First Time I Let Go (of Youth Soccer)

One of the worst elements of my favorite sport, soccer, is the penalty kick. There's nothing really good about the kick except for maybe some sort of spaghetti western duel aspect that hypes up an easily tangible, simple, and ultimately suspenseful moment. But that aspect is really only good for those watching, and I don't even like watching PKs. Basically, the shooter is expected to score by all means. This means the goalie is basically fucked unless he pulls off a brilliant stop, but even then that outcome will make the shooter feel like shit because he was supposed to score. Either way, someone's going to feel crappy.

Our team, the Fury - my opus magnum of my career as a soccer player, spanning five years with sometimes two seasons a year in fall and spring through tournaments, trials, and tribulations, the loss of friends, the growing pressure to travel further, to win more, to become better conditioned, better skilled, better mechanized cogs in a monstrosity of a division-climbing machine that inevitably drove itself into the ground winning only one game in its last two seasons finishing off any last urge within me to satisfy some sort of athletic achievment in life - needed a designated penalty kick taker. I was far from the first choice. Being a defender with very little experience touching the ball in the attacking half let alone the 18 yd. box, I held myself back from volunteering or even being noticed during the scan over the team by the coach in his selection. I think we actually had some sort of mini-tournament of PKs to decide who was going to be the one to take the kicks in game. This process, although efficient, logical, and excruciatingly simple on the outside didn't really make sense in the long run when concerning PKs, because the nature of the kick was so variable on the immediate state of mind that even the kid that scored cleanly 50/50 kicks was bound to trip up in game depending on the various outside forces and internal pressures, and that botched kick will be in the most important game of them all.

Either way, I don't think I placed first or second in the mini-tournament of PKs, but I also wasn't that far off from the top, leaving only a couple games where the top few missed kicks, and the coach's gaze inevitably fell on me. And in the first few times I came to kick in game (which happened pretty damn soon after I was picked not to my liking), I got the goals and tried not to think twice about it. These were also some of my first ever goals in my stint on the Fury so it took a lot of effort to downplay these shots, because I knew the second that I thought I had a PK gift, or even thought about it at all for that matter, it would be all over.

It was a home game, which in our warped division meant traveling 40 minutes away instead an hour and 20 minutes + away. Our home field was right beside the man-made pond area of a freshly carved suburban development characteristic of Loudoun's burgeoning wealth. The field itself, because of position depressed into the land, surrounded by a sloping hill on the other three sides opposite the reservoir. This gave us a finely chewed and over-saturated mud plain to play on. The ball skipped and stopped on a dime as it chose, and inevitably someone just ran straight into someone else, the whistle blew, the card was pulled, and the kick was set. I was pulled up from the back for what was to be a momentous kick, not for what it meant to the game, to the shaking parents atop the hill or my fellow teammates and coach sunk in the mud behind me. I approached the ball, trying not to look left or right, showing a little right but knowing I was to pull left, and then I hooked it, hard to the left. I hooked it so far to the left that it wasn't even a question for the baffled goalie, seeing my shot stumble over the ground more than maybe five or ten feet to the left of the goal post. I wasn't even close.

I anticipated the approaching disappointment, shame, and weight of a potentially game-losing miss, the shot hopes of those behind me along with their pitying words and pats on the back. I waited for all the shit to hit me and make me feel like it. But I didn't. I felt nothing of the sort. I think I may have even looked forward to going to McDonald's or some crap food after the game, trying to make the most of what was left of the weekend. I realized I just didn't care. None of it mattered. Perhaps I was years later in this realization than most kids, but then again, I was also years ahead of those that continued on after me into high school, college, adult leagues, coaching their own kids, and preaching sports to be the ultimate life lesson mechanism ever on and on. Fuck that. Sports are fun. You forget that and you're not playing anything.

House League

Right before the dawn of dunking burned a deeper ritual, that of getting up at 6:30 on a Saturday morning, watching a few half hours of cartoons, playing House League Soccer, and then coming back to watch more cartoons (and picking up McDonald's if we were lucky). Those original years before it was even possible to play on a bigger, better, and traveling-farther team were amazing. I don't remember a whole lot of the actual soccer, but more just being in awe at those that kick the ball hard (the aforementioned John Sheehan and Max Farley), messing around at practice (getting in fights with the Wheelers, a pair of brothers bent on destroying everyone and everything, including each other - the younger one, Nathan, bit me, twice, and the older one I got into an actual fight with at DZ Discovery Zone (probably my only true fight in life); I mean he had my name, c'mon!), and avoiding the oranges at half time (don't ask me why. I love them now, but never tried them then). Soccer was a huge Waterford tradition, as was scrimmaging the Hamilton kids, who for whatever god-forsaken reason, ALL had rat tails. It was a deeply potent sport in those days, before we knew the meaning of anything really, back when for whatever reason the opening of the MLS coincided with our youth; back when we went to DC United games to watch Marco Etcheverry rip shit up, marveling at how much he resembled what we believed the greatest player of all our peers, Edwin Hammerman, would grow up to be. The kid scored a goal off a corner with a bicycle kick when we were like ten years old.