a hideous game

chapter 15

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Soccer had no place in Veddersburgh.

While the rest of the region had incorporated the sport into its local jock culture, Veddersburgh’s athletic elites (the male ones, anyway—the girls’ team was okay) still mostly shunned soccer in favor of football, in which it excelled. It was a symptom of Veddersburgh being behind the times as much as anything else.

As such, the varsity soccer team was populated by two types of players other than jocks: Hispanic immigrants and nerds like me. Seeing as the latter outnumbered the former, it stood to reason that before our junior year, the Veddersburgh Boys Varsity Soccer Team (again, the woefully named Indians) had won a grand total of zero games in recent memory, certainly not since I had been living in Veddersburgh.

That changed when Tommy started playing soccer in our junior year.

Initially, only I was into soccer. My uncle had done a semester abroad in Germany and returned with a Bayern Munich jersey and lifelong love of the game, which he passed on to me whenever he had the chance. When I was young, he would come over and tune in to whatever soccer could be found on basic cable, and when I was eight, his host-brother from his time in Germany came to visit us and together with my father we went to see the German National Team play the United States National Team in New York.

Tommy ran cross-country during the fall soccer season in middle school and during our freshman and sophomore years of high school, and he was extremely good at it. He made states as a freshman and was already one of the top runners in the region. He ran track in the spring and excelled at that as well. By the time his sophomore year was complete, Tommy’s magnificent body, competitive fire, and the pressure applied from his father had turned him into a leading prospect, if not for the Olympics then for a Division 1 scholarship in track and field for running the mile, which he could complete in a mind-boggling four minutes and twenty-five seconds on his best days—an achievement I could not even begin to comprehend and that Tommy couldn’t seem to understand either. He simply shrugged his shoulders and did it.

Goodspeed by name, good speed by nature. He was the talk of the town.

It was the World Cup of 2006 in Germany that really got Tommy into soccer. I would insist on turning it on at their house, much to Mr. Goodspeed’s chagrin, who described it as a “third-world sport,” whatever that was supposed to mean, and “for foot dandies and crybabies.”

Tommy watched the games wide-eyed; he couldn’t believe the passion of the supporters and of the players. We would watch a game and then he’d insist on going outside to kick the ball around, trying and failing to emulate the skills of players like Zidane and Ronaldinho.

Eventually, he informed his father that he wanted to drop cross-country in the fall and play soccer with me on the varsity team instead.

“Why soccer? Why? You’re just going to throw away something you’re good at…for soccer?” It might have been the angriest I’d ever seen Mr. Goodspeed.

“I mean, they call it the beautiful game for a reason. It’s a creative endeavor, Dad, overlaid with a competitiveness that’s team-based, you know? I feel like when I’m running, the competition is within me and not against the others, it’s competing against myself, and everything gets boiled down to a hard number. But soccer is more like life, it’s fluency in motion, a sort of dance or ballet of instinct, the best team doesn’t always win, you don’t always get what you deserve but you can die trying, you know?”

“Yeah, it’s a ballet alright. You’re going to ruin your chances of a scholarship for cross-country.”

“I’ll still have track,” Tommy pointed out.

“Until you get hurt, then what? Bye-bye D1 school, down the friggin’ toilet,” Mr. Goodspeed said. To his credit, he never blamed me or my influence for steering his boy wrong, even though that was clearly what had happened.

Tommy played soccer our junior year, but despite the poetic way he described soccer to his father, Tommy did not play the game with grace or any modicum of joga bonito. Being a late arrival to the sport, Tommy had almost nothing in the way of soccer skills. He could barely control the ball.

But he was fast, strong, had unlimited stamina, could jump like a deer and had an unquenchable competitive fire. Combine this with his propensity to give 100% to everything, and Tommy made for a complete, hard-nosed, old-school defender. Our coach played him as sweeper, and our fortunes began to change.

We had a jock goalkeeper who had moved to Veddersburgh from another school like I did and was probably astonished to find the soccer team filled with unathletic nerds, but he stayed on with us all the same. Between him and Tommy, we hardly gave up any goals. Tommy was first to every second ball, won every header, an impenetrable wall of steel behind our defense who smashed the ball clear every time it came to his foot. He would chip in with the occasional headed goal and once even managed to kick and chase the ball 40 yards and finish the run with an unstoppable toe-poked goal.

Our junior season started with seven wins in a row, largely on the back of Tommy’s prowess, and we were in line to make the sectional playoffs for the first time in team history.

The game after our trip to the mall was our final home game of the season and was important for seeding purposes, especially since it was against our archrivals, Smithson High School of nearby suburban Smithson, who were tied with us at the top of the standings.

