The Problem With "Sportsball"
Long lazy days, cool breezy nights, day-trips to the beach, music festivals, food festivals, beer festivals, picnics held in the blazing countryside, a glass of wine gleaming with the light of the setting sun. Summer has come to Europe. Among the many things which this season brings, one of them is the conclusion of the football (soccer, if you prefer) season. This time of year often kindles the ashes of my dormant interest in the beautiful game. I feel the tug of nostalgia pulling at the sleeve of my soul. I remember watching matches with my father. I remember the frustration, the sense of injustice, the nerves, and, every so often, the joy of supporting the Azzurri, the Italian national team. Yes, I confess: I was once a “sportsball” aficionado.
When I was a child and teenager, I used to play all sorts of sports. I was never very good at most of them, to be honest, but that didn’t hold me back, and, if I may be so bold, I was pretty good at street hockey. I would spend hours outside, swerving on my roller-blades, hockey stick in hand, until the dusk became darkness and there was nothing left to do but trudge back home, my feet tingling with the sensation of gliding over the asphalt. I plied my hands at tennis, but not nearly as often as I would have liked. It’s a hard sport to play by yourself. I’ve always been an avid swimmer, having first taken lessons when I was not even in double-digits. I took up running in my early twenties, then, after moving to Spain, I discovered the excellent sport of padel. Around the same age, early twenties, I started getting into weight-lifting. Not too long ago, I joined a Muay Thai gym and became obsessed with that martial art. Sadly, due to Covid restrictions and the cowardice of the gym owner, my experience with Muay Thai was short lived. No matter what sport occupies my time, however, football (soccer) has been ever present in my life.
My first exposure to football, especially to calcio, occurred when I was just a toddler and during a stay in Italy, a friend of the family gifted me an AC Milan kit and an Italian national team kit, both complete with the shorts and socks. I loved those uniforms: the alluring, infernal combination of Milan’s red and black stripes, the tranquil Savoy blue of the Nazionale’s shirt garnished with the tricolore of the Italian flag. In comparison to what American sports uniforms were like, these Italian football outfits seemed so different. There was a pageantry to them, something almost like medieval heraldry. Nobody back home in the American midwest would have anything like this, I thought, and rightly so. I wore those Milan and Italy shirts well into my adolescence and many were the times when people would be so intrigued by my apparel that they couldn’t help ask me about it. In those days, especially in the rural parts of Illinois, knowledge about European football was pretty low and football shirts hadn’t yet become fashionable streetwear.
To watch European football on American television was a rare opportunity, especially if you wanted to watch any league that wasn’t English. Or at least it was rare in my house, where we didn’t have the cable or satelite television which offered a portal to the world of international channels. This served to add to the mystique and allure of football, of calcio. Being a Milan and Italy tifoso was like being in my own special club. Members: 2, my dad and me. While everyone I knew played American football or basketball, and directed their interest and devotion to those professional sports, I sat silent, pleased that they had no idea that there was a sport more epic and more passionate than they could imagine. But I knew. I knew. Later on, when I moved to a public high school with an enormous student body, which had the infamous reputation of being one of the most violent and rumoured to have the highest percentage of teenage mothers, the membership of my club increased. Being a football fan and a player on the school team gave me the opportunity to make friends with the Bosnians and Croatians who had fled to America during the Balkan Wars. If it hadn’t been for football, my brief spell in that public school would have been truly nightmarish, but I was able to find a clique in which to integrate myself and bonded with them thanks to our affinity for the beautiful game. We will return to the importance and utility of sport as a means of forging a community later.
Not being able to watch and follow my favourite team and the Nazionale created a void which I attempted to fill by putting on a pair of boots and playing the game myself. If I couldn’t watch my favourite players, I would become a player myself. Alas, I wasn’t very good and American soccer, while ubiquitous at the youth level, isn’t exactly the best teacher if you want to learn and improve as a player, at least not 20 odd years ago. It was more like a recreational activity, a pastime, a social outing.