The Drunken Striker
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. Read more
Filed Under TMC, Soccer, recreational alcoholism | 1 Comment
