A beautiful (mind) game

The tracks run to the east of the Fremont Youth Soccer Complex, just beyond a chain link fence and a long sandy berm. The fields shake when the trains rumble by. When I was a boy, I imagined that was what it must feel like on a World Cup pitch when the host nation scores a goal.

Yesterday I was supposed to find out. The U.S. wasn’t the host nation of the 2015 Women’s World Cup, of course, but it might as well have been. There were 53,341 people at BC Place for the Final, and so far as I could tell when we finally arrived, just about all of them were rooting for the Americans.

We’d risen in Beijing, where I’d begun and ended a two-week work trip in China with my wife and daughter in tow. We’d planned to go straight home to Salt Lake City, but when I realized our layover put us in Seattle three and a half hours before the final kickoff in Vancouver, I’d hatched a plan. It has been 16 years since the U.S. won a World Cup Final, after all, and we would be so close. We’d step off the plane in Seattle. We’d get a car. If everything went well we’d make it to the stadium in time for the anthems. Most likely, I figured, we’d miss the first few minutes.

And in soccer, of course, nothing happens in the first few minutes.

We were in our rental by 1:20 p.m. — the same time on the same day that we’d left China, thanks to the strange magic of the International Date Line. We pulled onto I-5 going north. It was a Sunday afternoon and there was no traffic until we hit the border.

I’ve spent months of my life on this highway, though most of it well south of here. When I was in the military, a few lifetimes ago, I’d run this road in my little blue Civic almost every weekend, from Naval Air Station Lemoore, in California’s Central Valley, to my hometown of Fremont, on the southeast edge of the San Francisco Bay.

Once, when I was 19 or 20, I’d arrived early in the morning and made my way to the sports complex where I’d spent almost every summer Saturday growing up. On that day, I can still remember, a black and yellow locomotive was rumbling past, dragging an interminable tail of flat cars. The field was overgrown by five inches and wet with fog from the bay.

I also remember that I was wearing dress shoes. I suppose that would indicate that I was also wearing my Navy blues but, while I can see that train as though it were right now before me, I cannot see myself in the clothes I was wearing on that day — just the shoes.

If it was the blues, it must have one hell of a sight for the morning joggers cutting through the park on their way to Lake Elizabeth, the city pond where I had sailed my first boat and kissed my first girl. A scrawny sailor, miles from the ocean, sprinting down the line of a vacant soccer pitch, crossing an imaginary ball across the field, watching it glance off the fingers of the keeper and into the goal, reliving a memory that was already fading then, and has now dimmed so much that I don’t remember the team I was on, nor the team we were playing, nor the outcome of the game.

But I do remember the spot where I stood as I watched the ball fall into the goal, and I do remember how it felt, and I do remember having heard once, from my father I suppose, that old quote about what American football players should do when they get into the endzone: “Act like you’ve been there before.” These days I see it attributed to Vince Lombardi, though that’s probably apocryphal. For all I know Abe Lincoln himself said it; he says so much these days. Truth is that I didn’t know Lombardi from Lincoln, so it wouldn’t have mattered to me anyway, but it sounded like something all athletes should do, and so I remember that I simply turned around and sprinted back to the centerline. And that’s what I did when I returned to that same field all those years later, dress shoes and all, after sending an imaginary ball past an imaginary keeper into an imaginary net. I tried to hear the cheers and could not, but the ground rumbled under my feet.

My daughter won’t ever have to go to battle, as I am now, to reclaim a memory of a time when she relived the time she scored her first goal, for already she cannot remember the goal itself.

She knows when it happened. It was on May 5, 2012, according to the fading pink notation we made on her soccer ball after going out for ice cream that afternoon. But that is all. We kept that ball — a cheap, vinyl, size 3 Baden stitched in the truncated icosahedron pattern classic to soccer balls — and added to her tally as she went along. That fall and every season since, we bought a new ball, adding more goals, more braces, more hat tricks, more hauls. That latter term references a four-goal game, according to some guy on Twitter, which is as good a source as any other on the matter, I suppose, since it almost never happens.

