Theses and Dissertations Collection

The Striker and the Clock is a memoir-in-essays about the narrator’s career as a professional soccer player. The manuscript is composed of 90 thematically and linguistically linked “minute-long” micro-essays that are composed of personal history, researched study, social commentary and eclectic literary analysis. The project looks back on the trajectory of career from the present tense position of self-study while asking questions about the nature of success, desire, gender, competition, labor, compensation, mortality and the relationship between one’s mind and body. A chorus of teammates, coaches and peers are remembered throughout the text and illuminate the “disparate motivations, joys, pains, and desires” of each individual athlete. The narrator draws a parallel between artistic practice and athletic ambition in an effort to complicate the figure of the wordless, simple-minded jock. The Striker and the Clock traces a lifetime of intense engagement with a sport and uses the process of writing as a way to explore how we come to understand our past experience and propel ourselves forward.