Addicted to Soccer
~1500 words. 7 minute read.
It is sometimes easy to forget, especially now during the middle stanza of life, the periods during which I was fully immersed in an activity, especially when that activity is no longer part of me, or (if anything) exists at the outermost fringes of my life.
Exhibit A: Soccer. Standing on a step stool to reach the handles of the foosball table, watching my brother playing ‘MicroProse Soccer’ on the Atari (and eventually beating him in ‘Kick-Off’), and feverishly following World and European Cups – all those must be among my earliest childhood memories. I remember thinking that the world was ending when I went to bed, crying (I was five) after Germany had lost the 1986 World Cup Final in Mexico City to Argentina. The image of Jorge Burruchaga sliding the ball past Toni Schumacher into the German net is still burned into my mind. I remember thinking that a) Lothar Matthäus messed up the man-to-man coverage of Diego Maradona, whose pass enabled Burrachaga’s breakaway and b) that Schumacher had committed too early and was way too far out of the German goal. I was five – I hope you understand what I mean by ‘immersion’!
The beaten-up soccer pitch close to our house in Luxembourg played host to many games with my Dad and my brother. Those games invariably concluded with me being upset, angry, or sad – because the game didn’t go my way, but more often than not because it was time to stop playing and go home for dinner. The fact that I always ruined the playful, fun atmosphere at the end of the game made my Dad frequently announce that, if we couldn’t enjoy the game, we wouldn’t be playing anymore.
Fast-forward to the glory days of club soccer at the small but fine organization ‘SKV Rot-Weiss Darmstadt’ during my teenage years. Practice was three times a week, summer and winter, matches and tournaments on the weekends, and on the days that we had no organized team activities, we met and played pickup games for hours.
I remember riding my bike to and from practice, which meant that during the winter months I was riding my bike for about 2.5 miles through freezing temperatures, in the dark, through a dense gloomy forest, without a cell phone. These days, as I fight to burn calories on the Peloton Treadmill, I realize that I must have burned over 1000 calories a day during my soccer-playing days.
Our coach was dedicated to the team’s success and planned pre-season training camps in the mountains, conditioning programs, and classroom sessions on tactics, video analysis, etc. No other team at our level underwent this kind of soccer education. The results spoke for themselves. Every year, we climbed up to a higher-tiered league until, eventually, we played against youth teams from Bundesliga clubs, like Eintracht Frankfurt. Scouts started to attend our games and a few of our best players were recruited to play for more prestigious clubs. Alas, I was not in the pool of our best players, but more importantly, I always had a ceiling built into my athletic career. That ceiling was Mom and Dad. Any activity that became consuming enough to threaten my focus on school and academia was trimmed back, which meant that at some point I couldn’t compete for spots in the starting eleven, and my ‘retirement’ from soccer became imminent.
I was able to make one final statement in my soccer career before I hung up my cleats for good. From 1997 to 1999 I attended the German School in Thessaloniki, Greece. It was at the annual athletics event for which German schools from that region of the world (Athens, Sofia, Istanbul) sent teams competing in various disciplines: Volleyball, Basketball, Track, and of course Soccer. The Soccer Tournament Final was the climactic conclusion of the whole event. For years, the German School in Athens had been dominating this tournament, but in 1998 our team was an All-Star selection of kids who had been playing at competitive levels all their lives. It just so happened that the German School Thessaloniki had built brand-new venues the year before and was hosting the event as an inauguration of our new facilities. We established an early lead in front of our home crowd: a header by my closest friend at the time, following a free kick that I bent from about 30 yards out into the box. We had to withstand an avalanche of attacks by the Athenians, who were painfully aware they were being dethroned, and who would have loved to spoil our party.
The final whistle sent everyone running onto the field – we had won by a score of 1-0. After the chaos and cheering began to subside, the coach gathered the team in a quiet corner behind the gym. It wasn’t until he struggled to get the words out, a tear rolling down his cheek from under his sunglasses, that the monumentality of the moment dawned on me.
I turned my athletic efforts into an entirely new sport during my college years and started to play hockey. But out of the countless matches and tournaments I played over the years, I like to remember the victory in Greece as the conclusion to a beautiful, formative, and immersive addiction.
