United

1. 1. You’re Paddy Crerand?

I was ten years old when I found out I was not the lone Patrick Crerand in this world. My family had just moved from Xenia, Ohio to Columbus in October of 1987, missing the start of my fifth grade year by about two months. I walked into the school on the first day introducing myself as PC to anyone who would listen.

“The empty desk next to you is for another newcomer named Simon,” my teacher said.

“He’s Irish and broke his collarbone,” someone said to me as if the two had been of equal importance.

Unlike me, Simon had gotten here on time and hurt himself playing a slide-tackling game on a hill at recess. When he finally returned from the hospital, we became fast friends.

The first time I went to his house to play soccer, his father, Joe, a salt-and-peppered haired Belfaster, didn’t believe me when I introduced myself.

“Go on now,” he said. “You’re fooling. There’s only one Paddy Crerand.”

I didn’t know what to do. Up until this point, I had always figured my name would go the distance. I’d be the first to make my mark on the world, which probably involved being famous for something or maybe playing professional soccer. So long as the other Paddy Crerand hadn’t done either, I figured, we could co-exist.

“How do you know him?” I asked.

“Well, everyone knows him,” Joe said. “He’s famous.”

“Oh,” I said. “Famous for what?”

“He’s a footballer for Manchester United. He only won the Euro Cup with the best team they ever fielded.”

“Oh,” I said again.

“You’re Paddy Crerand?” he said, looking at me.

“Yes,” I said.

“No,” he said.

But I was. The problem of course was that I had to take his word for it. My own father had heard rumors of such a cousin, though that was back in the 1960s when he had visited his grandfather’s small farmhouse in Donegal. No one had a picture though. They didn’t even have running water in the house.

 

 

2. 2.Man… United

For the most part, this blow to the ego would have subsided had the internet not been invented. In 1997, I was working in a state government office in Ohio as a college intern. We had one computer hooked up to the internet, and, because I was young, they gave that computer to me. All day long, I fielded requests to look up photos or plane reservations or maps for the office workers who weren’t allowed to have the internet in their own offices for the suspected and very prescient fear it would disrupt productivity. They all had email, just no surfing abilities.

During those early, pre-Google days, everyone took a special glee in looking stuff up on-line since people were creating new pages daily. I was still carrying around my email inbox on a floppy disk, so remembering something to search for and finding it was a real joy, though frustrating since those aggregate sites were spotty. At some point, I entered my last name into the search bar of Lycos or AltaVista and up came a picture of the man himself, the first I had ever seen: a black and white photo of him playing in a game, kicking a ball downfield to someone on the 1968 Manchester United team. I printed it out on the copier and taped it up on the grey cubicle felt wall. The angle of photo along with the angle of his kicking leg created quite a bulge in his white shorts, luring the office gossips, Halina and Rachel. They were always joking with me and stopped by to comment.

“Who is this strapping lad?” Halina asked.

“That’s the other Patrick Crerand,” I said. “My cousin who played for Man United.”

“Impressive uniform,” Rachel said.

“Very impressive,” Halina added.

“Would you say he was a big player for Man United?” Rachel asked.

“Yeah,” I said, clueless. “Pretty big.”

“Popular with the ladies, I bet, too,” Halina added.

“I guess,” I said.

“I bet,” Rachel said.

It wasn’t until their boss Al blurted out, “Who’s the dude with the giant wang on your wall,” that I took the photo down, much to Al’s chagrin.

“Shit, if my cousin was carrying that kind of a hog,” Al said, “I’d tack it to my door, too. I hope you got those genes!”

 

3. 3. Be Aggressive

When I was five, I played rec league soccer in Xenia. We practiced in what was basically our coach’s massive front yard on his estate that included a nearby landing strip for his plane. His name was Mr. West and together with his Brazilian assistant, he often parachuted down to our field. I don’t know what Mr. West did for a living, but he had a lot of money and seemed to be the embodiment of American capitalism. With his neat gray beard and dark squinty eyes, he looked a little like the Dos Equis spokesman. As a coach, pilot, skydiving enthusiast, and entrepreneur, Mr. West’s lone instruction was to “be aggressive.” He never explained what this meant, so we each carried our own private definition of the word. For some it meant “run hard.” Others “kick hard.” I noticed he gritted his teeth in a mock smile after he said it, so a big part of me thought being aggressive had something to do with smiling, or that the seat of aggression was in the lips or teeth. In the middle of the game if he said it to me, often I would just keep on doing whatever it was I was doing and then put his strained expression on my face, which made my mom ask if I had to go to the bathroom at halftime. My own father was tall and broad shouldered but not a sport enthusiast. He taught me how to throw a ball, but it was a real struggle to get him outside to do anything physical or competitive. He was a language teacher, so I could have asked him what the word meant, but West had repeated it so often, part of me thought it would just sink in through sheer repetition. It never did.

