When I look back on my childhood, as far as I can see into the past, I begin to mix memory and biography like anyone else. Sometimes I think I remember what is really a photograph I’ve seen many many times.
One thing though, which no one photographed was lunch-time soccer in elementary school. I remember from first grade to third running all over the mostly dirt schoolyard field, using the cunning and ingenious “bunch-ball” strategy so prevalent among un-coached teams of that era. It was a mostly defensive game plan, though a highly aggressive one. It can be summed up in the few following words, which were surely echoing around the insides of every kid’s head: ‘He’s got the ball! Get him!’
Since there were approximately thirty kids on the fields all following the same conniving plan of action, it was difficult for anyone to do much with the ball. And therein lay the basis for such a tactic. If you solidly connected with rubber even once, you fell to the right of the bell curve. No one could handle the smothering, stifling blanket of twenty-nine other pairs of legs kicking and jabbing at his ankles.
No one, that is, except Donald.
Five minutes after lunch began, we’d meet on the field, stomachs suffering mild indigestion after the ulcer-inducing flux of food into our eight year-old guts. A rigorous survey taken today would surely reveal staggering levels of heartburn among the victims of such behavior. My apologies to the good taxpayers of my country for shouldering the present healthcare cost of my youthful carelessness.
Those in charge, who drew their influence from being the oldest and biggest, and most notably, the ones providing the ball that day, were in charge of picking the grossly unfair teams we all came to expect. The reason for this was Donald. Donald was a natural, who’d probably bicycle-kicked his way out of the womb, and his above average talent was enough to sway the game in his team’s favor no matter what the distribution of the rest of us. Naturally, my narrow-minded peers concluded that to get what they really wanted, domination of the Craigin Elementary Premier League, they should contract Donaldinho to their squad. Everyone wanted to be on his team, and naturally when your team has the best striker in the league, you want to get him the ball.
So Donald handled the ball pretty much all the time. If you were on Donald’s team you were unofficially promised a victory that day, and you could be part of that success in one way: pass the ball to Donald. Any other offensive decision might as well have been treason. And so, Donald attracted the worn-out, half-flat implement recognizable as a soccer ball only by its traditional polygonal pattern of black and white, like a paddle does a tethered bouncy ball. He took every shot, and his leg was built like a sixth grader’s. How could it have been otherwise? No sensible human could ignore the simple statistics of the situation. By far and away the most likely way to score was to tee it up for Donald.
But I didn’t like racking up assists. I didn’t like playing for the team everyone knew would win. Winning meant nothing then. So I dodged Donald’s team and I played for the daily underdogs, waiting for the game that would really make history: when Donald was overthrown.
Here’s the one event that sticks with me most of all, though by most medical reckoning probably shouldn’t. It was a fantastic day for glory. The score, after a nearly complete lunch break was still 0-0. Craigin Elementary’s first ever tie game was afoot (pun intended)! A total hierarchy overhaul was not in the making here, A.C. Underdog had put precisely no shots on goal. Win we certainly could not. However, we’d adopted an even more heavily defensive strategy than classical bunch-ball that day. At the unlikely opportunities when the ball should squeeze free of the bunch like a slippery fish, we directed our clears not upfield to the opposing net, but out of bounds. Throw-ins were a good way for a lesser player to feel like part of the action, and so we burned up minutes on the clock forcing the other team to argue over who should get to chuck the ball to Donald from the sideline.
But we sucked. I’m talking bad. The ball spent about 99.9% of the time on our half of the field. Our most devastating counter attack came when a member of Donald United got confused and started making for his own goal. He was quickly dropped from the roster and would struggle to find work in the league again after that day. One reason for our incompetence was that anyone with a little finger’s worth of skill or speed was typically used to, and liked winning, and so got himself onto Don U. But not me and the boys of A.C. Underdogs. We were holding our own that day, by combination of determination and dumb luck, and soon we’d have our overdue fifteen minutes.
A hurdle to success presented it self just then. Our ferocity on D, though driven, was skill-less and desperate, and finally led to an overzealous goal stop a la mano from a non-goalie, resulting in a nearly point-blank penalty shot. Naturally, gargantuan-leg Donald would be shooting. This was a game-ender. No one blocks a penalty shot, especially not when you’re as tiny as we were. And Donald with the leg he had. No wonder our keeper quit the team just then, and no one was stepping forward to take his place. Who wanted to be the one who allowed certain defeat? After so nearly pulling off the big upset, it wasn’t fair to ask anyone to take on that responsibility.
So I did it. I stood smack in the middle of the goal, hunkered down, and stared Donald in the chin. Before what went down went down, Donald gave me a reasonable warning. “Look out, kid. This is going to be a hard one.” No shit Sherlock. But as I say, this day remains clear. Most of it. As Donald reared back, took his few approach steps and absolutely creamed the ever-loving bajesus out of that poor ball, I guessed correct and jumped in a parabolic path that intersected the incoming artillery round. That ball, fresh off the foot of Goliath himself, felt on the side of my face pretty much like the foot of Goliath himself. I was kicked in the head hard, but the collision altered the course of the ball. Unfortunately, the impact threw my chin wildly upward. I didn’t see where I’d re-directed the ball, and as my skull shook around my brain with horrifying force, I admit I lost all understanding of what the hell was going on. The memory goes hazy for a moment during the most critical slice of time in the whole story, but it begins again, clear as day. It is of lifting my little ringing head off the dirt and asking whoever was nearby, “Did it go in?”
“That was awesome!” someone said.
“Did that hurt?”
“You took it right in the dome!”
I repeated. “Did it go in?”
Some kids looked around. The answer was obvious. They wondered how I could not know. I noticed no one was playing anymore. “Yeah, it went right in. Bounced through to your left.”
Damn. Oh well, another one in the same old same old column.
But it wasn’t. All day I enjoyed celebrity status. I overhead retellings, “Did you see Henry get hit in the head?”
“Donald nailed him.”
“He didn’t even see the nurse.”
Nurse. Ha! Point Henry!
Donald: 100 billion, Henry: 1.
No comments:
Post a Comment