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Ted Lasso is a tapestry of everyone he’s ever loved; a patchwork quilt of idiosyncrasies sewn together, lopsided in some places, fraying in others, but lived-in, well-worn and whole.
He’s the classic literature he’s borrowed from his mother’s bookshelf, pages annotated and creased, spines bent from reading and rereading, lost in period pieces and coming-of-age stories that hit just between his ribs. He thinks that mismatched mugs bring character to any kitchen and after all these years he still peels apples just like his mama. In his opinion, baking is the best way to clear your head and any gift worth a lick is homemade; he’s been giving raspberry jam to his players since ‘05, still using the recipe given to him by his mother and her mother before her.
He’s the way that he cuts his sandwiches in diagonals, never halves, because Henry’s convinced him that they taste better that way. He commits to the sanctity of a pinky promise, bunny-ears his shoelaces when tying them and keeps a nightlight in his hallway, even 4,438 miles from home.
He’s superstitious, just like his grandmother, and never fails to throw spilt salt over his left shoulder. He thinks there’s merit to handwashing your dishes, believes in the healing power of homemade broth and still carries the embroidered handkerchief she got him for his birthday, tucked safely into the back pocket of his backpack.
Ted Lasso is a mosaic, sharp corners and glittering pieces, broken down and cobbled back together again by his own sheer will. He learned from an early age that when life hits, it hits hard, and sometimes the only thing you can really count on is yourself.
He found a lifeline, once, in a high school football coach that took him under his wing his junior year when his grades started slipping like his hold on sobriety. At the lowest point in his life, Ted found comfort in the small things: the way the mist rolled off the field under Friday night lights; how the chilled air would burn in his lungs as he held breath during a play; the feeling he would have in his chest after a particularly inspiring halftime speech.
Ted found something to hold onto.
And football brought him all sorts of new things – it brought him community and an outlet; something physical to help him feel less pent up, a way to express his buried turmoil without speaking. But it also brought him a clearer direction, a purpose; a new mantra for life. He really began to understand, to believe in the fact that life wasn’t about the wins and the losses, it was about being the best version of yourself that you could be.
He found a new version of himself in the word ‘coach.’
Ted Lasso is a watercolor, spread too thin, his colors diluted and running, the hues blending until he’s not even sure what he looks like anymore. Some nights he’ll stand in front of his bathroom mirror, pale light filtering in from the window and he’ll see his father’s face blending with his own – sometimes, if he stands there long enough, he imagines his reflection is what his father would’ve looked like if he made it past forty two.
That’s the thing about making sure those around you never feel lost – sometimes you lose yourself in the process.
He learned the hard way that being alone and being sad can blur the lines between reality and illusion, and that stretching yourself too thin is a recipe for disaster – yet he does it anyway. The tricky bit is that he doesn’t know how to stop, toeing the line between willful ignorance and delusion, treading carefully, heel to toe, fingers crossed that he doesn’t fall off the precipice he’s trapped himself on.
After years of practice he’s mastered the art of pouring from an empty glass.
Ted Lasso is poetry, golden-tongued, quick-witted, and kind, speaking more often than not in riddles and rhymes, long-winded anecdotes and folksy colloquialisms to deflect from acknowledging what’s really going on in his mind. He’s loquacious to a fault, an eccedentesiast by trade, and he
thinks
the
poets
might
disagree,
that sometimes you don’t have power over who you become – that destiny comes calling for us all in the end, and Ted’s found it – once or twice in the bottom of a bottle of bourbon, it burns –
Burns like his father in Hell, or so his priest told him once.
The thing is he’s forty seven years old, and if he’s being honest with himself, he’s frightened – because at the end of the day, when no one is present to bear witness, Ted Lasso is a tapestry of everyone he’s ever lost; a facsimile of his fears coming to haunt him, a specter of his past illuminating everything that’s wrong with his head.
Ted Lasso is his father’s son, it would seem.
Ted Lasso is, by nature, a believer – it’s something he inherited from his father, between chemical imbalances and left-handedness, tucked next to dimples and acid reflux, nestled next to brown eyes and stubbornness was his faith – not just in the divine but in all sorts of things: in people, in goodness.
It’s amazing how quickly a 12-gauge can strip a child of their convictions.
Our Father
Who art in Heaven
Hallowed be Thy name…
Except Ted cursed His name to Kingdom come, angered by a God that would leave him without a father, that would allow him to bear witness to his slaughter. But unlike those in Exodus, grief and suffering did not pass over the Lasso home, the red stain on their door coming to plague him for years to come.
It seems Ted and the Lord have something in common after all; some things are just unforgivable.
Ted Lasso didn’t go to his father’s funeral but somehow a part of him was buried with him. Yet unlike Lazarus, he never rose from that grave, far from holy ground when the local dioceses revoked his father’s funeral rites, banishing him to the farthest corner of the town he grew up in.
Blessed are those who mourn, yet the only comfort he’s found has been in libation – half a bottle of whisky poured on the cold ground above the grave he’s only ever visited once, the other half gently beckoning him into nothingness – it’s when Ted started flirting with the notion that sometimes he likes feeling nothing at all.
It’s funny, if you really think about it – Ted Lasso lost two Fathers in 1991.
When he was younger he used to believe that if you did good things, you went to Heaven, if you did bad things, you went to Hell – now-a-days he knows that everyone’s just trying their best to hold themselves together.
Looking back, his father’s hands never shook, not even when he drank too much, but Ted’s do – in remembrance of a macabre memory he just can’t seem to shake no matter how much he tries. But it seems he has his daddy’s trigger finger after all, what with the way that he up and moved himself to the other side of the world in an attempt to escape being overtaken by his own mind. That’s the thing about the Devil, Ted’s discovered; when he knocks on your door and tells you to ‘run,’ you don’t get the opportunity to ask ‘ how fast?'
You just hope you can outpace him.
Ted Lasso is a man, just a man, patched up and held together, a tapestry of everyone he’s ever loved and lost. He’s tired – pinching at loose threads and unwoven seams as he tries to hold all that’s sewn inside him from spilling out, piecing himself together with pieces of other people, because maybe, maybe if he lost himself in the process he could outrun destiny, leave it in a basement out in rural Kansas.
But that’s the funny thing about fate, isn’t it? No matter how far you run, no matter how fast, it comes for us all in the end; Ted’s pretty sure that in his attempt to leave everything behind he packed the ghost of his father instead. Sometimes, at night, after he’s had a few too many, he can see his father behind his closed lids, dancing with his demons, swirling, molding together into grotesque shapes until he can’t tell them apart.
Maybe they’ve always been one in the same.