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Soccerhead
An Accidental Journey into the Heart of the American Game
By Jim Haner Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 Jim Haner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3124-3
CHAPTER 1
SHELBY AND GOLIATH
THE MOMENT OF TENSION
As the wolf pack closes in, the Mosquito lies in wait.
Shifting ever so slightly on the balls of her feet, she bides her time, measuring the ground between them — her ground. Closer, closer. The wolves are cocky. She has seen their kind many times before, all boiling with testosterone and bravado, jacked up on Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs and Gatorade until their eyeballs jiggle in their sockets. God, what pathetic creatures. The thing she despises most about them, besides their utter lack of elegance and their cheesy boy smell, is their insolence.
"Look, a girl!" they jeered before the game. "They got a girl! We're gonna kill 'em! Yeah!"
As her coach, this was music to my ears, for nothing motivated her more than the loudmouthed derision of her opponents. And nothing was more damaging to the other team's morale than the moment when she reared up and kicked their sorry butts.
Four of them are now charging downfield, forming up around a lead striker on the fly. He's a belligerent Sluggo, bossing and pointing and directing traffic as he pounds the ball forward over the smashed brown grass of Magruder Field and the bald patches of dirt where 10 million kickoffs and Saturday-morning scrums have killed every living thing within a nine-foot circle. Not even ants can survive out here.
Sluggo has a wild brown nest of hair on his bowling-ball head, a round face like a frying pan, and the black eyes of a cave boy. Big and fast as a wagon full of rocks rolling downhill, he's used to getting his way, intimidating everyone around him — and he's eyeing the Mosquito with a murderous gleam. Before him stands a pixie of a girl. Her teammates call her the Mosquito because she is the smallest member of the squad — and because she harasses opponents to their last nerve. She's eight years old. Thirty-six pounds soaking wet, with a ponytail dyed blue some days to match her uniform. Her name is Shelby Hammond. And she lives to play soccer. She is the star defenseman and the only girl left on the eight-and-under College Park Hornets in the soccer-crazed suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Her hero is Mia Hamm, three-time Olympic gold-medal winner, two-time Women's World Cup champion, all-star forward of the Washington Freedom, and the most recognized name among female athletes worldwide. Shelby dreams of being Mia. She has a Mia poster on her bedroom wall, wears Mia clothes (pale blue nylon warm-ups, Carolina blue Nikes on her feet, jet-black scrunchy around her ponytail), and even though she's only in the second grade she has already decided that she will eventually play for the University of Maryland women's soccer team, a fixture in this town where the university is the leading industry and the primary source of civic identity. And after that, Shelby says, she will make soccer her life's work.
The Hornets had been together for two years at this point — roughly seventy-five practices and thirty-five peewee-league games, enough to learn the basics of the sport, enough for a few of them to demonstrate something that might be called "consistency." But none were yet as consistent as Shelby.
She is crouching low now, rocking from side to side. Her steel-blue eyes are unreadable — a strange, unnerving void. Sluggo hesitates in mid-rush, momentarily perplexed. He is closing fast, driving the ball in a bum's rush for the goal, but the Mosquito shows none of the customary signs of panic or submission. In fact, she appears to be grinning at him.
Closer ... closer ... closer ... The relievers erupt on the sideline — "Shelby! Shelby! Shelby!" — as the rest of the Hornets on the field begin to wheel into position. It is the only thing I have managed to teach them in two years of coaching: the importance of orbiting in one particular spot on the field instead of chasing after the ball in a mob and kicking one another until they're black-and-blue.
Thomas Waring, the team's hard-hitting midfielder and the kid who usually runs to the rescue on defense, is shot. Twice the size of the Mosquito, he's caked with dirt, red-faced, and soaked from battling for the ball against his oversized rivals — thirty — seven minutes of Irish-style, lunch-bucket soccer that has earned him the nickname the Hammer. The sandy-haired bodyguard stands on buckled legs, hands on hips, panting, thirty yards away from the action.
Not so the Killer Bees — Ben Haner and Bryan Basdeo — two-thirds of the Hornets' triple-threat offense, who are rolling back across midfield, trailed by Kevin Guerrero, the team's leading scorer. Kevin — the Salvadoran Terror — is the son of a player, and his grandfather was a player, as was his great-grandfather before that. In Kevin's world, kids take their first steps on soccer fields and they get their first pair of shin guards when they're three. The game is the center of community life for Washington's Latino émigrés. There are matches every weekend and doubleheaders during holidays, and the women bring food, so there's no reason to go home before nightfall.
Ben, Bryan, and Kevin know it's now or never. The score is 3–2. Underdog College Park is down by one goal to the team from Beltsville, favorites to win the division and advance, as always, to the county league championship. One more score and the Hornets become just another speed bump in powerhouse B-ville's blitz to familiar glory.
"Shelby! Shelby! Shelby!" the relievers chant.
"Three minutes, Shelby!" I bellow across the ocher plain, my voice swallowed up by the gusting wind and the war whoops on the sideline. "Three minutes — and it's game over!"
