Zebra

My father's greatest failure - perhaps his only failure, as far as I'm concerned - is that I am not currently playing professional soccer for his beloved Hapoel Hadera. He wouldn't even have minded if I wasn't a starter, so long as I pulled on their traditional yellow and black every Saturday.

Seriously, I could win the Nobel Prize for curing cancer, leverage my fame into a successful political career, and bring about World Peace (as my wife, reigning Miss America, had suggested during the Q&A portion of the pageant), and he would swell with pride... except for that little hole in his heart, which could only be filled by seeing me standing at center field in Hapoel Hadera's stadium, amid crumbling concrete walls rising majestically above the threadbare, dusty pitch. It is probably only for want of me that the team is languishing in the fifth-tier league [edit: Congratulations, Hapoel Hadera, on your recent promotion to the fourth-tier!].

Being destined for the glory that only footballers find, I was brought up accordingly. The day I finally developed the balance for it, I was playing one-touch with Dad in the hallway of our apartment in Faculty Housing. As far as I could tell, this practice was sacrosanct, on par with religious ceremonies and Sesame Street viewership. It never occurred to me that mine was likely the only household in Hanover where a two year old was encouraged to send a soccer ball careening off of vases and painting and bricabrac, so long as he only touched the ball once per turn.

Before long, Mom moved our ritual outdoors.

It was a few years after we moved to East Brunswick that I was old enough to play on a team. I was six, and small for six, and I was playing with boys as old as eight. Sometimes we won, and sometimes we lost. Life was good.

This was pee wee soccer, and of course it was ugly. As soon as the whistle blew, everyone but the goalies charged toward the ball. The game instantly devolved into an amorphous blob of frenzied kicking, twenty tiny legs churning at an unseen ball while coaches hopeless shouted "spread out!" Every so often, the ball would squirt out of the scrum, and the riot would pursue en mass. Sometimes the ball would miraculously make its way into a goal.

Year after year, our parents occupied the sidelines. Some sat with Camcorders on lawn chairs, shivering under blankets and cheering like mad, especially when the ball was kicked really high and far. Others paced the sidelines, screaming contradictory instructions at their children, who struggled to tune them out. These were the Americans.

Interspersed among the crowd were expatriated European dads, and they were ghostly-quiet in comparison. Sure, they cheered after a score, but mostly they observed in silence. My Dad claims that this is just the way of Europeans, but I'm convinced that they were too busy downing Antacids to quell the ulcers that each game would bring.

These were men who'd been playing soccer since conception, for whom any empty space was a suitable field of play, for whom soccer was a heaven-sent deliverance from the squalor of being, well, European. Their sons, on the other hand, were driven to well-manicured fairgrounds thrice a week - two games a weekend, plus a practice on Wednesday, unless it was drizzly. Their sons wouldn't dream of playing without cleats and shin guards. Sure, we knew Pele, but we'd never even heard of Johan Cruiff. We were poseurs, and despite their pride, we were surely to blame for every gray hair that sprouted during the season.

One by one, the Euros would tire of passivity, and they'd take on a coaching job. I liked to think that there had been some ceremonial passing of the whistle over the winter, or rather that the Euros would snatch the whistle from the American's one hand as he read "Coaching Soccer for Dummies" with the other. Rather than practicing throw-ins for an hour, the Dutch kid's dad made us work on passing around a defensemen and positioning ourselves without the ball. The Englishman taught us how to control the pace of the game; he also encouraged us to use our "boots", even though we were clearly not wearing galoshes.

You know, having mentioned throw-ins so disparagingly just now, I feel like I should explain their importance. The referees, teenagers who often had only taken up soccer recently, felt they needed to earn their $20 per game. Offsides were hard to call, and it was easy to award a free kick every time anyone made contact with anyone else, but the real mother lode was in throw-ins.

For a referee to call an improper throw-in is unheard of - they are an afterthought of the sport, a technicality - outside of East Brunswick. In East Brunswick, where the refs felt they had to earn their paychecks, their call-of-choice was the improper throw-in. It was their proof of knowledgability, their demonstration of superior focus and fairness.

The Euros would be dismayed to hear a whistle after a throw-in, at least at first. East Brunswick soon crushed their spirit.

The one Euro who managed to stay out of the fray was my Dad. The demands of his job put him out-of-state often enough that it was impractical for him to serve as coach, or so the story went. I knew the secret, though: Health.

A man's blood pressure can only go so high before damage is done. East Brunswick Soccer, well-intentioned though we were, threatened his very health.

Then, when I was 14, the unthinkable happened. The referee didn't show up! Since we were in the oldest age bracket, there was a substantially smaller pool of referees - already our refs were our classmates; a younger ref was unthinkable. To salvage the game, the coaches asked for a volunteer from the parents. For reasons I still don't understand, my Dad stepped forward.

It had started to rain. There were puddles all over the field, there was no traction in front of the goal, and soon everything was covered in mud. Dad ran up and down the field, blew the whistle for out-of-bounds and offsides... and that was it. Play continued, on and on without any of the usual interruptions.

Either this was the cleanest game in the history of East Brunswick Soccer, or a paradigm had been shifted.

We on the field were the first ones to pick up on this new interpretation of the rule book. As it became clear that short of armed robbery, nothing we did would be called, we started to explore new territory. Elbows found ribs, knees met thighs, and the mud flew higher with each slide tackle.

Each side's mothers, huddled under umbrellas, grew increasingly agitated. Their babies - their 14 year old babies - were being brutalized by those ruffians from the other team. Hadn't they put their children into Soccer leagues to avoid the violence of the Football leagues? This was unacceptable! Their eyes shot daggers at my Dad, but he stuck to his policy.

I don't remember who won the game. I do remember picking a fight behind the play. The defensemen who'd been covering me, a red headed kid named Matt, had been playing dirty, or so I had assessed. As we jogged down field after their goalie punted the ball away, I bumped into his foot with just the right timing, and he tumbled to the ground.

He was immediately back on his feet and right in my face. He shoved me. I shoved him. Our teammates shouted; my goalie had cleared the ball in our direction. In an instant, we were back in the game, elbowing each other's ribs and jockeying for position.

I glowered at my Dad on the way home. What a travesty, I thought, what a mockery of sport. He'd turned an athletic event into a brawl. As is the nature of my relationship with my father, approximately 3 minutes passed before the storm blew over and we were back to normal.

After that game, I became good friends with Matt the red-headed defensemen. We had squared off on the field of battle, each had stood his ground, and respect had been earned. We lost touch after high school, but I never forgot the game.

I didn't realize it at the time, but after 16 seasons in the league, I had finally played a real soccer game.

Years later, while in college, I was asked to referee an intramural floor hockey game. Unless the ball went out of bounds or a goal had been scored, my whistle almost never touched my lips. I was letting them play, as it was supposed to be.