The real reason West wanted me on the team revealed itself in the off-season of soccer when he called my mother repeatedly to convince her to let me be a fullback on the pee-wee football team he coached. I was a short, stout kid, barrel-chested for my age and exactly the right shape to block linebackers for a more agile and fast kid—namely West’s son—to run behind. It’s one of the more thankless and no doubt concussion-prone positions in football, and my mother always said no. Football scared her. But West could see what I was more clearly than my mother or I ever could. If I were to have a future in sport, that was my role.

 

4. 4. Jesus is a Red

What West wanted is what the other Paddy Crerand was: a hard-scrabble kid born in an impossibly tough neighborhood in Glasgow called The Gorbals. It was the kind of place where a kitten would scratch your eye out for a dram of cream. When Paddy was a boy, his father died in a Luftwaffe air-raid bombing while working in one of the shipyard factories on the river Clyde. Soccer and a stern, belt-wielding mother kept young Paddy from the twin potholes of life in post-war Scotland, mainly thievery and drinking and drunken thievery.

As a Catholic son of Irish immigrants living in Protestant Scotland, he made his first splash with the Catholic team Celtic in Glasgow in the late 1950s. Back then everything in Scotland and Ireland could be divided by the subtle religious differences of Catholicism and Protestantism, even football teams. Most Scottish teams would sign or not sign players based on their religious affiliation, including the two main teams in Glasgow, Celtic and Rangers FC. When Simon’s father said he was a fan of Manchester United—though they were not exclusively affiliated with the Catholic church in any way—because they pulled players from Celtic, they became a favorite of Northern Ireland’s Catholics in the sectarian hotbed of Belfast. Manchester United’s crosstown rivals, Manchester City, recruited primarily from Celtic’s Protestant rivals, Rangers, as if transubstantiation or the veneration of Christ’s mother ever factored into how well eleven men could kick a leather ball into a net. It only meant something to the fans. To his credit, Paddy Crerand, though fervently Catholic, saw the divide as a way to simply turn the working poor of Scotland, England, and Ireland against each other. He had good friends on Rangers and Celtic alike. During Thatcher’s Tory stronghold, he spoke out on behalf of miners and during the troubles in Northern Ireland repeatedly.

Crerand was part of a renaissance at Man United in the early 1960s after the Munich Air disaster killed eight players on the team in 1958. The manager, Matt Busby, hand-picked a group of young, tough players including the holy trinity of Man United lore: Denis Law, Bobby Charlton, and teenage Georgie Best, a young protestant striker from Northern Ireland, who shattered the Catholic-only fervor of the fan base but won over any detractors with his scoring wizardry and playboy lifestyle. The Catholic Crerand was the Protestant Best’s defender on and off the field. But he could never save Best from himself. In 2005, Best died at age 59 from complications of alcoholism. Being a devout Protestant, a consummate charmer, and a slippery mark, Best has no doubt sneaked past any purgatorial velvet rope outside paradise. Today the Man United fans in Old Trafford chant, Going up to the spirit in the sky, where I’m going to go when I die, when I die and they lay me to rest, I’m gonna go on the piss with Georgie Best!  

 

5. 5. Never Turn the Other Cheek

On the team, Crerand was known for his tenacity and passing, not his pace. Denis Law said he only had two speeds: dead slow and full stop. But he certainly must have been faster than he looked to have started on the team. On the old Pathé Film reels, the game’s pace is incredibly slow compared to the modern attack-centric philosophies most defensive players have adopted today. The reason for the hesitancy back then is from the brutality dished out by most of the defenders who thought nothing of breaking an ankle or throwing an elbow at an opposing player mostly under the blind eye of the referee. Players were more replaceable then. Paddy earned 45£ a week plus an extra pound if the crowd surpassed 30,000 at Old Trafford. Today’s best players can make a million a game, more with endorsements—where the real money is. Though certainly Best, Charlton, Law, and Crerand became household names, none of them transformed into brands that could attain the relentlessly meteoric marketability of a modern player like Cristiano Ronaldo, who makes several times their lifetime earnings combined simply by clicking the heart icon on a sponsored Twitter or Instagram post.

