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

A Transcript of the Press Conference Announcing David Beckham’s Decision to Play Football in America

Posted on March 16, 2007

(Begin transcript. For a proper understanding of the goings-on, imagine David Beckham talking like an “English” person.)

David Beckham: You there, the George Wendt-looking fellow.

Peter King: David, David, Peter King of SI here. As you know, I’ve covered the NFL beat for Sports Illustrated for quite some time, and am featured on HBO’s Inside the NFL. I have a regular column on SI.com called Mundane Morning Quarterback in which I assiduously detail my airport and coffee experiences and my daughters’ softball games. From what I am given to understand, it looks like I’m in denial that my daughter Mary Beth is a lesbian, a fate she in fact could never avoid because of a distressingly close resemblance to me.

David Beckham: And what’s your question?

Peter King: Oh. Right. Well, do you think you will be playing kicker, and for what team?
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The Worst Thing About Watching Your Father Stab Himself to Death

Posted on February 3, 2007

On the soccer field, he was alone, but he was never lonely. Like a monk deep in meditation, a Buddhist perched beneath the Bodhi tree, he crouched between goalposts, an 8 foot by 8 yard sanctuary that no one could violate. Every step an opponent took inside the box, even a toe across the 18, was a threat that had to be warded off by any means necessary.

He’d been described, by various terrible writers, as a whirling dervish, an unstoppable force, a madman in a technicolor dreamcoat. He’d been an inspirational story, a cautionary tale, and a flash-in-the-pan, sometimes all at once. The pain of loss, one writer said, was etched on his face, carved into the premature wrinkles around his grey eyes and evident in the military set of his jaw as he assaulted a sailing corner kick.

Eventually, the terrible writers from the local papers were overtaken by mediocre writers from the national papers. They flocked to Northeast Philly to pimp his pain and fill the void of human interest stories, left by a lull between runaway brides and dead American girls in Aruba. For a week, he was the human interest story, the kid whose father had stabbed himself in the thigh during a meth binge and bled to death on the couch, and whose mother was dying of AIDS in a prison cell. A great story, a real American tragedy—the confluence of drugs, violence, and sex in a crumbling city. If only he were black; then they could really push it to the next level.
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