Glory Days

I grabbed my umbrella and stepped out of the house into the night. The breeze had never been more welcoming. The rain, coming down in sheets was being pushed along by the gale. A thunderstorm was imminent and there wasn’t a soul on the street. Just me and the silence.

I just had to get away from it all. The hysteria, expectation and insanity. You’d think that on such a night my mind would be bursting , but I felt nothing. In fact, it had been quite a while since I’d felt any emotion. My mind was a blank slate that just refused to be written upon. People kept telling me that what I was going through was natural; it was anything but. I had been sucked into a bubble that I just couldn’t burst.

Head bowed, I just walked, my sneakers diving in and out of puddles. I walked a few kilometers, two or two hundred, I’m not sure, but I was brought to a halt by the structure in front of me. On that rainy night, chest puffed out, the stadium stood tall in all its glory.. Must have been the nostalgia talking. The Old Stadium had its own soul, and if you listened closely you could hear it breathe. Victory, history, power were permanent residents in this great structure. And Bob, of course.

In a world as ephemeral and evolving as ours, you sometimes forget the beauty of permanence. Bob had been around at the arena for as long as I could remember. And sure enough, as I turned the corner, I saw the figure of the old portly groundsman, blowing his cigarette smoke into the night.

“Some evening, huh Bob?” I shouted out walking towards him

” I had a feeling you’d drop by for a visit” he replied without even stealing a glance to my side.

” Do you think you can let me inside? For old times sake?”

This time he did turn towards me, staring down at me with a glaze as intense as any.

” Do you even have to ask?” he smiled back throwing his keys at me.

” You’re a fucking legend Bob. Have I ever told you that?”

” Anything for you son” he smiled back returning to his Marlboro.

A smile is something you normally associate with happiness. But, there was a sadness in the smile I had just received from Bob. It was the type of smile you’d give a dying man telling him that it’s going to be all right. Well, I guess that retiring from a sport you’ve been playing for close to twenty years can be seen as a death of sorts.

I walked through the turnstiles past the mural that hung by the North Stand. Time hadn’t gone easy on me, my smiling face seemed almost unrecognizable.

“Walk on the grass and I’ll murder you” Bob shouted down just as I made my way in. Something just never changed, I chuckled to myself.

Walking up those stairs, I couldn’t help but think back to all those times my father used to bring me to games here. My father was a retired army Colonel living happily off his pension. On paper he might have left the army, but mentally he never did. My father loved only three things in life; his country, his red wine and football. Week after week, he’d go to watch games at the Stadium, fighting his battles vicariously through the players.

When I was born,my dad finally found a companion for his weekly visits to his ‘spiritual home’. The running joke in my family was the my dad took me straight from the hospital to the stadium. The funny part was that I wasn’t sure if they were joking. Each weekend you could be sure to find the father-son duo sitting in red behind the goal. While most other children were just about learning to walk, I was kicking footballs in the backyard. My father saw the potential in me before anyone else did. With the benefit of hindsight and little perspective, there’s no other path I could have taken.

I tore my glaze away from the stands and looked down at the track that looped around the field. Each time I look at that track, the familiar feeling of fatigue returns. I can see a 13 year old me, running lap after lap around the pitch with my father looking on from the stands. This was his way of toughening me up. I sweat buckets out there in the afternoon sun, running till my knees buckled.

While all my friends spend their weekends partying, I’d be working hard at the gym. ” Curse me now, but you’ll bless me later” he would always say. I never once rebelled or protested. More out of fear than anything. I knew that to get anywhere in life you need to make sacrifices, I just never thought that it would be my childhood.

My eyes were caught by the dugout that lies just by the track. I don’t remember much about my debut, but I know that sitting there on that bench in front of 40,000 people, I felt no nerves. I had been preparing my whole life for this. I had prepared for it just as most children my age prepared for their SAT’s. He didn’t show it that night, but I know my father was super proud that I wasn’t sitting with him behind the goal that night.

I walked over onto the North End towards the goal ( Bob was going to murder me anyways). I stopped at a spot about 25 yards from the goal, the exact place from where I hit the Championship winning goal all those years ago. It was surreal, that whole experience. That was the moment I made the transition from being seen as a ‘local boy’ by the fans to ‘legend forever’. It was the moment I became a man from boy.

Looking around the stadium, it struck me just how many memories I had made here. I had practically lived my whole life on this stretch of grass. I had been kicking a football my whole life; I knew nothing else.

In that moment of realization and surprising clarity, I couldn’t help but think about just how much I hated the sport.

I sank to my knees and completely broke down. Years of pent up frustration and anger was finally set free and god, how they galloped.

I was forced into football just because I was good at it. That isn’t a good enough reason. Why is it that just because we are good at something, then that’s what we have to pursue? Here’s the thing about potential, it’s relative and personal. The potential I see in you, might not be what you see in yourself. The potential my father saw in me wasn’t what I saw in myself.

Each training session with my father would break me physically and emotionally. What my father didn’t realize that it wasn’t always sweat that fell from my face, more often than not it was tears too. My father considered emotion an irrelevant human faculty, so displaying them to him would have had no effect. “Curse me now, bless me later”. Turns out, I did neither.

Of course, I felt happiness each time I did well on the field, but it was the perfunctory type of happiness. I’d spent my whole life bringing happiness to everyone but myself. In the sport of life, I had cheated myself.

If we’re lucky, we find one passion in our lifetime. I wasn’t given a chance to find mine as football imposed itself on me. Before I even had the chance to spread my wings, they were cut off .

If I achieved so much success in something I didn’t even like, then what might have I achieved pursuing my passion. This is a thought that scares the daylights out of me and is a reason for so much sorrow.

I cried my heart out that night. I cried like I’d never cried, I cried till I could cry no more. I cried, not because I was saying goodbye, but because I had to wait so long to say it.