INTERVIEW: Rita Bullwinkel by Anu Khosla
Headshot
Rita Bullwinkel
Viking
Interview by
Anu Khosla
Rita Bullwinkel considers her new novel, Headshot, to be a fundamentally suburban book. It is set in Reno, Nevada, where eight young girls from suburbs and small-time cities across the US converge to, as Rita puts it, “hit each other with their hands”. They are here to box. They are here to win. They are here to be the stuff of legend.
Suburbanity was a quality so fundamental to the book, so ubiquitous, that I hardly noticed it until Rita pointed it out to me. Like a fish in water, perhaps I missed it because I, too, was a suburban girl athlete. Improbably, Rita and I grew up in the same tiny Bay Area suburb (Portola Valley), which even people from nearby seem to have never heard of. Rita was a competitive water polo player who played for a NCAA D1 team, where I was a competitive skier. Our own sports were as strange as boxing –– maybe more so.
We have both lived youth women’s sports. We have both lived growing up in an obscure little town playing an obscure little sport. We, like the girls of the Headshot tournament, have both lived that hitching of our dreams to obscurity.
Anu Khosla: Why boxing? Why was this the sport that let you tell this particular story?
Rita Bullwinkel: I think that I was drawn to boxing for a few reasons. One is that I feel like it is such a theatrical sport, both in terms of the lighting and the context within which it takes place. The ring literally looks like a stage. You're usually looking up, like one would look up at a stage if you're sitting in the front row. Boxing is a sport that feels very dialogue-like in the way that they move their bodies. It also occupies this outsized space in the American subconscious.
It wasn't necessarily a sport that I felt like I had access to until I found this trove of YouTube training videos that were posted by young women, teenagers who were making these videos. They weren't produced. They weren't something that other people were really meant to view. They were training videos to learn the difference between what they were enacting in reality and what they were enacting in their mind. Filming yourself while competing or while doing any kind of sport is a really common training tactic. And it's one that, as a competitive youth athlete, was deployed a lot on me. I have these very vivid memories of watching hours and hours and hours of myself shooting a free throw to try and correct my form, running, swimming, to try and see if I can see my body better from outside of myself than I could otherwise. It was when I was watching these hours long, unedited training videos of these young women that had two, three, four views –– they were clearly an archive meant mostly for oneself –– that I realized that I had access into whatever was going on there, and that setting the book in this world of youth women's boxing made sense to me. I saw a lot of resonance between the way the youth women's boxing tournaments operated and the way the youth athletic leagues I operated in and participated in worked.
There was also an attempt at portraiture. And in the way that boxing feels theatrical, it also feels it lent itself to that project of trying to have a linguistic portrait of someone in a very short space. To try and see if I could take their whole life and compress it down and wiggle it out and go back and forth with it. The physicality of the dialogue of just two people using their bodies against one another lent itself to portraiture.
AK: So much of the book, as a former athlete myself, really resonated with me. The way these other competitors’ memories sort of echo through your life. Even if you are not in touch with them anymore, there's something so intimate about having competed against each other in this way. I feel like I'm living that, as I was reading it.
RB: I do feel like there's something really strange and gooey that happens. I think the playing of games has the ability to form a collective memory in a really strange and bizarre and unique way. On the rare occasions when I encountered people that I've played against –– who I certainly did not have verbal relationships with –– there is a shared experiential relationship that is really hard to place. I don't really know what it is. It exists kind of outside of language and outside of time and has a very immediate memory recall.
AK: I did find that there was a lot in this book that seemed, whether it was intentional or not, to speak to and maybe in some ways subvert the traditional sports narrative. Was that subversion intentional?
RB: I'm not sure. There was one sports narrative arc that I certainly encountered a lot growing up that is still just rampant in our culture that I really feel like has not been true to my lived experience and I was not interested at all in depicting. It’s this diamond in the rough narrative that there's this external person – usually a male coach or a father – who recognizes some type of talent in a young woman. Athletic talent. And then because of this coach or father, they become who they are. I mean, that is basically the way everyone has narrated Serena and Venus's career. It's basically all attributed to their dad. I would say that I have this really vivid memory of being… I'd have to check the years, but when Bend It Like Beckham came out, I was like, the market that movie was made for, right? I don't know if you feel that way.