She opened this season with a haul. After each goal in that set, she simply turned around and sprinted back to the centerline, as she always does. When my daughter acts like she has been there before it is because she has been there before. My kid has two or three hauls now, along with assorted hat tricks and braces. I can’t say it doesn’t make me proud but, for now at least, it is indicative of very little. Success in eight-year-old soccer is success in eight-year-old soccer.

Still, we mark the goals for posterity in Sharpie and trace over the notations when they fade. I admit that I’ve tried to count them all, though I can’t ever seem to get all of her soccer balls into the same room to tally the notations, since there is almost always one at her feet, and sometimes two.

How she learned to dribble two balls, I don’t know. That’s nothing I taught her.

I did teach her to go to bed with her ball at her feet, and to roll it back and forth under the covers when she cannot sleep. I taught her to pull a defender to the left and cut to the right. I taught her to time her passes to meet a sprinting attacker on the run.

And, God forgive me, I taught her to pull uniforms, kick out heels and throw hips. She’s small, my girl. Almost always she is the smallest on the field. I was, too, and I know what it is to have these tactics in your arsenal. In soccer, you do these things and they are done to you and it is better to be good at them than bad. So, like dribbling and passing and juggling and heading, I taught her to cheat. If she is going to do it anyway, it might as well come naturally, and by naturally I only mean by practice, for there is really nothing natural about the beautiful game, where our feet are our weapons and our hands are our enemies. This, in my mind, is what makes it the beautiful game; it is the sportification of the human need to prove we can overcome our creator’s intention for our bodies. When we do so we are gods.

Do you doubt that human beings can be gods? You might not if you saw what Carli Lloyd did yesterday. We were stuck behind hundreds of cars at the border crossing, listening on the radio, when she put her first goal into the lower corner, just two minutes in. We cheered as though we were there and lamented that we might not arrive until the half. We weren’t more than a car’s length up from there when Lloyd struck again. By the time we’d seen the border agent — “What brings you to Canada?” she’d asked. “The second half of a soccer game,” I’d responded — Lauren Holliday had added a third goal and Lloyd, having completed her hat trick with a 52-yard bomb over the head of the Japanese goalkeeper, has ascended Olympus.

The scoring was long since over when we finally made it to the stadium with less than 10 minutes to play in regulation. Yes, that’s all we saw, but we knew it was a gamble and I’m a gambling man. In any case, in my mind, the bet paid off. I’ve forgotten many things in my life, but I swear that I will never forget watching my daughter sit on the edge of a concrete step, chin in her hands and tears welling in her eyes as the American women lifted the World Cup. We stayed until every player had left the field and then, having had very little to eat since leaving China, went off to find dinner.

We all gasped when watched the replay of Lloyd’s third goal, that evening at a brewpub south of Vancouver, where we dined on fish and chips and mac and cheese, and told for the first time the story of the time we’d raced from one side of the planet to the other to watch the last few minutes of a World Cup final.

I gasped once more when I watched Lloyd’s exploits again on YouTube this morning as my family slept in a motel just north of the border. Then, so long as I was awake and watching football in this way, I called up the last such feat to take my breath away. That came by way of a Senegalese footballer named Sadio Mané at St. Mary’s Stadium a few months earlier, when the Southampton winger, whose speed is not human, scored three goals in three minutes (an accomplishment made more impressive when you consider that he and his teammates spent a full minute celebrating the first goal and another minute celebrating the second.)

When I first saw Mané’s hat trick, on one of those shaky YouTube videos in which someone has recorded something with a camera as it plays on their television (the ESPN video wouldn’t play for me,) I felt the immediate urge to call my father. It was 2 a.m., though, as it is wont to be when I am watching shaky YouTube videos, so the next morning I drove to his house and found him making coffee and asked him if he had seen what Mané had done. He hadn’t, and I thrilled to be the one to tell him.