After Manchester United won the European Championship in 1968, Crerand played for a few more seasons before retiring in 1971. I took my first breath six years later. He coached for a little while, and then settled down, owning a pub outside Manchester, and eventually shifted into a color-commentator role, first on radio and then on the internet, and later as part of a Man U TV programming line-up to support and nourish the flames of their rabid fanbase, chronicled in head-stomping detail in Bill Buford’s book Among the Thugs. On his call-in show, Paddy often wears loud and colorful sweaters, “Cosby jumpers,” his fans label them. At one point there was even a Facebook page dedicated to pictures of the sweaters “to honour the lack of fashion sense shown every week by Paddy and in truth the appreciation of his one of a kind jumpers that have become part of Manchester United’s folk law.”

Crerand’s temper and ferocity followed him on and off the pitch. He was the embodiment of aggression, never backing down from a fight. A fan favorite, he earned more red cards than goals. Once, he decked a British soldier outside a Manchester nightclub, defending the privacy of a very drunk Georgie Best. Old age has not mellowed him. On television, he is beloved for his cantankerous wit. He often rails against Tories and hooliganism, and in favor of unions, sectarian unity, and stout defending. Still, his temper gets the best of him. A few years ago, according to the papers, he attacked a motorist with a golf club after a fender-bender. He wrote an autobiography entitled, Never Turn the Other Cheek. Anytime I google myself, I have to wade through all of it before finding myself.

I never had the guts to play soccer in high school. Never even tried out for the team despite wanting to. My high school, though quite small, had won the state title twice in Ohio in the 80s and were on the ascendency again when I was a freshman. At tryouts, I got too intimidated by the kids who played on the best club and travel teams in Ohio. Nearly the entire starting varsity side went on to play in college. One even hoisted the college national championship trophy with Indiana University and later played for the Dallas Burn in the MLS. Instead of playing, I was the team videographer. We went to the state finals the year I taped the games. Even though we were good, sometimes I’d get bored during a game and pretend there was an earthquake. The head coach grew infuriated with me for ruining the game film and cut me from my off-field position the next season.

 

6. 6. Eleven as One

Unlike the rest of the world, soccer in America is a rich kids’ sport. The tournament fees and travel run in the thousands. The custom uniforms alone can cost over a hundred dollars. My parents didn’t have that kind of money, and I didn’t possess anything resembling talent or real drive to warrant the cost. I played rec league and developed decent skills. None of my coaches ever looked at my name nor my body and said, that boy’s going pro.

Growing up in Xenia, kids cared about shoe brands, but in Columbus for the first time in my life someone asked me what brand my jean jacket was. They didn’t need to ask. Only one answer was acceptable: Levis. You could tell Levis made it by the rectangular burnt umber threads outlining the label centered in the yoke of the jacket. Quickly, I was brought up to speed about Ralph Lauren being the best brand for shirts and how girls with Liz Claiborne purses were doing something right—the not so subtle semiotics of wealth that had never quite disrupted my life living outside of a city but now had become an obsession. By the time I was in high school, I didn’t try out for the soccer team partly because I didn’t have the same kind of shoes as the other kids on the team: Adidas Copa Mundials with the leather tongue you could fold down over the shoestrings. My parents said, first make the team, then we’ll talk about new shoes. But what I had learned, what I wanted to say was, you weren’t you anymore unless you were wearing somebody else. And I needed to be that other person to make the team.