"Don't worry none, Shelby's gonna take him," the Mosquito's father says in his lazy West Virginia drawl. "Shelby's gonna chew him up, y'all will see." Terry Hammond is a walking refrigerator, a cabinet installer by trade and a former high school jock who signed on as my assistant coach on a lark and quickly became absorbed in every aspect of this game that neither of us had ever played.
The big man watches expressionless as Beltsville's horde closes in on his only child, the little girl who changed him from a pool shark and a rabid football fan into a doting butler, chauffeur, and equipment manager to a junior soccer prodigy.
The attackers are twenty feet out, tearing toward the right side of the goal, when they begin their familiar death spiral. Their coach, a towering guy in his mid-fifties with a receded hairline and a sprig of mustache under his nose, has been teaching this maneuver to kids for more than a decade. His name is Dave Pinchotti. He is one of the most well regarded coaches in the county, a gracious sort, who never fails to congratulate opposing coaches after crushing their hopes.
With Pinchotti's alpha striker bearing down on the net, the rest of the wolf pack veers to the left and fans out in front of the goal. When Sluggo shoots, they will swarm the Mosquito, confusing her goalie, coming at the ball from all sides. That's their plan. But then Shelby makes her move. Facing her opponent like a basketball guard, she shuffles three steps to her right, taking away the inches that Sluggo needs to shoot to the deep-right corner of her net — the shot he wants. In closing his angle, she forces him toward the center, where her goalkeeper can better make a play if she falls down or falters. What's more, her move forces the rest of the pack to move left to open up space for their leader until they drift, one by one, out of the play.
To make sure they stay that way, the Hornets' number-two defenseman, an insubordinate little genius named Linus Hamilton, dashes in between them and the outside goalpost for the checkmate. No kid on the team has a better sense of the geometry of the game than Linus, and no kid is quite so adept at critiquing the coaches' performance.
"You might want to try this," he'd say, or, "Their forward looks small, but it's a mistake to underestimate him."
"Thank you, Professor," we'd tell him. "Now please sit down."
"Linus's problem is that he's smarter than us," I told Terry Hammond one day at practice.
In fact, they were all smarter than we were — more adaptable, more flexible thinkers for not having a lifetime of preconceived notions about sports and how they should be played. In my journey from bumbling Parents' Night draftee to ranting soccer freak and, finally, fairly able coach, I would learn most of what I needed to know from children.
It's one-on-one now, the Mosquito vs. Sluggo, and Sluggo is confused. His overwhelming advantage has dissolved, and this damnable girl has shown no sign of folding. There is no fear in her eyes, which are blazing, locked onto the ball and the movement of his hooves.
"There is no animal more invincible than a woman, nor fire either, nor any wildcat so ruthless," wrote the ancient Greek comedian Aristophanes. Sluggo is about to learn the truth of this.
In the aluminum bleachers on the other side of the field, the Hornets' parents rise to their feet, mouths open. It is "the moment of tension," as the Dutch soccer photographer Hans van der Meer once described it — that thin slice of a forty-, sixty-, or ninety-minute game when ten thousand variables converge to produce a flash point in which anything can happen. Whether professional or amateur, soccer is made up of such sudden happenings. Unlike American football, the clock never stops. There are no huddles or time-outs. Unlike baseball, there is no ritual adjusting of codpieces, no practice swings or conferences on the mound, no standing around in the outfield waiting for the next hit while the pitcher reads twenty-seven hand signs from a guy squatting behind home plate.
Soccer is distinct among all sports as a study in constant motion. Every second is precious. Every pass, shot, block, or steal has the potential to alter the outcome for good. Promising paths taken up or down the field expire in dead ends or defensive traps. Over and over. The power of a single star to drastically affect the ebb and flow of the action — the trump card in basketball, hockey, or football; the reason that Jordan, Gretzky, and Payton are modern folk heroes — is most often nullified by the capriciousness of the ball, the immense field, the sheer distances that must be traveled, and the limitations of human endurance and foresight. Above all, soccer is an ongoing exercise in discombobulation and perseverance. Teamwork. Trust. For more than two hundred years, these have been the only reliable routes to success in this game. And the Hornets trust Shelby.
Ben, Bryan, and Kevin are in position at midfield — ready to take the pass they're sure will come. None of them rush to help her.
"Shelby! Shelby! Shelby!"
The range is down to less than three feet when the Mosquito finally strikes. Back to the net, shoulders squared, she halts her ten-yard retreat and launches a sudden feint, a small lashing kick, then backpedals again to see what happens. Sluggo obliges her by overreacting. Already rattled by her unnatural composure, he pips the ball even farther to his left, his "weak side," attempting to evade a challenge that hasn't yet materialized. Now he's lost control of the ball, and he's off-kilter. He's also inside the painted white box in front of our net, not ten feet from our goal. If Shelby fouls Sluggo now, the referee will give him a penalty kick, a free point-blank shot at the net.
