Advertisement
Published: September 7th 2008
Hey anyone who still gets this. Its been a busy summer and we finished the first draft of the book. And before school started as we had hoped. Now, we are working on the second draft and it is coming well.
I wrote this little piece as an informal assignment for public essay class. Since Ive begun writing I have been slightly scared of writing about soccer. I don't know why. I think, most likely, I was worried that writing about soccer, something so important to me, wouldnt resonate. I know that I have been put off from writing about it for some time also because I thought of it as too small a task, like somehow it was a waste of my talents. After writing this, with tears in my eyes and googsebumps on my forearms, I see that I was wrong. I can write about soccer powerfully, and meaningfully. My great plan is for this book to pan out enough so that I can get an advance to write the next book, a travel book about traveling around the world playing in pick up soccer games. It has always been my experience that when I found myself in a new place without familiar people, the pick up soccer game is always where I find my first connections. We'll see.
Its unedited and informal.. enjoy.
_____________________________________________________________________________
I don’t like the word “soccer”. I prefer to use “football”. Soccer, to me, is stuck in the world of American youth sports, in the world of the stocky man in his Giants jersey yelling at the kids to “sock the ball” or the all-star coach who told me to stop showboating when I scored with my left foot. Soccer is a passive pastime, a safe alternative to more dangerous after school activities.
Football, on the other hand, is about movement and beauty, nuance and passion. Football is the 70,000 rowdily drunk Celtic fans in Celtic Park where they sing about murdering Rangers fans and Protestants. The Rangers fans, a sea of blue, sing back in rehearsed vehemence, protected by a wall of stoic policemen in neon green raincoats. Football is Freddy Adu, the child prodigy whose path has taken him from the cracked Ghanaian streets where he kicked balls made of socks, to winning an immigration lottery, to a professional contract at 14, to messianic expectations, to bitter hatred from those who felt he would never live up to expectations, to getting caught drinking at a University of Maryland frat party, to signing for Benfica and celebrity status in Lisbon. Football is the El Salvadorians in Memorial park playing with sticks mere feet apart as goalposts, and as the sun drops over the Hudson River, men keep arriving in dirty jeans and sweaty tees, and join the game in boots or with no footwear at all. Football is playing with these men every summer day, saying little but knowing, with every pass that I receive, that I am accepted. Football is playing on the firm sand in Goa, barefoot, so that by the end of the game I can’t walk on the balls of my feet. All of the other foreigners, so many different Europeans that taken together they look American, complain with me and are laughed at good naturedly by the Goans, more similar to Brazilian than Indian. Football is the concrete court in Granada, the malafoya preppies with groomed hair whose headbands matched their shirts, shorts and shoes. Football is the Kenyans in Madurai whose drunkenness never prevented them from running me into the ground in front of a watching crowd of old women in saris with cracked, bare feet waiting for the bus. I follow football, with a zeal that borders on the religious, in order to connect with people.
It is for this same purpose, and little other, that I write. I have never journaled or jotted, planned or printed anything that I didn’t expect to share. I write to connect. I write to prove that somehow we aren’t that different, that even though you have never even met me, even though you have never been to America, and couldn’t picture the life I lead, you have been stopped on a walk by the beauty of this world. Today I was stopped by three black birds spiraling upwards, following each other, moving always on, as if caught in an unseen tornado. Maybe for you in Durban today it was the family of monkeys posted up outside your door picking out the ticks from one another’s coats. Or for you in Calcutta, it was the sad look in the eyes of the cow as she tramped across the road with her suckling calf in tow. I read football articles hours a day not so that I can know the most, but so that when I meet Julio in Costa Rica, I can talk about Saprissa’s recent championship, and share in their accomplishment.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.207s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 10; qc: 48; dbt: 0.0607s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Dad
non-member comment
A father's reflection
As someone who has lived you with a football(soccer) fanatic all these years I welcome the chance to finally hear about all the ways it has touched your life. I have been pleased to have shared in some of them. I hope you do get a chance to travel the world and write about the pickup games you play in. Will you take a soccer ball made of socks to Africa?