World Cup

I was never a soccer player. I had friends that were passionate about it in high school, but I could never really understand it. Part of it was that, having a Japanese father who never watched any sports on TV, I didn't understand the language of any spectator sports, much less an obscure third world one :). No, I was equally lost at a superbowl party as I was at a world series party, although I was somewhat more at home at the latter after years of Japanese-American little league. The soccer cluelessness stemmed from an early attempt at team sports in which my friend Keith-Mako and I were enlisted in a youth soccer league. Presaging a life of conformity, I was obsessed with shirts with numbers on them (my "number shirt phase" is the term my parents use) and was pretty excited about having a number shirt from an actual team that I actually played on! The reality of the soccer team was somewhat different however. It was endless boring drills in which the coach doted on his son, a Q-tip shaped headed big toothed giant to the exclusion of all the rest of us. With the exception of the occasional disdainful look at one of us, as we ran rubber legged past the soccer ball, there wasn't much "coaching" going on. Keith and I would fabricate various ploys to get pulled out of games, like pointing squint eyed at a microdot of blood that we were frantically squeezing out of our fingers after a fall ("collapse" might be a better word). "But I'm injured!". The one thing that kept me going was the promise of the number shirt. My number shirt. Unfortunately, our number shirt delivery was somewhat delayed, and Keith and I jealously looked at our friend Justin Holcher's new jersey which he proudly wore to school several times a week. To cries of "Luckyyyyyyyy!" we coveted the fabric with little holes for breathability, the gold v-neck collar, and the shimmery blue fabric. The coup de grace was that it was reversible for when you were the home or way team. When reversed it became gold with a blue collar. It was a perfect number shirt. This was going to be awesome, and we (maybe just I; I can't speak for Keith) would endure any amount of bodily injury for them. Our own jerseys arrived later in the season amid great fanfare. The coach brought a big cardboard box to the pitch, trailed by all of us jumping and shouting. After handing the number "1" jersey to his son, the rest of us dove in and pulled ours out. The excitement quickly dissipated. These were gold and ... Black? There were no perforations for high performance. Neither were they reversible in any meaningful way. And with the dream of the perfect number shirt of my very own shattered, so ended any enthusiasm I might have for soccer and the world cup.