The rivalry between Smithson and Veddersburgh was about much more than proximity, at least in the eyes of Veddersburghians. Smithson encompassed Veddersburgh on all sides and was much more well off, as evidenced by their new, matching, beautiful warm-up track suits they wore before the game. This affluence wasn’t bad or evil in and of itself, but for some reason many Smithson residents had a superiority complex in their relationship with Veddersburgh, perhaps because most of them had Veddersburgh roots or still had family who lived there.

My dad walked his postman route there, and he especially sensed the snobbery of Smithsonians toward their Veddersburgh peers. He attended that game to cheer us on, removed from the much rowdier student section.

The fad in those days was for members of the student body to try and emulate the passion, chants, and culture of European soccer supporters at high school soccer games, simply because it was fun and it was the only live soccer to be had anywhere.

Our friend Danveer brought the Veddersburgh contingent (ironically, mostly populated with jocks) and delivered on his promise of a bass drum, which he thumped enthusiastically with a very racist Native American headdress atop his Indian head. Emma and Cynthia sat with him, with Veddersburgh-blue face paint of Tommy and our numbers (7 and 14, respectively) on their cheeks.

The Smithson ‘hooligans’ sat on the other side of the field and, despite being the away team, were considerably larger and louder.

Being our final home game of the season, we honored our seniors by introducing them to the field with their families. There were audible snickers and murmurs of incredulity from the Smithson supporters when one of our senior players, a Honduran kid named Manny who scored most of our goals, came onto the field to be introduced with his not one, but two—two!—kids.

This set the tone for the game that followed, which was the most intense and heated I’d ever played in.

I usually did not play much, because despite having somewhat better skills than Tommy from a lifetime of kicking in the backyard, the growth spurt I was assured would come never came, and I remained below six feet, skinny, and slow.

But a recent spate of flu had spread through the other juniors on the team (curiously among those who were known to smoke weed together after practice), and we only had two subs on the bench for that game against Smithson, so I played often. I did my usual thing, which was to jog around lightly and hope the ball did not come to me.

Smithson employed their usual tactic of keeping nerds like me at arm’s length when I had the ball and dribbling past me when I did not, which remained effective. Then when our more dangerous and skilled Hispanic players got the ball, they’d foul or provoke them into Spanish tirades, always making sure the referee saw their reactions and not the instigating incident.

They could not rile or intimidate Tommy, though, and while our backs were to the proverbial wall and Smithson was knocking on the door of our goal for all of the first half and most of the second, Tommy was a colossus, a one-man wrecking crew of fury sweeping across the backline, all crunching tackles and heroic blocks, one to the face and another to the ribs, smashing clearances that cleared the grandstand and rolled all the way down the hill, all the way to, I imagined, the Mohawk River.

As the frustrations of the not-usually-stymied Smithson team grew toward the end of the second half and the game remained 0-0, so did the frustrations of their supporters, particularly the ‘hooligans’, who, in what was somewhat an impressively concerted effort, began an British-style chant that grew loud and clear and continued unmistakably for several minutes:

Veddersburgh’s poor, Veddersburgh’s poor

Lock your car doors, lock your car doors

After the game, the local Veddersburgh paper had reported on the chant and the Smithson athletic director had been forced to issue an apology to the Veddersburgh school district and suspend the students involved.

Once that chant petered out, they continued with a plaintive, ‘V-Burgh sucks!’, and, considering their previous chant, it was clear that it was not our team who they believed ‘sucks’.

These incidents served to motivate us further, and eventually Manny (our 18-year-old with two kids) won us a corner, which he proceeded to take.

I’ll never forget the sight: Tommy in our old and worn blue jerseys, lucky number 7, rising above the red sea of pristine Smithson high schoolers like—as a clichéd English announcer might say—a salmon from a stream, impeccably timed such that at the apex of his jump the ball thudded off his head just above his blonde eyebrows, his face crunched up into a look of rage and determination that left me convinced he had simply willed the ball toward the goal as much as headed it.

It was a powerful header, what the clichéd might say was thumping, directly at the Smithson keeper, but so strong that all he could do was parry it away to the feet of the number 14 in blue, a young man named Jude Harris, yours truly, who from six yards away managed not to fuck it up and thrashed the ball into the back of the net for the poor old Veddersburgh Indians to take the lead, 1-0.

I had never scored before, so perhaps I got caught up in the moment. I turned and ran to the corner flag from which the corner was taken, behind which was the Veddersburgh student section with Danveer, Cynthia, and Emma. I hugged Manny, he pointed to his girlfriend and kids, and Tommy came up behind me, wrenched me away, and lifted me and my smile toward the crowd like I weighed nothing, screaming like an animal: “MY FUCKING KING!”

