We stole their game

You remember.

Maybe you’re 8 years old, and you feel the laces of the ball sting your hands in that sweet spot between wrist and knuckle bottom that has its own wisdom, that doesn’t have to watch the Baseball Bunch to know where to throw or how hard. You don’t know how many miles per hour your pitch is. You’re not wearing stirrups or spandex, just shorts or jeans and a t-shirt.

There’s no camera here, that omnipresent third eye that in later years will provide proof that something really happened. Not even the gaze of your parents is anywhere to be found in this scene. From somewhere inside, you hear the clanking of your mother pulling dishes through soap. She doesn’t need to be watching you.

This is about the game.

Remember?

Or maybe you’re 10, and the molten rocks and tar on the street put out a certain sweet pungent odor you’ll forever associate with a ball, and when your foot greets it, it makes a Yes! trajectory right between these two chalk lines that’ve shifted all summer but that, on this night, at least, seem to be like magnets, and you can’t get the play wrong. You’re just. That. Good.

I remember.

There was a crow that’d wake me up every morning that summer when I was 9 years old, and I’d put on my red shirt with the puffy white crossed baseball bats on it. I loved the leather of the glove. Somehow, its old-world smell and string stitches seemed to authenticate my efforts.

This was small-town living, in Colorado where I passed my childhood. My parents worked, but they felt okay sending me on my way, alone, to meet my friends and learn America’s favorite pastime.

I practically floated to the scrubby, nubby baseball field for Little League practice. This was next to the labyrinthine brick elementary school with the hissing Victorian radiators that went silent in summer. Coach Bird—his real name—was the sole adult at those practices. Mostly he made us laugh. I played just about every position on the field. We hardly won. It didn’t matter.

These days, when my adult world feels minced and out of place, I look back and feel that Western sun on my small face. I see the empty wooden bleachers, and my feet shuffle on the ground, looking for the 47 pebbles by home plate.

I smile. It’s useful to pursue activities that build these kinds of smiles when you’re little, these smiles that radiate from a deep joy, these smiles that aren’t marked on for the world.

Now I go out to the soccer matches with my kids and note there are at least as many parents on the sidelines as there are kids on the field. The adults come with their camping chairs and sun shades that wave in the wind and stand like flapping flamingos.

The parents don’t stay in the shade. The kids often aren’t smiling.

“You’ve got time, Hector! You’ve got time! Man on!”

The woman in the blond ponytail paces at the side of the field in Terminator sunglasses, polo shirt and spandex Capri pants. Her toes are tapping; her hand, clasped loosely around a can of Diet Coke, twitches slightly.

“Back to the middle of the field!”

Her pace quickens, and she switches direction, like a high-stakes trader.

“Come on, Turner! Zachary!”

One of the boys scrunches his face. Hector, Turner, Kai, Carter or Zachary—it’s tough to say if he’s one of the kids the woman with the Diet Coke can was calling out to. “I’m already sweating!” he says to anyone who will listen. There’s a February heat wave in the air. Two weeks ago, the sky was all icy spittle. Practice was cancelled that day. Today, it’s 85 degrees out for the under-12 league.

“You’re in trouble if you can’t take the sun, brother,” says a man with sweat decorating his receding hairline. He sets up his sun umbrella.

“Well,” he says, stretching out his legs. “At least we’ll be cool for our game.”

When did this scrimmage of kids become, for the adults at the sidelines, our game? When did we stop playing ourselves and start pacing, while the next generation either lived up to all we hoped for them or disappointed us bitterly, becoming, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, heroes or bitter failures in a story we’d tell?

On Monday at the public library, I overhear two people talking. She wears bobbed hair and sensible shoes. His spectacles are tucked into white tufts behind his ears.

“I tell you what, that boy on the other team, he was tiny. He was little. But he could run that ball like nobody’s business,” says one.

“We’re trying to work on offense, but honestly, our boys need to work on their speed,” says the other.

Our boys.

They have so much riding on their shoulders, these kids. They can never quite forget that what they do on the field matters. It will be talked about. It will be seen.

Marvin Smith remembers his days as a child dribbling a battered ball up and down a gritty street in Trinidad.

“We played for hours,” he says. “I played because there was a ball, and I wanted to play.”

“My mom probably only saw me play two, three times,” he adds.

“In your entire career?” I ask.

“I didn’t need my mom to be on the soccer field to play.”

This is a man who dances down the field, whose cunning can move the ball, as if by a sixth sense, to the exact spot where it meets a teammate and culminates in goallllll!

Perhaps someone should’ve been at the sidelines all those years ago, pulling out hair, doing deep knee-bends, straining at the gut and marveling in the marvelous creation that is Marvin.