Before the big television rights came over to the U.S. or we hosted the World Cup, the rec league teams I played on in Columbus called themselves the Crusaders or the Avengers—nicknames not quite good enough for American football teams, names disconnected from the land we played on or the city where we lived. Of course, Ohio has some of the worst names in sports. Our pro-football teams are named for a man, Paul Brown, and an endangered Indian apex-predator more at home on the Ganges than the Ohio River. The biggest college team, Ohio State, has a poisonous tree nut for a mascot. When the Major League Soccer team started in Columbus, they choose The Crew for its alliterative ring. The first iconography of the brand featured men in hard hats against the backdrop of the city. What construction has to do with soccer or Columbus was and remains baffling to me, but no one was watching the MLS for its catchy nicknames.

Almost all British and European clubs are simply named for cities. The reason many British clubs use the name “United” came about during the early days of football when several professional club teams would combine to form a new team in a city that already had claimed the name of the city itself. Every “United” today started with at least two different teams, sometimes more.

There is no United more famous than the team in Manchester, though. They boast one of the largest cash reserves, buy the flashiest players, and kick-off home games to sold out crowds in a stadium nicknamed by Paddy’s teammate Bobby Charlton, “The Theater of Dreams.” They are one of the biggest brands in the world. But like Walt Whitman, every “United” contradicts itself and contains multitudes. Often assembling the best starting eleven rarely makes for one cohesive team. Though they were once known for their blistering offensive imagination, now they plod along and cling to one goal leads. The fans in the Stretford end of Old Trafford sing of the glory years and hoisting trophies, but they haven’t won a big championship in a decade. The most famous team in England is owned by an American family who also own one of the worst NFL teams, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the city where I live.

 

7. 7. The Gorbals of Columbus

During my junior year of high school, for service hours, I coached an under-eight team for a youth center in Linden, a rough neighborhood down the road from where the MLS team, the Columbus Crew, would later play at the Ohio state fairgrounds. My team was entirely black and poor, products of the moribund neighborhood they lived in. Only one kid had played before, an all-around athlete named Ron who sometimes came right from a football practice to play with us. My qualifications for being coach were watching the 1994 World Cup obsessively, attending a soccer-crazy high school, and being available at the practice times. I had little effect on anyone on the field apart from angering the father of my two Somali players. The Somali boys spoke no English but could trap and pass with a fair bit of skill. Often their father would stand on the sidelines and scowl at me, shouting at the kids in Somali, waving his hand dismissively at me when I had them run wind sprints or scrimmage.

My lone strategy for the game was for the two Somalis to pass the ball to Ron and then to let Ron dribble through the opposing team, which he could do pretty much at will. Ron was quiet and tall for his age. He was one of those kids who smiled instead of complained. On his football team, he was the star running back who often went untouched on his way to the end zone. He juked, froze, ducked under, and leaped over defenders.

Linden was one of those neighborhoods like The Gorbals that Paddy Crerand would have understood well. It wasn’t going to let you go. It was riddled with gangs and drugs and violence. You had to fight to escape. Its most famous resident was Buster Douglas, the heavyweight boxer who had knocked out Iron Mike Tyson, but even he eventually moved back, a shadow of his former self. Football in Linden for young boys made sense as an escape because it, too, was violent, and so parents took the game seriously, cheering wildly on the field as their sons’ helmets clacked dully off one another. Often Ron missed practice or the beginnings of games due to football. Soccer made no sense to them at all. A few parents showed up for the games but mostly they were quiet affairs played on a field lined every ten yards. The lone highlight was watching Ron lace through a defense with the ball at his feet where he wore generic brand football cleats.

 

8. 8. Red Devil

Crerand was the king of misdirection on the field. He’d get his opponent looking one way and then steer a ball in on the diagonal behind the defender to a surging Charlton or Best who finished with a clinical touch. No-look passes, skip overs, long hard runs down the line, soft crosses perfectly weighted for a header. At his finest, he saw the game quicker and better than his man, found lanes where none seemed to exist, created space by drawing defenders and releasing the artists who played ahead of him. He was a scrapper and never made it look easy. The field was always covered in muck, and hardly a photo exists of him without a stain on the back of his white shorts from slide tackling. Every ball contested, dug out from the ground or another leg, studs first. None of the Brazilian sweetness or the Spanish brilliance, but a cheekiness, a wit without the flare or finesse, but bold, a directness. His runs had power but not grace. The consummate player’s player, he made the best look better. At some point during Crerand’s playing days, Matt Busby started calling his team “The Red Devils” to replace their former and less threatening nickname of the Busby Babes, a comment on the youthful nature of that tragic team lost in the Munich Air crash. Eventually the Red Devils name stuck so that now the team badge features a horned incubus holding a pitchfork underneath the triple masts of a red river schooner.

