My love affair with the Beautiful Game

It is hard to believe but the blog has reached 1,000 page views now.  Thank you to everyone who has shown interest in my story.  I honestly never thought I would post more than the very first one about my trip to DC with Haley.  Then I thought that once I had told the story of my divorce that I wouldn't have anything else to say.  Well, it has turned into a great outlet for me and also a way to let my family and friends get to know me better - and along the way I have rediscovered my love for writing.  Last week I went with my brother, his son and a friend from my ward to the RSL game.  It was a great game and reminded me of why I love the sport of soccer - which is sometimes referred to as 'The Beautiful Game'.
Another reason for continuing the blog is that it has kind of become the beginnings of a personal history.  It is always better to write about things while you can still remember them!  I am going to start copying these things to another file so that, after the blog has served its purpose, I will be able to keep going and won't have to start over.

Understanding One Another

April's grandmother, Lucille Cannon, remains one of my favorite people - even though she has been gone for several years now.  She was such an interesting person.  Grandma Cannon was a fairly renowned water color artist and spent some time (if I'm not mistaken) as president of the Utah Water Color Society.  The most intriguing part of her story, to me, is that she didn't really start painting until she was a senior citizen.  She went back to school at the U while in her early 60's and earned a BA in fine arts - and she did it backwards.  She convinced the school counselor to let her take the classes in reverse order - from the hardest to the easiest.  I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that conversation!  Grandma Cannon was one of the most Christ-like people I have ever met.  I felt like one of her grand children from the beginning even though she hardly knew me.  That was the thing about her - she could make you feel like you were the only person on earth when you were talking with her.  She listened to and heard every word you said and always had relevant questions to ask about the subject of the conversation.  I loved her for that.  One of the most enjoyable experiences I had was sitting next to her on a flight when the whole Long family went to Hawaii 14 years ago.
Grandma Cannon could talk about everything - from sports to art to making castings.  I don't know how we got onto the subject but we started talking about Pablo Picasso.  I made some remark about how crazy I thought he was and that I didn't really get his art.  Well let me tell you of the education I received during what has to be the shortest 5 hours of my life!  She told me how at a very young age little Pablo could very quickly draw precise likenesses of people and animals and that he was so good he got bored with drawing normal stuff.  His IQ was in the genius range.  He had to find more complex and 'interesting' ways to express himself.  That is how he sort of invented his own style - the depth of which takes time to appreciate.  Grandma Cannon taught me two things on that trip: 1) sometimes the best way to learn is to keep your eyes and your ears open and your mouth shut.  2)  If you want people to understand you then you have to be willing to let them in.  If April ever reads this she will probably say "well then what happened to you?".  It is true that I stopped communicating with her on some levels.  In my defense I will only say this - you can only have your opinions and feelings scrutinized and rejected so many times before you no longer want to go through what for me was the painful process of always having to justify everything I said and thought.  At times it felt like she was never impressed with anything I ever did.  Maybe I'm not that impressive, I don't know.  But once upon a time I was a pretty good soccer player.  Maybe it's just that the older I get the better I was...

The Early Years

I first started playing organized soccer when I was 7.  I had played baseball for a couple of years but was not very good at it.  I think the last year I played I only got one hit the whole season.  My parents could tell I wasn't enthusiastic about our national past time and to their credit never pressured me to keep playing.  That is why when my best friend, Steve Smith, introduced me to soccer and got me to sign up I fell instantly in love with the most popular sport in the world.  For me and soccer it really was love at first sight.  Instead of sitting and watching for half of the game I could run the whole time!  From the beginning I showed aptitude at the game.  I was smaller, but also faster than, most of the other kids and I loved to chase the ball.   I can still remember the blue, reversible, mesh jerseys with the vinyl numbers that would stick to my back as I got sweaty.  I have tried to find some of my old soccer photos but have not been able to.  My mom probably has them stashed away somewhere.
For a quiet, shy and reserved kid the soccer field was a great refuge.   In some ways I became a different person out on 'the pitch'.  I was aggressive and loved to win.  I never hurt anyone intentionally - when I was little.  As I got older and began playing defense there was a certain element of intimidation that accompanied being the 'last line of defense' but for the most part, as a young boy, I just loved to play.  In my second season I scored a lot of goals which prompted my dad to lower the $5 per goal reward to 1 dollar - which did not deter me one bit - it actually made me want it more.  As I got older I spent increasingly more time with a soccer ball between my feet.  I have sometimes wondered if I had OCD as I would often sit on the couch, watch TV, and juggle my soccer ball with my feet.  For you non-soccer types juggling involves kicking the ball from foot to foot without letting it touch the ground.  It is a great way to develop a feel for how the different surfaces of your feet react with the ball.

