Saying Goodbye - the End

At the height of our success we were breaking apart - entropy in action! Last season had arguably been our finest, involving a bitter battle with a team that theatrically wore black and who played the role of vaudeville nemesis to our Hero. Though they beat us in the regular season, destroying the knee of one of my original players in the process, we ended up with a better record and finished the season as league champs. Another medal! Hollywood style vindication and justice! Cue the music . . .

It was the beginning of the end - we had been together since U13 at Classic V and now we were looking at going to U19 Classic II and the team was fading away even as we enjoyed the heady success of winning yet another championship. We just didn't know it yet.

Spring Season is referred to in soccer as "Short Season". Because so many boys play for their high schools in the winter and spring, the club season is truncated and involves independently set up games that don't count against your record - sort of like Pakistani arranged marriages. And often times the other team can't field a full squad on that day for one reason or another and more games are cancelled than are played.

Spencer was graduating high school and he would go on to play college at Southern Virginia; Decook switched loyalties so that he could play on a team that included his high school friends. Cason - another original! - followed him because this was a Big Club, with access to college scouts and a higher fewer ethnic minorities. He in turn was joined by Justin who spent the last season pouting because noone else on the team held him in the esteem he held for himself.

Jesus, our keeper,  left because he was a goal keeper and we couldn't seem to hang on to them. He just kind of faded away at the end of the season, claiming he didn't have a phone, a ride, a clue . . .

Patrick had been our number one goal-scorer for years - I had recruited him back in the U12 days when I was shameless about stealing your most talented player from your team with promises of glory. In the ensuing six years I had picked him up and taken him home twice a week - he lived miles away, in Braselton; I had fed him on away games and visited him in the hospital when he ruptured his spleen playing for us. He had never paid a penny towards any fees, never paid for any of the camps we held. Patrick's head was turned by a Big Club that saw his numbers and made him any number of promises, and so he left . . . only to try to return weeks later when the rosters were set and his position had been filled. No dice, Patrick. Despite everything we had done for you, you chose to leave and so no door was left unlocked with a candle in the window for your eventual return.

And so it goes - by summer recruiting time we had refilled our roster but it was like something from a Civil War novel: the proud boys who had joined the regiment in the glory days of Hope and Courage were gone, their spots filled by raw recruits who didn't know the culture and the history. Game enough to try to live up to the Iron Horse name but there were too many of them and we didn't have enough time to shape them: this was the last season for the team. We broke them in and threw them out there. Buncha FNG's .

Brian's son was graduating this year and he was opening his own business and so that would be that. Over the years I began to rely on Brian more and more. Iron Horse was so successful I could afford to turn my attention and worries over to my younger son's team, which always struggled. In time Iron Horse became, by default, Brian's team, and it was a good fit. My relevance began to fade as my attentions were called elsewhere. If Brian and I had a difference of opinion regarding formations or tactics, I began to defer to him. Gone was my old bluster and cockiness. I had found myself out and realized now, after years of experience, how little I actually knew. I'm glad I didn't know that in the beginning - I would have failed miserably.

Brian had coached his last game last Saturday, handed the equipment bag over, and now I was the last man standing, me and the Four Originals, and the  Second Generation players, the ones who flocked to us when we were unstoppable - like Victor, and Junior our other captain. Brian had told me, "We managed to bottle lightning there for a while."  We had both wanted to create a winning team around those who could play the game but were too poor to afford Big Club membership fees and in that we were more successful than we might have hoped for. Or maybe not, we were both full of hubris in those first days.

If only . . . if only we had kept the original crew, we would have dealt handily with this team in the gloaming of late Georgia Autumn. Our esprit and elan and speed would have kept these boys on their back-heels and Patrick or Manuel would have scored the final goal. But this group - there was not enough chemistry. Pieces were missing, we were patched up with tape and wire. The sounds across the street from the other complex were silent now and the cars driving past had their lights on. This field had no lights however and it was getting dark.

With five minutes to play, the refs called the game. It was too dark to see, they said. It was dangerous to play. The other coach looked at me and I shrugged. "I want to finish the game," I said. So did he, so did all the boys on the field - but we were vetoed by the referees. Game over. As ignominous an ending to years of success as you could possibly imagine.