Smith built his career by playing in amateur clubs, then moving slowly, painfully, intuitively, into and through the professional ranks before coaching at Huntingdon College in Alabama with the hopes of returning to Trinidad and inspiring the next generation of soccer players. By what he feels to be the fingers of fate—he talks about this frequently as a way of inspiring his players—he wound up here, where he’s director of coaching for the Baton Rouge Soccer Association.

Sure, his single mom only came to three matches, tops. But an inner love for the game is more than enough to produce a great soccer player, he says. It’s the one key ingredient, far stronger than an army of fanatical parents. Remember: That love for the game has to be kindled by the kids themselves.

Smith is leaning back in a chair at BRSA’s Lobdell offices, his radiant smile competing with the shine of 400-odd trophies on the wall behind him. Soccer is like life, he says. You can’t tell kids what to do when they are out on the field during matches. All you can do is watch the magic and hope that the integrity you’ve passed on to them during practice works. It’s the philosophy of a Vince Lombardi instead of a Bobby Knight.

The kids are quick studies in the power of process and patience, and the game of soccer gives immediate feedback. The parents, however, can be obnoxious in their pursuit of glory. Not every kid wants to play premier-level soccer. Some just want to have fun.

“We have parents pushing for that upper tier, while the kids are crying out,” Smith says.

Smith’s dilemma—which he is trying to solve by educating the adults while the kids do what comes naturally—is that parents put up a lot of cash and hours to get their kids playing soccer at ever-greater levels.

“The return is parents saying to the kid, ‘You’ve got to put out. I want you to be a starter. I want you to play X amount.’”

He makes the case that sometimes kids learn more from failure than they do from success. Sometimes, he preaches, the most legendary teams just won’t make it to the finals.

Such a long-range, nuanced, holistic view can be difficult for parents to accept.

That’s putting it nicely, says Jeff Jones, Central High School woodshop teacher by day and Biddy Basketball coach by night.

“These parents in the South are nuts,” he says. “They’re completely nuts.”

Jones says that he looks into the stands at every youth sporting event he attends and sees a sea of so-called supporters, spitting, with shaved heads and machine-like Oakley sunglasses, who only care about glory and who will do anything to get it. They sign up their kids for sports camps at age 3; they shop leagues to find the one that’ll push their kids the hardest, not toward better play, necessarily. Not toward a lifelong love of sports or an improvement in their attitudes, but toward points on the scoreboard, flashing lights and ego-stimulating, rah-rah, siss-boom-bahs.

The stars get played into oblivion in the form of burnout or injury. By turn, this creates a cottage industry of attorneys who represent kids hurt while playing. The less-than-stellar sit on the bench, and we’ll never know what kind of stars they might become if given the chance to learn by playing. They’re just not that good. Not strong enough. Not big enough. Not worthy of running, tossing or gaining those glorious inner smiles that will help them through life’s valleys.

Most of us who have reached drinking age know that adulthood arrives rather quickly, and once it’s here, it’s here for a long, long time. It’s heavy, like an industrial air conditioner. It’s metallic and cold on your shoulders. Sometimes it thrums with longing.

The rising impulse in our country is to prepare the kids for it—to make them worthy of it. Today’s parents want their kids to know what’s coming, but they want to make sure it comes in a nice package. Teachers will tell you all about the oxymoronic urgency that parents often have to challenge their kids, and also to make sure every single thing their kids attempt ends in flashy success.

Play used to be the one arena where kids didn’t have to feel this adulthood, this excellence by parental standards, pressing down on them.

Parents mean well when they register their kids for sports and manage those young athletic careers with all the seriousness of sports agents (“Help me help you!”). They do it because they love their kids and are often more than slightly worried about tomorrow. It’s the fortunate child, the thinking goes, who has even one adult concerned about her future. This is a luxury.

Still, sometimes children already know exactly what to do. They might, in fact, be our coaches. The experts say kids mostly don’t care about winning. All they want to do is play (see Playing versus performing at the end of this story).

What, then, must we do? We, the parents, we, the coaches, we, the adults.

Remember. Maybe the answer exists in the power of play.

It’s something we all might be slowly forgetting. But what if we, the adults, could collectively remember it for ourselves? What if we all stopped watching the kids and started doing?

What if adult soccer leagues filled to capacity, and Baton Rouge’s Rocketchix tripled its enrollment? If more dads went into the backyard and started throwing balls to kids, and more moms started taking their daughters to the tennis court? If Baton Rouge’s bike paths were populated by entire families, and kids sat in the stands shouting, “Go, Daddy!”

And there goes Daddy, grinning like a little kid, sunlight skittering off his sweaty brow. He remembers the right now. He knows that the lessons of life will come to him, embedded in the game. He believes in the game. He passes the wisdom of a game richly played, which has little to do with fancy uniforms, highbeam lights or winning scores, on to his children like a glimmering treasure resting in the ancient, cracked palm of a baseball glove.