The Teenage Years

As time progressed I spent more and more time playing the game itself.  I would juggle for hours in the back yard.  I would kick the ball against the back wall of our garage in the back yard until my parents would say "enough!  It sounds like your trying to kick a hole in the wall'.  Funny thing is I kind of was.  I would kick the ball against that wall as hard and as low to the ground as I could and then try to recover fast enough to stop it as it came back at me.  That was how I developed the power in my shot and my ball handling skills.  I ruined the soffet above that back wall but my dad never really got that mad at me for it.  I think he felt that there were worse things I could be doing and that if I stayed away from drugs, alcohol, and girls then it was a small price to pay.  I also had one of those little net thingies with an elastic tether that you could stake to the ground.  I would spend hours kicking the ball trying to break that tether - until I finally did.  Had to go knock on the neighbor's door to ask for my ball back.  In my early teen years I was introduced to the world of competition soccer.  The difference with competition teams is that you had to try out, you practiced more, and the other kids were better - and almost always for me - bigger.  Bigger but not faster.  Somewhere along the way I developed very good foot speed, which for some reason got me moved from offense to defense.  I was frustrated at first because I loved to score goals.  I would have been unhappy with the move were it not for the best soccer coach I have ever known - Hans Knubel (the correct pronunciation is, actually, Kuh-nuble).  Hans explained to me that some of the best players in the world were defenders and the reason was they had to have all of the same skills as the other players but that it took a special kind of smarts to play defense.  He also reassured me that I would still get opportunities to score goals - and he was right about that part.  Maybe I'm just a sucker but I swallowed it hook line and sinker and played defense for the rest of my soccer career.  This photo was taken earlier this year at an RSL game.  Hans was there celebrating 70th birthday.  He looks pretty good for 70, don't you think?

Hans, Inga, and me (about 20 lbs ago).

The Knubel's have season tickets so whenever I go to a game I always try to stop by and say hello.  Hans Knubel was a great coach and mentor and his accent made him sound legit!  He was very patient with us.  He had that gift of relating to younger people but was still able to get your attention and communicate important information.  He had this saying where he would call us 'Pre-Maradonnas' - a sublte play on words that combined Prima Donna and the name of the legendary diminutive Argentine striker Diego Maradonna.  If he called you a Pre-Maradonna, you knew he wasn't happy with whatever stunt you had just pulled which usually involved getting away from the basics skills he was tring to teach you.  I learned so much about the game, and life, from him and he, really more than anyone else, helped me to develop my skills.  He is the one responsible for teaching me the shot that his son, Stephan (our goal keeper and a great friend) hated so much.  One of the great things about Hans was that not only could he tell us what to do, he would demonstrate it.  The first time I saw him kick one of those low, knuckle-ballish, laserbeam shots I was envious.  He taught us how to do it then left it up to us to work on it - and work on it i did!  I loved the feeling of striking the ball that hard and watching it glide, with no rotation (like a knuckle ball in baseball) into the back of the net.  That and the pursuit. I loved having the ball go 'over the top' at midfield when the fastest player on the other team would take off running after it. (This, by the way, is the most over-used and inefficient play in American soccer - also known as the long ball - and it pains me to see MLS teams, and the national team, still try to use it so much, but I digress). Anyway, while I loved the pursuit, my favorite part was catching up to him, taking the ball while upending him and then seeing the 'where-the-crap-did-you-come-from' look on his face.  The funny thing is that I hated to run for any other reason.  I hated jogging, wind sprints or any other exercise related form of running.  But kick a ball and pit me against another kid chasing it and I loved it.  I loved to be the spoiler and I became a slide tackle artist.  Brandon Lingwall was also every bit as good, if not better at it, than I was.  Some seasons I would slide tackle so much that I would get a nasty raspberry on my left butt cheek and would have to wear a bandage the entire season.  I also would have to sleep on my right side because it was too painful to lay on my sore spot.  I also had the dubious record of 14 yellow cards in one season but, somehow, that never deterred me from sliding.  We had so much fun playing together - Brandon, Stephan and I.  Brandon and I became the enforcers.  We had some smaller kids on our team who occasionally would get bullied by the bigger kids on the other team.  If one of our smaller buddies got hurt Brandon and I would make eye contact and we knew it was on.  It was sometimes a silent competition to see who would be the first to hand out the retribution.  We never really hurt anyone (badly) but we were pretty good at sending the message to the other team. - leave the little kids alone.  If you want to play rough - bring it over here.  Playing with Brandon and Stephan are some of my fondest childhood memories.  In ninth grade I tried out for the high school team and actually made the team but I chose not to play.  Part of it was that I wanted to stay on my comp team to play with my friends and part of it, if I'm honest, was that I didn't have the confidence to do it.  Looking back that seems kind of silly to me because I tried out again the next year and made the varsity team as a sophomore and started every game - duh.