I called the boys over and gave them a halting, disconnected speech regarding pride and joy. It was really dark now and people were fleeing for their cars the game was over, the season was over and the team was over. We had managed to bottle lightning there for awhile, but nothing lasts forever . . .

Saying Goodbye - Part Three

At U12 there were four teams that played each other in continuous rotation and I was already coveting their best players, a shameless poacher of talent - the green team had speed that I craved, the red team had one rotund Mexican kid who could score from any part of the field. And there was that other team that seemed to be where, by common consensus, you went to play if you lacked any sort of athletic ability at all. We'd play that team and I'd tell my boys: "I don't want you scoring more than five goals against them. If you get to five goals, pass it around. Or use your weak foot. I don't care - don't drive the score up." I didn't want anyone from that team.

By the end of the season the green coach - Brian - and I were already scheming like Arabs to build a select team that we were sure could compete with the best in the state. The best players from both our teams and open tryouts to fill in the rest and we'd be ready to go. We were gleeful and spoke confidently of formations and tactics and plans for tryouts. I remember these early conversations as being buoyed up by the flatulence of my own arrogance. Gawd, I was such an ass in those days. The very definition of "puffed up".

The trick to building a team is to be able to recognize talent in an artificial environment that lasts only a few days. We had clipboards and stopwatches and various stations with cones and flags where we tried to make sense of speed, ball control, passing ability. We collected stats and compiled numbers. My head spun with the science of it all. This was number crunching, this was the sort of thing actuarial did in cubicle hives set in glass towers across the corporate landscape. I wasn't much good at it. My ability to spot talent was mostly hit, with some obvious misses. Brian gave me enough rope to hang myself. He was quieter and more thoughtful in those days and so I think I had him fooled by my slick talk and my confident bluster. Later in our association he wouldn't hesitate to veto my more asinine ideas. He must have been baffled at some of the player choices I advocated but, to his credit, he remained circumspect.

You want your team name to reflect something of your local nuances and culture - by all means, you want to avoid the usual hyperbolic cartoon superhero names Americans like to attach to their sports teams: the Blast! The Rage! The Venom-spitting Cobras of Death! The town where we were based was your typical small Southern railroad town, bisected by the tracks which could tie up traffic for long periods of time in the middle of the day. We decided to call our team The Iron Horse Football Club to reflect the reality of where we were from. Plus, it sounded good - and Brian, an artist, designed the logo.

That logo and the team name got a lot of mileage over the years and now they were playing their last game. I stood on the sidelines clutching my dry erase board like Captain America's shield and made a mental tally: there were four men left from the original sixteen boys. Time works in two ways, as I've said before: very slowly and very quickly, both at the same time.

Yesterday we formed a team, today is six years later. That first year we won our first tournament, the Nike Triumph Cup. The boy who scored the winning goal is gone, as are several others either because they dropped out along the way or they were cut at the next round of tryouts. Names drop by the wayside and you wonder about them. Some go looking for greener pastures and, of those, a select few shake your hand and thank you for all you've done for them; others slink off and join other teams and you hear about it by a third party. Some lose their love for the game, some realize that the game left them behind, some just  . . . disappear.

Some improbably stick with you out of fierce loyalty despite recruiting efforts by Big Clubs, and one such now stood at the top of the center circle, waiting for kick-off. Victor came to us from Zimbabwe and in the early days when he joined our club he was notable for his joie de vivre, his smile and his inability to get anywhere on time. We'd be starting a match and Victor would be late but then - wait, here he was! You'd see him get out of his dad's car and amble across the fields towards us, in absolutely no hurry, flummoxed when we scolded him for his lack of haste, slowly putting on his cleats and shaking his head. For a long time we called him candy-cane due to an impromptu song he once sang in the back of my car while enjoying the minty freshness of a candy one of my sons had left on the seat. He pronounced the word "beach" like "bitch" and "sheet" like "shit" and the boys never ceased prodding him to answer questions where he couldn't avoid using those words. He told us that once, back home in Harrare, he had been menaced by a monkey and it seemed to have made an impression on him.