When I started teaching college in Florida, the other creative writer on staff—a gifted writer, Buddhist and bon vivant—named Kurt renamed me Paddy. Kurt was my father’s age, tall and gaunt, a Navy pilot’s kid who grew up in the Canary Islands, Germany, the Bahamas, and New York City. Nearly every day, he’d walk down the hallway of my office and announce his presence by saying, “Paddy-man, Paddy-man, Paddy-man” before checking in with me to see how I was doing. He’d gone to school in Northern England, so when the English Premier League games began airing consistently on cable television, we’d meet sometimes and watch them. He loved Manchester United but being an over-sensitive soul, he couldn’t bring himself to call them the Red Devils.

One day Kurt came down to my office and told me he didn’t feel like himself. For months, he’d been hiding a lack of dexterity, an inability to button his shirts or type on a keyboard correctly. He said he felt dizzy, like he’d lost his equilibrium. He spoke with a slur. I told him to wait there. I ran to get my car thinking he might be having a stroke. The hospital was a few miles away, so I drove him. When we arrived in the ER, the nurses seemed unconcerned. I watched as he fumbled with his wallet. I had to put it in his back pocket for him. They told him that it was probably anxiety, not a stroke, and took him back and ran some tests and an MRI. He was lucid. He put his hand up to the back of his head. “I feel something there,” he said, gesturing to above his ear. “Something bad right there.”

The nurse and doctor shrugged it off. They’d heard him say he was a poet, excused him for being overly-dramatic. About a half hour later, the doctor returned ashen-faced with the results from the MRI: a mass the size of a tennis ball in the exact spot Kurt had pointed to.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “It has to come out immediately to relieve the pressure.” He wouldn’t say if it was cancerous or not. It was a rural hospital and there was no way to be sure from the image without a biopsy, but his face knew. It was a glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer with a high mortality rate.

That Christmas, after two brain surgeries, I bought Kurt a Man United scarf. I went to his house near the school and sat next to him in bed as he faded in and out of consciousness, watching United’s new signing, Anthony Martial, surge down the field. Man United had been going through a rebuilding period after their coach Sir Alex Ferguson had retired and were shadows of their formers selves. At the end of the century they had lifted the biggest trophies in England and Europe and one season had completed a treble championship of the English Premier League, the English Football Association, and the European Championship. Sir Alex had bested all the records set by the early team that Crerand played on and Busby managed. A Scotsman who had taken the field with Glasgow’s protestant team, Rangers FC, Ferguson was known for the toughness of his defense and the creativity of his offensive players. Like Busby, he drew from a talented pool of young players and created a juggernaut led by David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, and Roy Keane. But now, my friend grunted at the television as the upstart team from Leicester came back from three goals down to win the game in the final five minutes with a smash and grab goal from their striker, Jamie Vardy. The loss dropped United out of the top half of the league table, a terrible showing for a team bathed in accolades, money, and trophies.

“Not our season,” my friend kept saying, holding my hand and the scarf he’d wrapped around his own. “Next season,” he said, though I could see in his eyes that he knew he wouldn’t be there to watch them with me.

After he died, his wife gave me back the scarf I had bought for him. I folded it so just the team name shows and not the badge.

 

9. 9. Charlie Means Manly

Before my son was born, my wife and I spent nine months talking about what we should name him. We decided not to find out the gender of the baby prior to the birth, so we had a long list of names in case it was a girl or a boy. Nurses, friends, and strangers alike were disappointed we didn’t know, but often it gave them a chance to guess, like my wife’s belly was some sort of prize at a fair or a crystal ball to gaze into. It would be the last good surprise, we joked with each other. For girls we thought about Penelope, Lucy, Evelyn, but for boys we quickly settled on Charlie. My wife liked the name because we had once lived in Louisiana and driven past Lake Charles often, and it reminded her of our first adventures together living there when I was in graduate school. I liked the name for the most Irish reason of all: I had been to Ireland once and seen it etched on a grave. That Charlie Crerand was my father’s second cousin whom he had met when he traveled to Donegal during Paddy’s playing days in the late 60s. Charlie was his affable tour guide of the family farm then, and when we went back for a family reunion in the 90s, everyone was sad to report that Charlie had passed. Still they regaled us with stories of his generosity and charm. Paddy knew this Charlie as well and often visited and arranged for him to travel to Manchester to see games. Charlie had lived a good long life, but part of the reason everyone was sad was that they thought Charlie would have been able to convince Paddy to come to the Crerand reunion there in Kilmacrennan. Instead, Paddy sent his regards in a letter. Everybody loved Charlie though, and it seemed right that since one Charlie had departed, another one should enter the world. My wife said she knew she was having a boy and would greet him by his name every night when she showered. When he was born, his eyes were wide open as if the whole world were a surprise. Even the nurses laughed at him taking in the labor and delivery room.

