Soccer, Evolution and Season's End

Evolutionarily, parenting has one simple goal. Our job, as parents, is perpetuation. Or put more simply: our job is to raise parents. And the strangest part of this process that has been going on at least two million years is that when you’re doing it you don’t realize you are.

Inversely, nothing brings us back to our own childhoods like becoming a parent. Our past can stand at our window, like Banquo’s ghost, pointing fingers at our errors. And we know we’ve erred when we do those things we hated about our own childhoods. Those things we thought we’d never repeat.

I’d never planned on being a soccer dad. On passing on the obsession of soccer. But, the door was left ajar and now I am perpetuating my mild obsession. And sadly, this week ends Havana’s first season of soccer.

Tonight, instead of our last practice before our last game on Saturday, the 14 girls of the Super-Strikers team are to watch-and-learn from a televised British Premier League game at the coach’s house.

Tonight is the crossing of two paths. It’s a small cultural convergence. British soccer, my own roots and the pick up and drop off sport of children, American soccer.

I admit, I like the game. I like the shape of the ball. I like watching it move. I get almost as much satisfaction watching 22 people I’ve never met play with this ball as I do from playing with it myself. Yet my own evolution towards the sport was somewhat rocky.

Like most things forced on me at school, I rejected soccer for many years.

The notion of going out onto a freezing soggy field in the middle of winter and swapping your long pants and long sleeves for short ones made little sense to me. At my school, the soccer field grew longer the longer winter was with us. Its potholes were filled with ice, its flat spots rose glacially up into small hills and traversing the length of the field even without a ball was an endeavor.

Twenty unhappy boys, heads lowered, would march onto the pitch. The teacher would yell, blow his whistle and resume yelling. Then twenty young boys with mud plastered up and down their legs and matted in their hair, heads bowed, would leave the battle field.

This ritual did not enthuse me for the game.

And yet soccer did eventually ignite something in me.

At 16, I started full-time work and had the money to enter the world of grownups. Specifically, I could now enter through the mythical door to the cultural epicenter of British life: the local pub. A year or two later, the 20-odd pubs in my area of West London were my life’s main reference points.

We’d meet at the pub, cram into cars and make the weekly pilgrimage to Stamford Bridge, the Chelsea stadium. We donned our colors, sported our self-inked tattoos and joined the 50,000 other young men that pressed themselves into the stadium stands. We sang, we chanted, we jumped so high that the concrete stands seemed to shake. I entered the world of men, as I knew it to be.

And we occasionally went to Away matches that involved both increased cost and increased risk. I was once on a train intercepted by rival fans. Thud! A brick bounced off the plexi-glass window of the train car. We all hit the deck, wild-west style. And then, more thuds, this went on for about a minute, which I calculated at the train’s speed meant an assault by the rival fans over a distance of a quarter mile. These lads were well organized. And the Chelsea train had not yet gotten into the rival town's station!

My baptism of soccer could not contrast greater with Havana’s.

On Saturday afternoons I get my camping chair and we head out to watch Havana and the local Under 10s league. The language of the supporters is more cautious and more clean, and there are no anthems sung by parents. There is even very little mud, with games sometimes canceled on the rumor of rain. And yet for many of these girls this is the place where they will find themselves. Where they will test themselves and where they will be challenged. It’s a safe environment for young girls to experience physical conflict.

No-one would question that the winding roads that led Havana and I to soccer have been different. But then our childhoods have been remarkably different too.

What I honestly do not know is if hers is a better childhood than my own. But then, in a sense, that is for her to judge and not I.