Victor had changed over the years, had developed a gravitas that seemed to be based on his role as elder brother in a house where a father was constantly absent, flying back and forth to Africa. He had two little brothers that he had to take care of while his mother worked and picked up classes at a local school His smile was still brilliant and his humor always ready but there was a distance in his eyes now as if he was peering into the future and weighing options. One option that he stuck with was playing for Iron Horse despite the recruiting of a variety of Big Clubs, despite the fact that he made the first and second cut at the IMG National soccer academy. Colleges were lining up for Victor now and he could go anywhere but, improbably, impossibly, he still wore the Iron Horse shirt, still lined up for us at kick off, the creative heart of our team.

Manuel was still with the team too, the chubby Mexican kid from the U12 Red team who could score from anywhere.His dad and sister used to call him "Chapparro" which means "shorty" in Spanish, or something like that, but now he was as tall as me and his young boy chubbiness was gone and now he was built like a kitchen appliance. Over all the years he stuck with us, scoring improbable goals, finding those long passes, harrying his own team mates until they wanted to drive a nail through his temple to keep him from talking all the damned time. Manuel was the youngest high scoring player in the Mexican Adult league and, as such, he was featured in the local Spanish papers. He always needed a ride to away games and, because he played every weekend all year long for his father's team in the Mexican leagues, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of where every soccer field in this part of Georgia was, a human GPS. If, on the way back from a game, we stopped at a fast food restaurant, Manuel would lean over the counter and call into the kitchen - "Hey, amigo!" Then he'd give specific instructions regarding his food in Spanish. "There's always a Hispanic back there," he once told us, confidently.

Manuel was in goal for us tonight because Iron Horse had Spinal Tap Drummer Syndrome when it came to goal keepers - they dropped away nearly every season for a variety of reasons. We couldn't seem to keep one.

But it wouldn't be a problem after tonight . . .

Saying Goodbye - Part Two

Seventeen years ago I used to drive past this very field on my way to church and look down at the games playing out in a mute frenzy of opposing colors and wonder, "Will my son play down there some day?" Sam was an infant then, bundled into his car-seat and wrapped in blankets against the November chill, but I was a young father and the future was ahead of us and I was comfortable contemplating chances of glory.


In those days I was the successful head coach of the boys' varsity team at my school, and full of my own abilities and potential. Before I took over the team had won two games in two years, but my first year as head coach saw us post our first ever winning season. I had the sense back then to let the boys find themselves as players, and developed their game around what they showed me - it was instinctive coaching rather than tactical. It was coaching by ear rather than scripting a game plan, but it was successful for several years and we went to the state playoffs twice before I was ready to step down, all full of myself as a keen tactical coach, a big game coach able to pull out wins, a player's-coach as they say in the business.

I was deluded by my own successes, but it didn't help that my son's youth teams were also wildly successful, even back during the U6 days when "winning" was an exercise in the theater of the absurd. Organize a U6 team correctly and they'll score dozens of goals per game if you have the right players. Those teams won and won and, by winning, attracted other players who also wanted to win. I saw the potential for building a dynasty.

The first in a wave of recruits arrived unceremoniously when a U8 a mother came up to me and told me that her sons were going to play on my team. You need to know the Hmong to understand how straightforward and without guile they are. She told me this very firmly and identified her two sons - one of whom was no taller than a marionette. The oldest was playing soccer in those days because he liked the snacks and juice-boxes the coaches handed out with largesse after the games, but the younger one played for the love of the game and they were tired of being on the losing end of playing against us. I knew their quality from having coached against them and I shamelessly allowed them to jump ship, to my team.