He let me down and I smiled again and pointed at Cynthia, who blew me a kiss and I blew one back.

When I turned back to get in position, the referee greeted me with a yellow card.

“Excessive celebrations,” he explained to my upraised arms. My coach and the Veddersburgh kids (including, I think, my father) went ballistic. It was unheard of to award a yellow card for excessive celebration. Such a card would never be given to Smithson.

A Smithson player, a tall, red-haired kid with the number 22, came up to me when the ref was out of earshot and before we kicked off again.

“Hey,” he said, although I did not look at him. “Is that your girl, huh? You got yellow fever?”

I knew the best thing to do was to not respond, but I did glare at him, and although the referee did not hear, unfortunately Tommy did.

Tommy came barging up to this number 22, a kid who could surprisingly match Tommy in height and size, and stared into his eyes, nostrils flared, fuming. The only thing that stopped Tommy from destroying that Smithson kid right then was my skinny frame between them, and perhaps Tommy’s self-professed pacifism, although the opposition player wasn’t to know that, and it looked like he might have shit himself.

“Repeat what you said, brute,” Tommy seethed.

I knew we needed Tommy to avoid a red card to have any hope of winning the game.

“Let it go, Big T,” I said. “Let it go. Win this. Let’s win this.”

Play resumed and once again our backs were to our own goal. Smithson was controlling everything. Their coach was going nuts at them on the sideline, apparently incensed that they could lose to the likes of Veddersburgh.

There was not a minute left in the game when it happened.

The same number 22 for Smithson who had taunted me after the goal had left me on the ground after stealing the ball away with what may or may not have been an uncalled foul and was bearing down on our penalty box. Tommy came charging in.

I don’t know if the Smithson player had managed to shift the ball from one foot to another, or if he had taken a heavy touch, or had perhaps adjusted himself in a way to initiate contact.

Whatever the circumstances, the Big T train had left the station, and there was no stopping it, no pulling out for Tommy as he went into the duel with nothing less than what he gave everything, which was everything.

The sound of their shin guards smashing was not unlike the crack of thunder that changed his mother at the lake house, not only in its loudness and intensity, but in that Tommy—like his mother—was never again the same.

Both players gave an anguished cry, but while the Smithson player remained upright and wheeled away on one foot, Tommy lay motionless on the ground, clutching his leg, moaning in agony.

“Tommy!” I cried involuntarily, my voice cracking. I ran over and knelt beside him. He was crying like a child. I could see through his sock that his plastic shin guard had split in two.

I waved for our coach to come on, but already the ambulance team had been mobilized and they were driving the stretcher cart onto the grass. Both the Veddersburgh and Smithson students were silent. A calm truce engulfed the event as something larger than the divide between the municipalities played out before them.

Mr. Goodspeed came running down from the stands and across the field to kneel beside me.

“Shh, shh, it’s okay, Big T, it’s okay,” he said, stroking his son’s golden hair. I looked up and saw his mom in the stands looking worried and confused.

“My leg! My leg!” Tommy sobbed. Emma was suddenly beside me as well, along with a man who had run down from the Smithson side of the bleachers and I would come to find out was Dr. Gonzalez, an orthopedic surgeon who would accompany us to the hospital and offer the Goodspeed family his advice and assurances as an expert.

Tommy later told me that, as he lay there, he thought he would lose his leg, that they’d never be able to repair it and he’d never run again.

We spent the night at the hospital with him and his family, along with Dan, Emma, and Cynthia. It turned out he had what is called a ‘comminuted fracture’ of his tibia, which is apparently when the bone is broken into a bunch of little shards like puzzle pieces, and they have to put it back together again with rods and screws and allow it to heal in a cast.

The process was long and arduous, but Tommy would eventually run again. He missed all of that year’s track season, though, and in the fall of our senior year, he decided to forgo soccer and run cross-country again to get back into shape. When he returned to track again that final spring of our public schooling, it turned out that he had been injured at such a crucial stage of development and growth that his mile time could never recover. He would never again run a mile in less than five minutes.

What hurt Tommy the most was that it turned out his father was right. Soccer had ruined his chances of an athletic scholarship. His father’s prescience in the matter clouded Tommy’s judgment forever afterward, made him doubt his own instincts, and served to increase the influence of his father on his decisions from then on.

The beautiful game, the game of poetry in motion, had betrayed Tommy, and he would never forget it.

We never won another soccer game.

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previous (makeover)