The Beautiful Game

There are many reasons why soccer is the most popular sport in the world. One is that it can be played just about anywhere.  All you need is an open field (or a street), something with which to mark the goals and something round to kick.  In some of the poorer countries around the world an old stuffed sock or shirt becomes the ball.  Another reason is that it resonates with so many different people across many social, economic and political backgrounds.  I once read an interesting article in National Geographic about soccer.  It was fascinating and one of the most eye-opening articles I have ever read about any sport.  In fact, it's here if you are inclined to read it:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2006/06/soccer/soccer-text

Here is one of the best parts - which puts it way better than I can:

Brazil
Ballet With the Ball: A Love Story
By John Lanchester
Why do we fall in love with soccer? What happens? At some deep level the reason soccer snags us is that good soccer is beautiful, and it's difficult, and the two are related. A team kicking the ball to each other, passing into empty space that is suddenly filled by a player who wasn't there two seconds ago and who is running at full pelt and who without looking or breaking stride knocks the ball back to a third player who he surely can't have seen, who, also at full pelt and without breaking stride, then passes the ball, at say 60 miles an hour, to land on the head of a fourth player who has run 75 yards to get there and who, again all in stride, jumps and heads the ball with, once you realize how hard this is, unbelievable power and accuracy toward a corner of the goal just exactly where the goalkeeper, executing some complex physics entirely without conscious thought and through muscle-memory, has expected it to be, so that all this grace and speed and muscle and athleticism and attention to detail and power and precision will never appear on a score sheet and will be forgotten by everybody a day later—this is the strange fragility, the evanescence of soccer. It's hard to describe and it is even harder to do, but it does have a deep beauty, a beauty hard to talk about and that everyone watching a game discovers for themselves, a secret thing, and this is the reason why soccer, which has so much ugliness around it and attached to it, still sinks so deeply into us: Because it is, it can be, so beautiful...
 

I love the way that guy writes!  Americans, for the most part, don't get soccer.  I don't know if we aren't patient enough or we are just suspicious of things that weren't invented here.  I realize some things about the game itself are out of place in American sports.  Things like 'diving', faking an injury, or my biggest pet peeve - overreacting to an injury and acting like you are dying until the trainer comes out and sprays his magic mist on you and you get up and play the rest of the game at full speed.  Americans don't buy into that because we watch American football where you can see a player suffer a real, painful injury and keep playing - even without the magic spray.
Last week I was reminded of the beauty of the game when I went to the RSL playoff game and saw this goal by Alvoro Saborio.

Sabo's goal is even better in this video than when I saw it live - it was beautiful.  One of those rare moment where everything went right.  For me soccer is a great metaphor for life.  It can be so frustrating and sloppy at times and then suddenly, it can become gratifying and elegant - it can be beautiful.  Sometimes there is a great play that completely turns the tide - a play in which one player exerts himself and takes a chance, stops a pass or a shot and the momentum does a 180 and the team that was on its heels is suddenly on the attack.  The whole mood of the stadium is transformed from boredom or even disdain - to anticipation and excitement. It can be electric.
Like life, soccer can be mundane (though it is never boring to me).  It can also be frustrating and even irritating when, as a fan, you can see from the cheap seats that the team isn't playing as well as they can or that it's just going to be a long night because you can feel it's going to be.  But every once in a while - if you know what to look for, the game can be truly beautiful and when it is - all seems to be right with the world.

So, like Grandma Cannon did when I revealed my ignorance of Pablo Picasso, I try to be patient with people who show the same contempt for the beautiful game - my game.  If they have a moment and are inclined to listen - I will try to share my appreciation for it - and if I'm half as good as Grandma was, they will understand a little better.  And maybe next time they have a chance, they will sit down and watch a game.  And if they are lucky - they will witness greatness - and it will be beautiful to them too...