is. To have your teammates, people who have become accustomed to playing with and against the best players in the world, trust you. Treat you as one of their own. To step on the field and not look out of place. To shuffle your seven billion billion billion molecules for miles across a field, and be greeted at the end of it with satisfaction.
Weston McKennie belongs at Juventus. And I don’t think his game on Sunday was as incredible as many, many people are making it out to be. But I do think it was fine, it was good, it was exactly what it needed to be for his team. And I think that when you think about that statement, and look at that team, and look at the kid from Texas in the black and white stripes that you’re talking about?
That is its own kind of incredible.
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That’s a debut goal scored five minutes after coming into a professional game for the very first time, and I think that is pretty darn good. If the United States could do me a favor and not break apart before 2023 so I could root for Sophia Smith and Catarina Macario on the USWNT as opposed to the Democratic Republic of California or something like that, I would greatly appreciate it.
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I… may have gotten a little carried away.
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Happy Monday, y’all. You got this.