AK: Oh, absolutely.
RB: I think I was twelve or thirteen. I was wearing my Air Jordans and maybe, like, an SF Giants baseball hat, and I was like, "a movie about women's soccer?! This is certainly for me! Marketing people who have made this, I will buy this movie ticket! I will beg my parents to take me to this thing." I remember watching that movie and being like, oh, my God, this is such a bummer. I didn't have the language for it, but there's that coach. He is given all of the credit for the team's entire talent, for taking out time from his important day to teach these young women how to play soccer. And then he bangs one of them!
The diamond in the rough narrative, which is still, I think, the narrative we have, I think it's just fictional. I understand that people need teachers to learn how to do something, but there's no other field that really has that pervasive idea. I'm thinking about if you're a professional violinist, how many films do we have of violinists that really portray all of their greatness, all of their artistic power coming from their teacher? None. For whatever reason, with women's athletics, it's like, well, there has to be someone else behind the curtain that is really pulling the strings. And so in the book, the coaches are present, but their language is basically never spoken. It's muffled. The young women are not paying attention to it. They're like, these people are in my way. They're someone that has to be dealt with and then pushed aside.
AK: There's a part in the book where you write about how the coaches, if the girls lose, will go to the bar at the end of the day and talk about the shortcomings of that particular girl and her failings as an athlete. But if the girl wins, they're going to attribute it to their coaching and what they did for that girl. I think a couple particular former coaches of mine's faces flashed through my mind as I read that section.
RB: We're one of the first generations that really grew up with the benefits of Title Nine. There were copious amounts of athletics leagues for young women that one could participate in, and yet there were almost no women coaches, because women's athletics hadn't existed for long enough. I'll speak for my mom, the high school she went to, all of the public high schools in California, they didn't offer women's athletics. So it's not something that she would have any access to to be able to coach. There are some few exceptions, but the vast, vast majority of coaches I had growing up were men.
AK: One of the things that was coming up for me was the way body image functions in the book. These girl athletes clearly had some of their image of themselves as boxers informed by the way people outside of their boxing life reacted to their bodies. There's almost this idea that athletes inherently will have ideal bodies by societal standards. But that's not the truth. Even within one sport, there's a wide range of what bodies look like.
RB: Yes, like Steph Curry. Perfect example. We could go on and on.
AK: People seem to think that body image issues don't exist in women's sports, because there's this idea that the women athletes already have bodies that are their athletes bodies, so they're quote-on-quote "good" bodies by society's standards. But my experience is that body image is sometimes worse in women's sports than it is outside.
RB: What is "ideal" is different from sport to sport. In swimming, it is extremely physically advantageous to be shaped like a triangle, and if you swim a lot, your body will begin to be shaped like this. Very tiny hips, very large shoulders, because you're using your shoulders so much to power water. But even if something is advantageous for a sport, the reality of women's athletics is that no one cares. Society at large is not attending these games. We have tons of examples of women's soccer leagues having low attendance, the WNBA having low attendance. At the college I went to, the women's water polo team was one of the highest ranked teams at the university. We were a top 20 D1 team. And even still, in terms of facility use or using the personal trainers we were way, way down on the totem pole. The men's football team, who were a bunch of jokers, they were ranked like 80th D3, always had precedence. It was what the athletic department mandated. And so, you know, maybe you have this body that is useful for this one specific thing that you might have some power in –– some select power in this very small, claustrophobic, insular community. But if you exit outside of that, if you go to a job interview, you go to the grocery store, no one else is recognizing this thing as an asset.
