Writing Boots

After all this time writing Soccer Dad and discussing it with just about every sports-parenting podcaster in the world, I think the most philosophical point I can make is: The problem with devoting your family’s whole life to children’s sports is that children’s sports isn’t worthy of your family’s whole life. I write in the book:

As a parent, it seems to me—especially one financially comfortable enough to be able to afford travel sports—your job is to introduce your kids to as wide a sampling of life’s joys as you can: people, places, art, music, books! You want to help turn your kid on to everything great in the world, don’t you?

When you get your kid involved in travel sports, the temporal, financial, spiritual, and mental commitment narrows that scope severely. Money and precious time that might have been spent in infinite explorations has disappeared into gas tanks, travel-soccer clubs’ coffers, and the income statements of Hampton Inn and Panera Breads.

And yet the way youth sports is organized these days, it’s less and less possible to meaningfully pursue any of it without that total commitment. So if you’re going to raise your human being whole, you have to make the sports thing more meaningful than just a sports thing—by consciously connecting all of it to bigger heroes, and larger themes.

For our family, many of those heroes were the members of the U.S. Women’s National Team that won the 1999 World Cup. And the central theme was a hopeful, happy, good-humored brand of—for lack of another term—feminism.

Also from Soccer Dad (an excerpt of an excerpt published this week at the excellent youth sports website YouthInc.com):

When Scout was very little—maybe six—our family happened upon a documentary about the 1999 US Women’s National Team that won the World Cup—the iconic one, when Brandi Chastain tore off her jersey after scoring the winning goal. Along with much of the nation that summer, Scout’s mom and I had watched that World Cup and been charmed by that team.

Belying its cheesy title, Dare to Dream, the film compellingly details the profound progress of women’s soccer since the US women won the 1991 World Cup in China and returned to an American-airport welcome of two or three people. In 1999, the women were selling out huge American football stadiums for their games.

In the film, the star players—Chastain, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Kristine Lilly, Briana Scurry, Michelle Akers, Joy Fawcett, Carla Overbeck—recall their bus ride to play a semifinal game at Giants Stadium in New Jersey and being bewildered by the heavy traffic they find themselves in, on a Saturday. Until it dawns on them, as Overbeck puts it in wide-eyed recollection, “Oh my gosh, all these cars are for us!”

This moment makes me cry every time I watch it.

In fact, I cry on and off throughout Dare to Dream, which our family has seen at least a dozen times, in the way some people read the Bible over and over—as a regular guide and reminder of the original purpose of this disorienting, endless project.

I cry at Dare to Dream partly because I was raised about a half a generation before the world began to see that women athletes were every bit as intensely competitive and passionate as men. The only women athletes I saw as a kid on TV were skinny little Olympic gymnasts, and tennis players like Chris Evert Lloyd, who used dainty-looking wooden tennis rackets, played in country-club skirts, and barely seemed to break a sweat. In my preppy suburban high school, the big girls’ sport was field hockey, also played in skirts—plaid, as I remember. They stooped over their short sticks, as if mopping a kitchen floor. Football, basketball, and baseball were part of boys’ identity. Field hockey, softball, and volleyball seemed designed to give girls something to do.

So to see women playing sports as necessarily intense and physical and fast and dangerous as soccer—this was an education for me. And once I had a daughter, that education became an emotional awakening, and a determination to see her express her power and strength and passion every bit as strongly as she felt them. And surely, every bit as strongly as the boys.

But I cry at Dare to Dream for another reason, too—a higher reason, and thus maybe suspect. What is clear in this movie is the love these women had for one another when they were playing—and the love they still have for one another all these years later. At one point in the middle of their run, defender Joy Fawcett had a baby; rather than let her quit the team, her teammates encouraged her to bring the baby on the road, and they all pitched in to help. The child was in so many team meetings that when she wet her pants once, she explained, “I just lost my focus.”

The women teased each other, got on each other’s nerves, shared their inside jokes. Once they saw a malaprop sign in China that read, “Don’t use panic.” So they’d yell to each other during games, “Don’t use panic!” I actually had a chance to witness this kind of female camaraderie and humor from the inside, when I played a George Plimpton gonzo-journalist role, playing pre-season quarterback on and writing about a women’s professional football team in Chicago. I was further moved by that experience, seeing the deep devotion of these women to their sport and to one another. And I laughed a lot, too, as when I asked the starting quarterback for advice and she suggested, “Stop throwing like a pussy.” Scout was very young during this episode, and she must have thought football was primarily a women’s sport, because when she saw me in uniform for the first time she shouted, “Dad! You look like a real girl!”

I realize that men on many teams love one another, too, and help one another through. I’ve heard NFL stars look back on their careers and say with teary eyes that what they miss most is the locker room and “the guys.” But something about the depth and quality of the way I’ve seen women athletes relate to each other on film and first-person seems more tender, less callous, saner—a better template than, for example, your typical men’s college basketball team or pro football team for the kind of families we want to build, communities we want to nurture, companies we’d like to work for.

Now, there is a very good chance the preceding paragraph is a great big load of sentimental claptrap, from the sort of middle-aged white man who said at fondue parties a generation ago, in order to feel and sound progressive, that we ought to put women in charge of corporations and government because they’ll make more nurturing leaders. All I can tell you is Dare to Dream moved me before I spent almost two decades observing soccer girls and sportswomen competing together and being together in hotel hallways and lobbies, at restaurants and on long car rides home. And Dare to Dream still moves me today. …

The more daring the dream, the more difficult its fulfillment and the more complicated the process and conflicting the forces at play—and so, the more essential for a higher prize on which to fix a soccer family’s eyes.

Surely this celebration of women’s sports and women’s society is not every family’s purpose. But it seems to me that every family ought to think and talk about what that purpose is, for them. I love sports. But sports for sports’ sake is doesn’t feed the soul, sports glory is fleeting and pure sporting achievement does not provide a sufficient foundation for the dynamic life we want our kids to have.

Last words on this, from Soccer Dad:

At the end of Muhammad Ali’s last brutal fight with Joe Frazier, he sat alone in his dressing room with bumps all over his battered head, repeating over and over to himself, “Why I do this? Why I do this?”

Your family will have moments like that. Long, silent drives home from early tournament losses. Periods of seemingly stalled soccer progress. Huge soccer expenses in lean years; competing, conflicting family priorities.

You’ll ask why you do this, really. And whatever the reason, your family will need to share it and revisit it frequently, to make sure it still holds true.

To soccer parents, sports parents, all parents of kids involved in demanding activities: On the occasions when you ask yourself why you do this—why do you?

Writers routinely advise one another to “kill your babies”—sacrificing favorite lines that don’t quite work. Well, you can kill ’em, or you can just blog them separately. This was the original lead for the piece I published yesterday, at ProRhetoric.com. You can tell why I liked it, and why it had to go.

It’s Sunday afternoon, after last night’s Gridiron Dinner, in Washington, D.C. I’m back home in Chicago, wondering like a snail in a bathing suit pocket after a spin cycle: What the hell was that all about?