“Will you name him after yourself?” the delivery nurse asked me. The thought had never crossed my mind. As they cleaned my newborn son and put him under the heating lamp, I leaned over and whispered his name in his ear, as my father had done for me.

A week later, on our first visit to the pediatrician, on-edge and near delirious from lack of sleep, the doctor, a kind-faced Indian man named Dr. Jacob, gave me some clutch advice as I nervously held my son.

“Babies,” he said, “are incredibly resilient. You could drop one from the top of the building and they’d survive. You really can’t do anything to hurt them.” He took Charlie from me and laid him down on the examination table, stretching out my son’s long legs to mark the paper at the end of his heel with a pen for a measurement.

“He’s tall,” he said. “Good strong kicks, too. Charlie’ll be scoring goals before you know it.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“It’s a good name,” he said, then he asked how to pronounce my last name.

“Unusual,” he said.

“It’s Irish,” I said.

“Ah,” he said.

“Yours is unusual as well,” I said. There were two doctors with the last name Jacob at the practice, both Indian and both around the same age. I asked if he was related or married to the other one.

“No,” he said. He explained his family came from Kerala, a section of India on the southwestern coast where it is thought St. Thomas the Apostle preached. It was home to a very small population of Catholics who typically took a saint’s name for a surname.

“There’s a bunch of Keralans with last names like Thomas, Paul, and Jacob, but they’re all different families under one saint’s name. None of us are related. The other Dr. Jacob is just a coincidence.”

 

10. 10. No Tricks, No Treats

Ten years later, Charlie loves soccer now, but it’s not Manchester United he cheers for. The season the game grabbed him, Harry Kane’s team Tottenham Hotspur—the North London club and perennial ne’er-do-wells of the Premier League—stole his heart. When I told him my maternal grandmother’s surname was Kane, that sealed it for him. Instantly he spoke of Harry as if they were cousins, as if the name Kane were as rare as his own.

He played his first rec league game in the very Protestant sounding and affluent ex-urb of Tampa called Wesley Chapel. I wished I could have watched him with the dispassion that my own father had for the game when watching me, but I quickly found myself shouting encouragement from the sidelines with an intensity that borders on insanity. “Be aggressive!” I screamed. “Go to the ball!” Sometimes he stared at me from the field with a blank look on his face, perhaps trying to understand what I was shouting. Sometimes I feared the blank look meant he didn’t recognize me, this new person I had become on the sideline.

The week before Charlie started playing, I took him back to Dr. Jacob for a sports physical.

“What sport are you playing?” Dr. Jacob asked.

“Soccer,” Charlie said.

“Are you a soccer fan?” he asked.

“Yes,” Charlie said.

“I just got back from watching a match,” Dr. Jacob said.

“What team?” I asked.

“There’s only one team,” he said. “Glory, glory, Man United!” he sang. “The reds are marching on.”

I smiled.

“Our cousin played for that team!” Charlie said.

“What was his name?” Dr. Jacob asked.

“My name,” I said. “Patrick Crerand.”

Dr. Jacob smiled, shrugged, and went on with the physical.