Watching the moment unfold, I realize that I'm light-headed, sucking wind as if I were the one doing the running. On my next breath Shelby counterattacks in earnest. She brushes the ball with the tip of her toe, drops her shoulder, and plants it in Sluggo's chest, then swipes him with her arm as she ricochets toward the meandering sphere. It's a circus move, straight out of pro wrestling or hockey, and the physics of it send the brute twirling. The sneer drops from his face as the Mosquito squirts away with the ball and 110 pounds of goalie named Edward Curry barrels into him. Edward is exceedingly large for an eight-year-old. His teammates call him the Rhino.
The karmic splendor of the comeuppance is lost on the Beltsville loyalists in the bleachers.
"Foul! Foul! Hey, Ref, where's the foul?"
They're up now, stamping their feet, and several are rushing to the touchline at the edge of the field. They're red-faced, throwing their ball caps, casting imploring looks across the turf at Coach Dave. But Pinchotti is as unperturbed as ever, his gaze fixed downfield on the unfolding action. Oblivious to the outrage of his followers, he checks his watch: under two minutes ... and counting.
It is at times like this that the cultural divisions in youth soccer are most keenly seen. For the howlers among the parents are, by a wide margin, American-born white suburbanites steeped in the familiar rules that govern basketball and football — where almost every form of touching can, in the name of fairness, be nitpicked into various forms of foul. Noticeable on such occasions is the relative calm of the Latino, African, Asian, and Indian parents. The Guatemalans and Hondurans. The Nigerians and Moroccans. The Vietnamese and Chinese and Filipinos. The Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. These ethnic groups have settled in the D.C. area in vast numbers in the past two decades, and they now make up about 20 percent of the population, transforming the Potomac Basin into a soup pot of ethnic assimilation third in size only to New York and Florida on the Eastern Seaboard.
These newcomers have been playing soccer all their lives, and they are accustomed to the seemingly whimsical officiating of their native game. Absent a clear showing of malice, most physical contact on the field is considered incidental to the kinetic forces that make soccer the "beautiful game": speed, agility, dexterity, flexibility, aggressiveness, power on the ball. To stop the action at every bump or jostle would carve out the very heart of the thing. Add the fact that the referees are sprinting much of the time and it's unreasonable to expect them to get a clear enough look at a crime in progress to make an arrest in the vast majority of cases. Nor would most fans want them to. For in this game, as in life, bumps and scrapes and setbacks are expected as cosmic forces unfurl, and the ethnic soccer fans seem to have faith that the leveling hand of God will set things mostly right in the end.
Not so their native-born neighbors.
Almost nothing about soccer conforms to American conceptions about sports — or life in general. For one thing, you can't use your hands, which makes everything else more difficult. For another, the familiar orderly echelons and grids and diamonds are nowhere to be seen on the field, because there's only so much you can do with your feet to make a speeding ball behave rationally. Efficiency and expediency, which may as well be lyrics in the national anthem, are stymied at every turn. By necessity, legality becomes a much more fluid concept, based on snap interpretations of seventeen bright line Laws — which date to the nineteenth century — by referees who are beyond the checks and balances of instant replay or umpire conferences. For Americans, with their vestigial Puritan morality and their ornate codes of conduct and their constitutional entitlement to be secure in their personal space, watching their kids play this immoral game can provoke a spontaneous infarction.
On the sidelines, they can be heard bleating at the absurdity of it all, especially the fathers. Men who have thrown, caught, hit, held, and shot every manner of ball will clench their fists and pound their thighs at the sight of their children spastically struggling to achieve with their feet and heads what they could do in half the time with their hands. "FOUL! God DAMN it, Ref! FOUL!"
Here is the sound of the old order dying, the anguished rattle of well-settled expectations shattering. It is the sound of the comfortable majority losing their grip on familiar and predictable entitlements. For them, this new game is like a plague, skimming off the cream of the nation's high school athletes and consuming vast tracts of land for soccerplexes; they see it vying for the affection of their children, 14 million of whom now play soccer in organized leagues. Yes, soccer is here to stay, and the weekend soccer dad knows it, and it's driving him out of his mind, because his kids love it and he doesn't know the first thing about it. Watching these parents squirm, I empathize. I was once among them, as mystified by the seeming lawlessness and hypnotic effects of soccer as I ever was by the byzantine mysteries of curling, cricket, or hockey. Football was my sport, the only thing I ever really cared about. I grew up playing smashmouth pickup games with my brothers on frozen back lots and tar-hot beaches in southern New Jersey until our lips and knuckles bled — back in the days when only the weak went home early. But I was won over by this new sport, which requires far more skill, and in which the violence is more discreet and less likely to be crippling, rules are less a constant factor, and arbitration has no place at all. Only later would I learn that it is not a foreign game after all, that it belongs to us by birthright, that we owned it a long time ago, before we started forgetting everything we ever knew about our own history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Soccerhead by Jim Haner. Copyright © 2006 Jim Haner. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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