Soccerhead

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 steelblue 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.




"FOUL! Hey, Ref! FOUL!"
It is too late. The moment has passed. Sluggo is eating dirt somewhere beneath the toppled Rhino, and the Mosquito is on the move, trailed by the tattered remnants of Beltsville's barbarian legion. Whatever slim hope their supporters had of inducing the referee to grant the team a penalty kick is gone in less than two seconds. In two "touches"—two quick kicks of the ball—Shelby is beyond their immediate reach, bobbing and weaving toward the sideline. She gives a glance and finds her strikers exactly where she expects them to be, strung out in a line at midfield, spaced a nearly perfect twelve feet apart, poised like relay sprinters awaiting a baton.
She does not have much time for decision. The drum of footsteps behind her grows louder as the shell-shocked opposition get themselves organized in pursuit. In a matter of seconds, one of them will pull even to shoulder her off the ball while the other two tear ahead to block her passing lanes. These boys are bigger, faster, stronger, and she's tiring. The element of surprise is now lost. The time is now. The Mosquito wallops the ball upfield—WHUMP!—then slows and finally stops. Bending at the waist, hands on knees, she gulps air. Not even Mia could have done better, and Shelby knows it.
What happens next is almost hard to believe, and Coach Pinchotti is the only one who sees it coming. His team is now hopelessly out of position. His midfielder, Sluggo, is struggling to untangle himself from the Rhino's embrace. His three strikers are exhausted from the long charge downfield and the unexpected chase back the way they came. The ball is gone, moving away from them faster than they can possibly run. And it's heading straight for the Hornets' most proficient dribbler—the kid with the blond bowl haircut and the flying feet. The coach's kid. The lefty.
"Watch out for him," Pinchotti yells to his two defenders as they charge past. "That kid is dangerous."
If they hear him at all, they don't heed the warning. My boy is a blur now. He has always had a comically short stride on the run, and he moves so fast that it gives him an almost reckless appearance that worries opponents. He sweeps in behind Shelby's pass and pushes the ball out in front of him, away from the center of the field, in a wide arc that takes it very close to the right touchline. It's a practiced maneuver, designed to draw the defenders to him while cutting off their ability to move on the ball—because most young soccer players have no idea that it's perfectly legal to step out-of-bounds to make a play, as long as the ball stays on the field. Hemmed in against the line, they rush straight at him, shoulder to shoulder. They're falling for one of his best tricks.




It helps that Ben has been playing this game since he was old enough to walk. Before he could even speak in complete sentences, my son was being schooled in the basic mechanics of soccer by a West African nanny who would roll balls at him on the lawn and urge him in French to blast them to la lune—the moon, outer space, his destiny. Her name was Maggie Dahl. She was a political refugee from Togo who had fled under a death warrant for participating in a rural voter registration drive. An accountant by training, her English was not nearly serviceable enough to allow her to pursue her trade in the United States, so, like so many other immigrant women in the D.C. area—where industrial jobs are all but nonexistent—she sought work in childcare. When she moved in with us, in 1995, a great blessing was visited upon the future Hornet with the bowl haircut.
In her heavily accented English, Maggie pronounced her national game "sockair," and on warm summer nights, as Ben whacked a ball around in the yard, she patiently explained to me that it was not merely a game but, rather, "the Game"—so deeply ingrained in the fabric of everyday life in her country that it was in many ways the primary instrument of socialization for young children. How the game is played in one corner of the globe or another is seen as a manifestation of national character and identity everywhere else. And in learning how to play children internalize the traits that are valued in their society. Maggie insisted that these things were generally understood everywhere but here. Soccer was a way of life, she assured me, the one perfect metaphor for everything.
"In Brazil, oh!" she said. "It is très beautiful! They play such soccer there, it is like dancing."
As serious students of the game will tell you, it's all that and then some. The Brazilians play as they live, with a wide-open, unstructured style that gives free rein to individual flourish and feats of athletic heroism. They call it samba, after their national dance. It's high-risk, fraught with injuries, wild swings in momentum, and soaring scores in which a sociologist or economics professor might find many useful insights into the Brazilian way of doing things generally. The Dutch, in stark contrast, play a highly organized variety of soccer that features precision dribbling and close-quarters passing. The aim is not necessarily to score but to maintain possession of the ball until an opponent fades from exhaustion late in the game. It is soccer by geometric attrition, and it suits a lowland country where civil engineering is a religion and meticulous attention to detail is all that holds back the raging sea.
Among other notable styles of play, the Italians are stubbornly defensive on the field and famously voluble in the clutch. It is soccer as opera, second only to the Brazilian form for sheer dramatics. British teams, on the other hand, are highly regimented and play a breakneck offensive game that is more than a little violent. The Irish are just plain mean, masters of the "hard tackle" and the discreet elbow to the nose. And so on. And so forth. And all of these things are fairly well understood all over the world—except in the United States.
Thanks to his French-speaking, Togolese nanny, our Irish-Polish-German boy plays like a Brazilian, a seemingly improbable lineage that is increasingly common for young American soccer players, many of whom now have Latino coaches or team trainers. Or women coaches. Or multilingual coaches of uncertain ethnic origin. During the summers, they attend high-priced soccer camps that have become totems of middle-class arrival for an increasingly diverse white-collar workforce. They are the children of tech immigrants, African-American strivers, and newly minted professionals with no-collar roots—parents, like me, who made good on common stock upbringings and found ourselves pulled in by the almost irresistible gravity that soccer exerts in suburbia. Because of this game our kids know things about the world that we never imagined at such an early age; and thanks to the tutoring of foreign-born teachers, some of them have that rarest of skills: ambidextrous feet.