Two weeks later, I saw his face pop up, haggard and sleep-deprived, during a television press conference during the local nightly news. On screen, a Polk County sheriff named Grady Judd announced a huge bust of a drug prostitution house a half-hour from where we lived. They had arrested a few underage prostitutes, but most were older, dour-faced women with missing teeth from using meth. Judd, a known gadfly, made a real show of highlighting the johns, including one of his own deputies and two prominent doctors from Tampa, including our Dr. Jacob. The operation happened near Halloween, so Judd dubbed the sting, “No Tricks, No Treats.” At first, my wife and I didn’t believe it. Dr. Jacob had been our doctor for all three of our children since Charlie was born. We had appointments with him for my daughter, Genevieve, and my son, Jude, that same month. We had spoken of his wife and children, his work volunteering for Catholic charities at free clinics in the Caribbean. But there on the arrest record was his full name under his photo.

By Christmas, the other Dr. Jacob in the practice changed her name so that patients wouldn’t confuse her for the other one. The announcement on the practice’s automated phone message repeated the similarities in last names were only a coincidence.

 

11. 11. Untied

This year Charlie is playing his first season with the competitive team in a nearby town, much poorer and rural. It’s the kind of place people call “old Florida,” which means it’s not near a beach and is overrun with trailers instead of strip malls. When you move there, to fit in, you either have to lose a tooth or get a pit bull. Luckily, the team is mostly Hispanic and the coach delivers speeches in two languages, English for the white kids and Spanish for the rest.

Charlie still hesitates sometimes on the field, waiting for a player to make a move before pressuring the ball. It’s the kind of strategy a kid with lots of space and no real pressure otherwise in his life would use. The other kids on his team play with a desperation I imagine once reserved for doomsday preppers, which a few of them might be. They hurl themselves into each other and fear no injury. They swarm and harry each other off the ball and on it, before practice and after. They don’t listen during drills, but they kick hard and dart across the field. The parents are no better.

At halftime of his last game, the director of the team, an Englishman named Gary, came to talk to us. Florida is an elephant’s graveyard for retired pro-athletes, so of course Gary is a former pro-footballer from Manchester who grew up in the shadow of Paddy Crerand’s pub. He picked out my son’s name immediately on the roster during try-outs a few months back. During that game, the parents were upset with the referee and the other team’s side judges for missing calls and giving a yellow card to one of our more aggressive kids who steamrolled the kid he was marking, knocking the wind out of him.

“Is it always this bad?” I asked him during the injury time-out.

He shook his head. We were out of earshot of the other parents. “The boys just need to learn to love the game. Every time they’re on the field, they don’t need anything but encouragement.”

I could see my son struggling on the field in the chaos. He was in his own head, thinking too much about what was being shouted by the parents, by me, and sometimes paralyzed by indecision, just watching the game and not playing it. I walked down at halftime to give him a pep talk, but I could see he was close to tears. I held his hand. I should have taken him home. But I let him play.

I often wonder what it takes to make a kid aggressive on the field. A father killed by the Luftwaffe? Enduring poverty? Religious sectarian violence? Is adversity the only way to greatness? In his autobiography, Paddy states frankly he wasn’t the best player on any team as a youngster. Plenty were more talented, but they fell off, lured by drink, or landing in prison. Their parents failed them whereas Paddy’s mother had not.

In the second half, the referee finally banished all of the parents except my wife and me to the parking lot for shouting obscenities at him and the other team. The other parents glowered at the referee and then a little at my wife and me for not leaving with them, but the ref singled them out directly. They wore it like a badge of honor. This is how much we love our sons, they seemed to say. If you cloak your shame in enough love, you don’t feel embarrassed and you can rationalize any behavior in its name. But I still felt embarrassed for them and myself.

“The competitive league,” the English director said and shook his head. At one point he had been paid to play, but even this was too much for him as he put his head in his hands.

Competitive for who? I wanted to ask him, but it was clear. We were all shouting our sons’ names, but it was our egos who were playing and losing—not the kids on the field who had to take a knee as the parents packed their belongings and filed out of the stands, still cursing the referee and the beach community team we were playing. My own son would spend the rest of the game wringing his hands in nervous energy, kneeling down to re-tie his shoes just to avoid playing. Eventually he would sub himself out with a stomachache even though the team needed him.

I wish now I could say I found the right words to make him better, to calm his nerves and assuage his fears, but I never did. As he knelt in the grass with the other boys, he didn’t need my voice of encouragement. He needed everyone to let him be, to be alone for a moment, and for a voice inside him to say, just go on and be yourself. As the whistle blew, I hoped he would show me how to do the same.