He was still out there this November day - the younger Hmong boy. He was sixteen now and still small but - again, you had to know the Hmong - an absolute warrior. In a game earlier in the season he had taken down a 19 year old player, big as a linebacker, after a dirty foul, and came up swinging. He had to be pulled away by two other players while his antagonist stumbled off bewildered and cowed but the older brother was gone now, joining a list of absent faces. He had once been the rock at the heart of our defense, the undisputed captain of the team, but something had soured in him when he turned sixteen and he became distant and hostile and no one knew why - this boy who had once played so he could get snacks, who would come off the field on a substitution and run over to his parents so he could hug the baby sister he adored. It all culminated with a fist fight between the two brothers, a sudden and quick affair that saw the younger brother humiliate the older one at a practice one day, and then he was gone. Off the team, never to return.The prodigal soccer player who did not come back . . .

We lost other players over the years, but that one was the first one to hurt my heart. Tonight I said goodbye to him too, one more time, as my boys huddled around and prepared their pre-game cheer: Iron Horse on three! One! Two! Three - IRON HORSE.

This was the last game of the season, and for many of us, the last game we would have together - yet somehow the cheer came out muted and lacked conviction. It trailed away and ended with scornful laughter as the boys pulled apart and the starters took their positions.

I looked at the other team but not with the usual scrutiny. There was nothing on the line for this one. Win or lose, both teams would remain in the middle of the table at Classic II.

Saying Goodbye - Part One.

It was another early November soccer game but this time there was nothing tangible on the line: no championship to be shooting for, no edgy adrenaline rush as we calculated points and tactics and overall strategy towards inevitable victory and another medal. After fourteen seasons of driving through the leagues from Classic V to Classic II, winning each league either flat out, or saving it till the last game . . . this one was anti-climactic. We were in the middle of the table with no chance to win the championship and add more hardware to the trophy cabinet and the glory of the team, but no threat of being relegated back down to Classic III either. The season was done after tonight, and so was I.

The sun was going down and the shadows were reaching across the pitch from the scrub behind me. There had been frost this morning and then enough sun by midday to scorch my nose, but these shadows had the feeling of winter in them, as if they had been hoarding their chill. We were on the only soccer pitch on this side of the street, surrounded by trees and evening shadows – across the street was a large modern complex of something like thirty fields and the last games of the evening were playing out over there, but the sounds were muted through some peculiarity of the landscape and I was put into mind of how I used to be able to hear the playground sounds at my elementary school when I’d stay home sick. We lived less than a mile from the school and the sounds of children would float disembodied through the trees, sounding near and far away at the same time. A melancholy sound . . .

The last time this team had played at the complex across the street we were fighting to remain at the top of the league and every game was do-or-die. In club soccer, only the league champion gets promoted to the next level, switching places with the last-place team in the bracket above. We were U16 then and at the top of the Classic IV table with ambitions to rise to the top league by the time our boys reached U19. In those days we mixed natural talent with organization and preparation and so we knew going into that game who the danger men were and what we had to do. We had studied their statistics and scouted their last game – in fact, we made sure they knew we were scouting them, arriving to watch that game wearing our uniforms so that they couldn’t miss us, hoping to squeeze that much more advantage out of the situation.

We ended up winning that game by a solitary goal scored in the final seconds of the game when our wing-back, playing heroically despite having the flu, drove into the box and slotted an unlikely shot from an unlikely angle – and then collapsed onto the pitch with nothing left to give. That’s who were in those days, dangerous until the final whistle blew, every boy playing like a man. Hero-stuff. We won the league that year and, when we were given our medals, I thought back to that game and how key that victory had been.

But this was a different year, a different league, and the boy who had scored that famous goal was gone now, graduated and playing in college. My co-coach was gone now too, he who had engineered the psy-war-ops scouting tactic; so many had come and gone and now this was my last game too, and the last time I would coach my oldest son and I stood there in the lengthening shadows feeling curiously displaced and inert as the boys stretched and taped their shinguards and tied their cleats with their special knots. I stood quietly and did not come out of myself to bark orders in preparation for this one game, this singular game, as I would have in the past. I found a folding camp chair and plopped down into it and waited for the referees to call for captains . . .