The Beltsville defenders rush in, and Ben suddenly comes to a dead stop in front of them, pooching the ball back toward the center of the field with the outside of his left foot. Both defenders fly past him, through the vacant space where the ball was supposed to be, in a classic case of overplaying and underestimating their opponent. Just as their error is dawning on them, Ben jukes left, pokes the ball with his right toe, and jets back toward his buddies at midfield with the prize.
The play is unfolding in picture-perfect form. Six of the seven Beltsville kids on the field are now out of position, trailing far behind. The Hornets are all holding their spots. Two minutes to go, with the score 3—2in his favor, Pinchotti stands with his arms folded across his chest, beaming. Could it be that the runts from College Park might tie the score against his awesome juggernaut?
Ben nudges the ball once more, pushing it back on course, straightening it into a beeline toward the goal, then looks ahead to find his man. Sure as cornflakes in the morning, Kevin Guerrero is way out in front of him, smack in the middle of the wide-open field, looking over his shoulder on the fly, waving his right arm for the pass, yelling to his teammate, "La pelota! La pelota!" The ball. The ball. Give me the ball.
Streaming down the opposite touchline, Bryan Basdeo paces himself to be the second man at the net, the striker who cleans up any errant shots or fumbled saves by the goalkeeper. He is so good at these mop-up shots that he's the Hornets' second leading scorer, the one they call Bigfoot. More often than not, however, "The Ben and Kevin Show" leaves nothing to clean up. On his third touch, Ben's right foot explodes on the ball with enough torque to spin him bodily into the grass. The ball sails up straight and true. At its apex it seems to hang in midair for a small eternity before landing six inches in front of the charging striker. All the math is now in favor of the Salvadoran Terror. Momentum. Distance. Timing. Velocity. Kevin flicks out his right foot at a full run, cushions the ball's landing with his instep, pushes it out in front of him—and fires.
It's a head-high shot from close range, straight at Beltsville's goalie. Heeding a primal survival instinct, the kid squats to save his nose, shuts his eyes, throws up his gloved hands, and hopes for the best. The ball has other plans. It rockets over his outstretched fingertips and splashes into center net, untouched.
"GOAL! GOAL! GOAL!"
The Hornets go berserk on the sideline—Michael, Braulio, Robbie, all the relievers and coaches, leaping and tripping over one another. Shelby's father, Terry, grabs me in a bear hug and squeezes the air from my lungs, then drops me back into my shoes, wheezing. Ben, Shelby, and Thomas slap five at midfield. Kevin sheers away from the net and cuts a U-turn, flying back up the sideline, grinning his famous foot-wide grin, and pumping his skinny arms. His parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins leap up from the island of blankets they have spread on the grass. His grandfather and family patriarch, Rafael Guerrero—soon to be my padrino, the man who will finally teach me this game—raises his arms in the air, yelling, "GOAL! GOAL! GOAL!"
"Kevin!" the old man yells to his grandson. The boy flies to him and leaps into his arms before charging back to his teammates forming up for the kickoff.
"Okay, guys, we got a little less than a minute to go, and it's their ball," I shout to the kids on the field. "They're going to come at us with everything they've got. So be ready."
If I had learned anything about coaching the game after dozens of crushing defeats and near-victories turned to ties by last-minute goals in an opponent's favor, it was this: the ecstatic moments after you score are when the other team is most dangerous. Your guard is down, and their fangs are bared. But Beltsville doesn't have much fang left. Sluggo and his Mongols mount a halfhearted attack that peters out in a defensive trap. The clock expires. The referee blows his whistle. Final score: 3—3.
In the traditional end-of-game ceremony, the two teams line up in columns, then run past one another, touching hands as they go, reciting "Good game, good game, good game" to each of their rivals. The Beltsville team is entirely male, mostly white and African American. The College Park kids are an amalgam of blacks and browns and whites—the offspring of laborers and lawyers, underwriters and mechanics, civil servants and journalists. When they reach the end of the line, the Hornets mob their three stars, cheering and slapping their heads. Shelby turns red. Ben flashes a row of teeth. Kevin pours water down his shirt.
Then Pinchotti—Coach Dave, the boss of Mighty Beltsville—walks over to congratulate them. "I've been watching soccer for a long time, and that was one of the most beautiful plays I've ever seen," he tells us. "You guys have done a hell of a job with these kids. If they're only eight now, imagine what they'll look like in another year." Pinchotti comments on the courage of the Mosquito, the skill of the left-footed boy with the bowl haircut, the intensity of the Salvadoran fireball. He credits Thomas Waring for holding down the middle of the field against his bruisers. "You all looked great," he tells the awestruck group, then walks away.
In the lore of the Hornets, this would be remembered as a defining moment—the Play and the Day. It would be discussed for months, even years, to come. They had gutted it out and stuck together to match the best team in the league. At eight years old they had built themselves a small monument. Whether they could preserve it was another question.
I didn't know it yet, but my education was just beginning. My already laughable absorption would only intensify. And the husk of my former self-the workaholic careerist who had forgone personal happiness for too long—would crack and fall away. It would take us two more years to get there, two strange and sometimes frightening years, but the Hornets' quest for a perfect season had begun.
Copyright © 2006 by Jim Haner