Soccer is not the only thing my father and I share, but when I was 17 and about to leave for the Navy, and he was angry at me for doing so, and I left our home in a torrent of expletives and did not return for several weeks, our detent came over pizza and a conversation about the beautiful game.

We could talk about soccer in a way we could talk about nothing else. Baseball had long since divided us — I had stopped playing when I was 15 and his heart was broken. I was Matthew after the apostle, but was nearly Carney after the American League third baseman. Carney Lansford, a childhood friend of my father’s, was playing for the Angels when I was born. My parents, expecting a girl in a way that didn’t make sense in an era before routine sonograms, had not decided on a boy’s name for me. In the hospital room where I was sleeping on my mother’s chest, my father was watching the Angels play and Lansford was up to bat. “Come on, Carney,” he’d told the television, “if you hit a home run I’ll name my son after you.” Lansford took the next pitch long. My mother had voided the deal before the replay had even come onto the screen.

Had the years been aligned, I might have named our daughter Mané. The choice in 2007 was between Maya, the poet, or Mia, the footballer. My wife let me choose the latter.

It wasn’t a particularly creative choice. The name had languished in ethnic obscurity until the game-changing American footballer Mia Hamm came along. Today, 11 years after she retired from the game, hers is still one of the most common baby names for American girls, and I know that many of their parents are obsessed the way I am obsessed with this game.

Our Mia was barely two weeks old when we took her to her first Major League Soccer match. It was a heartbreaking ordeal. The referee was lousy. The home team’s coach got red-carded. And then, with less than a minute to play in what seemed destined to be yet another scoreless draw, our team gave up a goal to lose the game 0-1. She cried the whole way home and I imagined it was because she knew.

She was kicking a ball as soon as she could walk. She was playing with me in the park as soon as she could run. I started coaching her teams when she was four. At five she scored her first goal. And then she wouldn’t stop.

She ended the past season with a two-goal game. The first was pure hustle — the keeper deflected her shot and she was on the loose ball in a flash, burying it into the corner. The second was pure skill — she broke down the middle, pulled the defender to the left, cut to the right, and then did the same to the keeper.

We do not wear cleats on asphalt, so after the game I carried her over the pavement to our waiting car.

“Nice brace,” I said. “It was?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Those were both really nice goals.”

“Well,” she said, “it doesn’t matter who scores, only that we all do our best.”

“Did you?” I asked. “Of course,” she said.

I suspect she is lying about not caring who scores. In the car on that day I told her about how Mané had scored the fastest hat trick in the history of the world’s greatest football league.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, do you think anyone will ever get four goals in three minutes?”

“You, maybe?” I laughed.

“Maybe,” she said.

I adjusted the rearview mirror to get a look at my child. She was staring blankly out the window of the car, daydreaming, I assume, of what a three-minute haul would look like.

Of course she is this way because of me, but I swear I’ve tried to keep soccer fun. I thought, in fact, that I’d coach her for another year or two in the local recreational leagues before things got serious, and only then if she wished for it to be so. But then, one by one, the parents of the other players on her team declared they would be signing their daughters up for competition league tryouts. Her teammates were moving on. Suddenly I wondered: Will my daughter be left behind?

And then, almost as suddenly, I wondered: How can this be a real worry?

Yet it is. Not just for me, I’ve learned, but for a lot of parents. Not three months ago I would have viewed the ensuing levels of preoccupation with my child’s soccer future as irrational — even given my admittedly absurd preoccupation with soccer. Today, though, I’ve come to realize something terrifying about myself, my daughter, and this game we love.

At eight years old, she is at a crossroads.

