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 . . .
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