Notes From My Knapsack 4-22-07
Jeff Gill

Enjoying the Beautiful Game

Soccer is still not to the taste of all native-born Midwesterners. Not enough equipment, rare and glancing impacts, very few points: these all work against soccer in the minds of some.

The Little Guy is a fan and a player, if still more of an entomologist and botanist than aggressive forward. Five years after his first soccer league, he’s moved past having Dad as coach (and a good thing), and there are actual keepers (goalies, some say) guarding the net.

I’m still trying to figure out exactly what makes an offsides call, which is scary because my first exposure to soccer other than an export of Brazil in social studies class was to be a soccer ref.

It was a new sport for my hometown, where football and basketball had long reigned supreme, and all four of the high school guys who got hired to ref soccer for 5th and 6th graders knew nothing, except for the Belgian exchange student, who taught us all we needed to know about corner kicks, throw-ins (keep your feet on the ground), and the mysterious yellow and red cards.

He didn’t tell us enough about offsides to stick, though it looks something like icing in hockey, which I’ve never understood either. But plenty of smart people don’t follow the intricacies of the infield fly rule, so I can’t let it bother me.

During our recent seasonably unseasonable weather (for an Ohio April), the team practiced cheerfully, but the home practice suffered. Outdoors, anyhow.

We compensated by putting in extra time on one of the most fascinating aspects of the video game industry I’ve yet seen. Right, right, you don’t play (or don’t let your kids play them), but do you know that not all video games involve shootings and explosions and pixilated gore?

FIFA Street is a video game soccer program. There’s a Madden-labeled football game, and the NBA has a basketball offering that approaches what I’m talking about. FIFA is the international soccer body, overseeing things like the every-four-years World Cup, and they have approved a legit soccer video game on green grass and many players.

But they also have released FIFA Street, where you travel the world, playing soccer under highway overpasses in New York City, in the favelas of Rio, and by the docks of Marseilles, in a four-on-four street league with major players from around the world.

The level of play, and the strategy of field and body positioning that comes across in a TV set and the standard hand controller, is amazing. You fake the ball around a defender, kick passes high or low, bop headers into the middle, and score on roundhouse kicks while falling gracefully backwards onto the pavement.

Meanwhile, police cars cruise by, carry-out delivery guys on bicycles pedal past, and locals hang onto the mesh fencing and talk amongst themselves while the eight players dash and dive on the makeshift pitch.

My computer days are medieval, and my last real programming was on a Commodore 64 (well, a bit on a 128), but I still hold in my mind’s eye the sub-structure of all this. Graphical interfaces built on programming tools assembled from machine languages comprised of hexadecimal spun out of the ones and zeroes of binary.

Deep within this delightful version of what all the rest o’ the world calls “the beautiful game” is a data tool scanning myriad on and off switches. That’s all. But work up through those layers, and you have a son and father learning from and between each other how to play soccer a bit better.

There is little more I can add about shooting and shooters and violence and grief, except that we can all have less of it in our lives, even if we cannot avoid it. Guns and explosions and death does not have to be our entertainment, and we can pluck it as aggressively as we do the dandelions.

And the dandelions do us much less harm. So let’s avoid our tendency to look for extreme answers and mass exclusions, and just choose our activities and amusements with care. Get out and kick it around with the kids, and find the ways inside the hosue where you can keep things interesting without detonations and demolition.

But I’ll warn you: FIFA Street is way too much fun (plus you learn some geography), so schedule all the outdoor time you can first, and leave the gaming to after sunset.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and a retired soccer coach and referee (by popular demand). Tell him about some of your favorite family activities at knapsack77@gmail.com.