I have no illusions about college scholarships, professional leagues or national team service. These are not things I dream about, nor has my daughter even entered the time in her life if which she might dream in this way – not even after what she has the opportunity to experience yesterday evening. Instead, I’ve been focused only on the notion that my Mia might be permitted to play this game through her childhood. To play four years on my high school’s varsity team, I had to do little more than show up. If she would like to play a single year on her high school team, she cannot follow my lead.

For as good as she appears to be at this time, if she wishes to keep playing in the years to come, a little talent and hard work is not enough. For she is not the only Mia born in 2007, and in that year there were plenty of other Abbys and Hopes, as well. Over the coming months, I’m sure, there will be a bumper crop of Carlis, and there should be.

But where we live there is little in the way of recreational soccer for girls much past the age of 10, and to have a chance of actually participating in the competition leagues in the years when that time comes, she cannot simply be playing right now. No, she must be training. Practices and camps. League games and tournaments. Indoor seasons in the winter.

And this is why, on a recent Wednesday afternoon, we drove under dark skies to a junior high school in the foothills of our city, where we stood in line so she could register for the tryout among hundreds of other boys and girls and a seemingly equal number of anxious parents, some of whom, having apparently been through this all before, arrived with lawn chairs and refreshments. There was not, as far as I could tell, a single child smaller than my daughter, but she held her own until the skies opened and the lightning shocked the clouds. The children crowded together under the registration tents with their parents huddling beneath umbrellas until someone, apparently with the sense that none of the rest of us possessed, decided the tryout would be postponed and we should all get the hell out of the electrical storm.

Back in the car, we counted the seconds between the lightning and the thunder. Flash. One. Two. Three. Crack! Flash. One. Two. Boom!

Flash. One. Bang!

The ground shook beneath us.

My daughter dances and sings and draws and crafts and snowboards and cross-country skis and plays the piano and writes stories. She speaks Chinese with a Shanghai accent. She wants to be an author and a veterinarian and a chef. She sometimes loves to do nothing at all. She just turned eight years old. She still lets me sing her lullabies. She insists that she will never move away from our home.

She has no concept of the rest of her life, but she says she wants to play soccer for the rest of her life. And so, as we headed to another tryout the following day, I told her that if this is what she wants to do then she will need to start making choices about how she spends her time.

“I’ll spend more time playing soccer?” she asked.

“A lot more,” I replied.

“More soccer sounds good,” she said.

And with that, she chose the thing that will take up so much of her time that there would simply not be as much room for any of those other things. Not because she has big soccer dreams, but only because she thinks, right now, that she might like to keep playing in the years to come and I, loving my daughter and this game, want to preserve for her that option.

Yes, I know it is a gamble. And like any gambling man, I’ve lost my fair share of bets, so I worry that the things we do to preserve this game for her might also steal this game from her. And from us.

It seems like half the college kids I teach these days are burnt out of soccer or baseball or violin or whatever else it is that their parents wanted them to do and love and master. I see their eyes roll when they talk about their parents and their lips curl when they talk about practice, practice, practice. And I know, of course, we are not special. I know that could happen to us.

One night, a few weeks ago, I dreamt it did, and that my daughter wanted to change her name. And when I asked how she could no longer want to be named Mia she told me, “No, it’s not my first name I hate. It’s my last name.”

I got the call from the coach the next morning. “Would Mia like to play competition soccer?” Two days later, when I told my daughter the news, she leapt into my arms and said “thank you, thank you, thank you.”

We’ll be home tomorrow morning. She scrimmages tomorrow evening. This weekend she has her first tournament. For a day, perhaps, she’ll be the girl who went to the World Cup Final, or the final minutes of it anyway. After that she’ll be someone to beat for playing time.

So it begins. Where it ends I cannot know and do not wish to know. It is difficult for me to act like I have been here before, because I have not.

But I remember the joy I felt the first time I scored, or at least I think I do. And I remember that there was a day when I sought to recreate that moment, for that is how powerful a moment it was. And I remember the ground shook beneath my feet. And I think it’s still shaking.