The Visitor

We've had our fair share of strange callers at our small home amidst the oaks on the edge of what could be called "downtown". Some of you might remember the story of the early morning peeping-tom who peered in our front window at Liz while she ironed, causing her to shriek in manner that was not quite human - and jolting me out of the bed to stand on the porch in my boxers, waving a cudgel and an (empty) pistol at the receding shadows of early morning, screaming invective while my adrenaline count threatened china-syndrome levels. Our caller had ridden his bike on his pervy route and I saw it lying at the foot of our driveway. My adrenaline finding a target for release, I beat the shit out of it with my cudgel - though that only did minimal damage to it. Those bikes are built pretty tough. I managed to smash off the plastic reflectors and, perhaps, dent a few spokes. When the cops arrived they expressed doubt that anyone could have ridden such a bike. I explained that it had been in better shape before they arrived . . .

Lately we've been haunted by Carolyn, whose dementia causes her to wander the neighborhood with a strange mission to "visit with" anyone she can corner. At any hour. The first time she arrived we were glad to meet her. She had a friendly face and she indicated that she had moved into the recently renovated Crack House on the corner. We were glad to see Nice People living there, and we told her so, but we realized right away that something was off-balance in Carolyn's demeanor. She tried to push past Liz and I and step into the living room with a proprietary air. Her smile faded and her expression became determined and . . . distant. The people in front of her had ceased to exist and she was compelled to move forward . . .

We sent her on her way, but she comes back from time to time to "visit with" us. Usually it's at the end of the evening when the kids are getting ready for bed. The dogs will go ballistic as they sense her presence coming silently up the driveway. Their barking hides the tread of her feet on our front steps and across the porch but we'll hear the doorbell.

This is the kids' cue to scatter and they do so quickly, like kids in a war zone hearing aircraft overhead. Liz scoots down the hall behind them and I go to the door, careful to only open it a crack. Carolyn will smile and say, "I've come to visit with you." Then the smile will go, and with it any semblance that I'm staring at a functioning member of society. The eyes unfocus and look inward at things I can't see. Her intentions are lost in her fog. I make my apologies and excuses: It's late, the kids are going to bed, etc. etc. She turns and lumbers off, disappearing into the inky shadows at the foot of our driveway to continue her restless wandering . . .

The owner of the house next door had his own Carolyn encounter last week when he had come home from New Hampshire to tend to his rental house. She had come to the door "to visit" with him as he pulled up carpet and trim. He pulled up a chair for her but she didn't stay for longer than a few minutes before drifting out the door without a word.

I'm reminded of Tove Jannson's character The Grok (illustration at the head of this post) who wanders restlessly through the Moomintroll world, unsettling everyone with her strange and dread-inspiring presence, and leaving icy patches where-ever she rests . . .

Crazy Carolyn - that's what we call her, and not without affection. Still, like The Grok, she's unsettling. She is a large woman and her face is doughy and lugubrious. Sometimes when I come home from soccer late at night I'll see her lumbering down our road with that particular side-to-side rocking motion large women have, rolling along like a sailor on deck. It's dark on our end of the street, where In-Town peters out and she comes out of the shadows into my headlights all of a sudden, her face telling a story of sorrows and heartbreaks and worry - the La Llorona of Winder. The Weeping Washer Woman. The Gray Lady of folklore. When I surge around her she fades into the shadows again. I get out of my car at the top of the driveway and look behind me with anxiety. Will she be there, just behind me, hoping for a visit? Will she try to follow me into the house?

In Tove Jannson's Moomintroll books the arrival of the Grok is preceded by a feeling of dread and a drop in temperature. Moominpapa opens the door and she's there, lurking just outside the pool of light that spills from the house.

Yesterday afternoon the dogs exploded again, the terrier spinning in circles and the dalmatian charging the front windows. Our personal Grok had arrived but when I opened the door she was not there. I walked to the foot of the driveway and looked both ways but she was not toddling off with her peculiar seaman's gait. She couldn't have disappeared that fast.

And of course she didn't. She was at our backyard gate, peering over the fence at the children playing there. "Carolyn, you can't do that," I told her. "You're frightening the children." She told me she just wanted to visit with the people in the yard but I sent her on her way and watched as she made slow, relentless progress down the road.

When I drove down the road an hour later she was on her front porch and she raised her hand to wave vaguely at me, and I gave her a quick salute. I drove on wondering who lives there with her, who watches her?