There's something particular about embodying a young female body. It's just such a charged thing to live in. That makes the act of using that body for something that society does not expect you to use it for particularly interesting, because it widens the way you're understanding yourself and the way society is understanding you. I think a lot about how photographing women, just depicting a woman visually is really difficult. What I mean by difficult is that we just bring so much baggage to it. I even see it in women's author photos. How do you desexualize an image of something that has been, that is in some ways, visually fundamentally sexualized by our culture? I think that's why it's interesting what has driven each of these young women to use their bodies in this way that is so far divorced from what the society at large would expect of them. Even within that, as I'm sure you'll remember, there are characters in the book who size up the other women physically in terms of sexual attractiveness, and are like, well, I'm hotter than her. Which seemed true to life.
*Both laugh*
AK: You're describing this thing that functions in sports and in art. One of the ways that a coach might push you towards a sport or not is related to your body. If you're tall and lanky, they're like, you should be a cross country runner. If you're very muscular and short, then maybe you are going to be funneled into boxing or whatever it is. They're trying to match the way your body looks to the sport. There is one way in which maybe it’s a hyper rationalist approach, where it's like, “oh, we're just matching this athlete to where she's going to succeed the most.” But there are so many assumptions that come along with that, there's so much scaffolding of prejudices when you do that. It's a fraught endeavor.
In the same way, I think within our generation of writers, there is a sensitivity to how we're writing physical body on the page. We’re trying to be respectful of different characters, whether they're fictional or nonfictional. I find that when I'm reading a physical description on a page, I get nervous because I'm like, what is this writer saying about this person's body? There's a bravery in putting it on the page. What I loved in the book is that it didn't feel gratuitous. It didn't feel like you were using their bodies just to paint a scene. It was trying to show something about these characters, how they have developed this psychology as a result of living in these bodies.
RB: Oh, that means so much to me. I'm curious to know, with skiing, I don't know enough about skiing to know, what does the archetypal skier look like?
AK: There's different disciplines within skiing. I was a freestyle skier where there was less of a particular body type in the sport. In ski racing, Lindsay Vonn, if you know of her, her body is very specifically the archetype of what a ski racing body is. It's being tall and very muscular. Ski racers wear these tight, aerodynamic speed suits, so you can physically see their bodies. I wonder if the fact that they're more visible is relevant? Because in freestyle skiing, which I competed in, you were wearing baggy clothes all the time. Not to say this is why I picked skiing, but there's probably some degree to which I liked the sport because I didn't feel exposed, physically. I just don't think I could have ever been a swimmer because you guys were literally exposed. Maybe that's also why there's a degree of confidence, or the women who succeed have some body confidence, and they're able to not let thinking about their body being exposed distract from the sport.
RB: Yeah, I think so. I mean, specifically with water polo, there is this element that it shares with boxing of the body as weapon. If you ever watch a water polo match, before it starts you'll see all the young women or men have to put their hands above on the pool deck, and the referee will go by and touch each of their nails. It's like your nails are talons, that they're like a weapon that needs to be checked. And also that you can't be trusted to regulate yourself. Something about that really reminded me of how when you watch a boxing match, I'm not talking about pay per view professionals, but the referees look in the gloves to see if there's lead in them. Left to their own devices, there's this acknowledgment that the people participating in this event have the capacity for violence. Which I do think is interesting with young women athletes. There's very few societal contexts in which there's a public acknowledgment that a woman has a capacity for violence in that way.
AK: Maybe some of the reason I've been asking you about sports narrative is just this feeling that we aren’t getting all the great sports narratives. The opportunities to tell them seem limited, the sports section feels small, and the sports books that are being published are, like, the same repeated history of the NFL or NBA. Honestly, from Bend It Like Beckham to this book, what were the other women's sports stories? Obviously there were some, but…
RB: But there kind of weren't.
AK: There kind of weren't, right?!
RB: I mean, I don't know what they are!
AK: Yeah, exactly. I have to really sit and think about it. Whereas when you brought up that example, it's funny because it's one that I think about all the time.
RB: We just got this one movie and it was really bad.
