The Drunken Striker

Written By: TMC

Posted on July 26, 2007

They told me when I signed up for this that it would be fun, that we’d all enjoy ourselves and that we’d remember it forever, vividly, like how people remember the first time they got laid, or the last time they had a cigarette, or the pain they felt when they fell out of a tree as teenagers and broke both wrists. It was supposed to be kind of a party, a weekly get-together where we were more focused on drinking and cursing and getting away from family than on soccer, and who gives a damn who wins the games? Then Sanders got hurt, and two other guys quit, and one guy went nuts and ran off to live somewhere in Minnesota with his sister, and before you know it we’re down to five players and I’m playing every minute of every game just wishing like hell that I could get hurt too so I won’t ever have to run again.

The other guys, they’re mostly the same as me in that they don’t want to play either, but we feel like we have to because Sanders is sticking around to coach, and Winter is on the hook for four hundred bucks whether we show up or not, and it wouldn’t be right for us to leave him hanging. So we’re there every week, tired and fat and still sore from the week before, getting run off the floor by a bunch of twenty year olds without kids, jobs, body fat, arthritis, or any sense of what it means to be old and useless. We try to bully them, bounce their heads off the walls and hack at their shins until they turn purple (of course they don’t wear guards—they probably ride to the games piled 3 deep on the back of those little rice rockets without helmets, so why would they even think about slipping a little piece of plastic inside their socks?). We let them run past us and we let Harvey deal with the steady stream of breakaways, because if we all sprint back on defense, then there’s no way in hell we’ll be able to mount any kind of attack, and what’s the fun in playing a game if you don’t even have the chance to score? Harvey tries, but he’s slow, so if he gives up a rebound (he’s got good hands, but they’re not perfect), you know it’s a goal. Then he gets pissed, kicks the wall, and fires the ball at my back real hard because he thinks I’m still good enough to hang with these guys.

Just because I was good twenty years ago, they all think I’m still the best player, but the truth is I’m probably the worst. I don’t want them to know this, so I drink a lot before the games. Everyone has a couple beers, but I have 7 or 8, and I usually keep a vodka-Gatorade on the bench to keep my buzz going. When I stumble, I blame the beer. When I have an open shot and the ball bounces off my shin while I jam my toe into the ground, I laugh and shrug and give them with the kind of look I give my ex-wife when she asks why I haven’t sent the check yet. At first they laughed at me, but now I see them whispering when I bend down to dig another beer out of the cooler, and I feel their sidelong glances at me while I chug from the Vodka-ade, and I’m engulfed by their guilty silence when I come back from taking a pre-game piss. They don’t trust me anymore, and I don’t trust them, because they’re the ones who made me do this. I wanted to run around a little bit, but I didn’t want the expectations, and I didn’t want the embarrassment. They still think I can play, if only I stopped drinking, but the truth is, I think I might be even worse if I played sober.

There are 3 games left in the season, but everyone makes the playoffs for some reason, so Winter is sure that we can get it together in time to make a playoff run. We haven’t won a game yet, but we keep coming because we have to, and because we already spent our money. We won’t win any games, and we know it, no matter what we say, because I’m the best player on the team, and I haven’t been sober in two months. But we still make excuses and lie to each other, always pretending there’s a chance if only we get a few breaks. No one ever mentions that the real problem is, unlike the eighteen year olds who have nothing better to do than run around and play games all day, we’re old and have more important things to do. And no one ever mentions that the weight of all those years is what makes us so slow. And we all pretend not to see the scars, the little limps, the cloudiness in each other’s eyes, the moles that might be melanoma. Teams are like families in that way—sometimes the best way to hold it all together is to lie to yourself and everyone else, because once you start tearing down the wall of dishonesty, there’s no stopping and soon you’re flooded with so much fucking reality you can’t stand it. We’re in over our heads, but we won’t admit it, and if I’d known it would be like this, I never would have signed up in the first place.

© Copyright Sport Fiction • Powered by Wordpress • Using Detour theme created by Brian Gardner.