Our first game is history – as in historic
? Chapter THREE
The story so far: South Orange River’s middle school soccer team of boys, who know nothing about the sport, play their first game.
The Buckingham team was coming down the field toward our goal. To my eyes, they looked like a herd of stampeding blue buffaloes. As for our guys – the ones in the red and yellow – they were doing one of four things:
Standing around. Running the wrong way. Backing up, furiously. Falling down. Or, actually, five things, because some people did a combination of two of the above, like Fenwick, who backed up and fell down. Or Radosh, who ran the wrong way, realized he was doing it, stood still as he tried to figure out the right way, and then got tangled in his own feet and then fell down.
Anyway, you know how it is in history – battles and things – wars can truly be lost at the first shot. I understand that personally. I was at such a battle.
Playing in front of me was Saltz, my special buddy. We not only grew up together, we lived near each other. Defended each other. Loved each other. So when he saw that advancing line of Buckingham blues attacking, attacking me, he actually did something.
First, he turned red in the face. A great red blotch. Then he started to charge the blue line. Now, unlike me, Saltz is a big guy. With his T-shirt flapping all over the place, his arms flapping other places, his longish hair flapping in the remaining places, he really charged. What a sight!
For just a moment, the blue line hesitated. I mean Saltz is a big guy. And the red face, the flapping, and so on . . .
Meanwhile, the ball was squirting forward.
Saltz, I saw, was aiming right for it. My stomach, which had been traveling somewhere in the region of my throat, began to go right. I could see that Saltz was about to send that ball a billion miles in the other direction. Except … he missed.
Which is to say, he charged like a madman, cocked his leg, or whatever you do with your leg, kicked, missed and kept right on going. He went, in fact, past all the Buckingham players before he realized what had happened.
And what had happened was that there was nothing between me and the charging herd of blue Buckinghams. The white ball was coming right at me. I should know – I saw it trickle past me into the net.
It was only fifteen seconds into the game. But, to tell the truth, that first few seconds was typical. Final score:
BUCKINGHAM: 32 SOUTH ORANGE RIVER: 0
Or, in case you hadn’t noticed, we lost our first game, badly.
We were on our way. Down with further to go.
We got back on the bus feeling stupid. It wasn’t just that we lost, but we lost by being so amazingly bad. Beyond belief. It had stopped being fun about two seconds into the game. Maybe one second. It wasn’t even a question of how good they were. We stank.
We were the first team to get back to the bus.
“Well,” said the bus driver with lots of good cheer, “how’d you guys do?”
“Lost,” said someone.
“But close, I bet,” said the driver.
“Distant,” came the reply.
“Well, next time.” The driver just couldn’t drop his insistent cheerfulness.
Then it was Mr. Lester’s turn. “Gentlemen,” he said, taking a quick look over his shoulder to make sure we were still alone, “I want to tell you how proud I am of you. You didn’t give in.”
“I bet he loves hang gliding over the Grand Canyon with one wing,” whispered Saltz into my ear.
“You kept up your spirits,” continued Mr. Lester.
“Nothing else to keep up,” said Radosh.
“You showed courage and character.”
“What about talent?” called out Eliscue.
“Or skill?” Root offered.
Mr. Lester pressed on. “Each week, from experience and practice, you’ll get better. I know you will. You have nothing to be ashamed about. Their coach told me he was impressed.”
“With what?” asked Fenwick.
Mr. Lester said nothing.
“Mr. Lester,” Hays called out. “How come, by the end of the game, they only had four men on the field? Is that legal?”
“Sportsmanship,” Mr. Lester murmured, and quickly sat down.
“If they really wanted to give us a chance,” Saltz said to me, “they should have gotten all their players off the field. Those four guys scored five goals.”
“What makes you think, if they had none, we would have scored any?” asked Radosh.
No one answered.
Our other teams came on the bus. One team had won. They were crazy happy. The other team had tied. They were just dumb happy. Naturally, they wanted to know what happened to us. It was Hays who told them.
They refused to believe it. “No, really? What was the score? Tell it straight.” Things like that. After a while, they had to believe. And they were amazed. Stunned. In awe. For a bit, anyway.
Then quickly it became joke time. Like, “Maybe if you hadn’t shown up, they would have scored less.” There was some logic to that.
It got so bad the coaches made them shut up and our team kept its distance.
By the time we got back to school, we, at least, were into our usual kind of stuff: discussing school gossip, homework, a special trip that was being planned. The big thing – tomorrow we were each going to find out who our partners were for our history projects. We kept talking about who we wanted to work with and who we didn’t. The deal was, we were going to draw names out of a hat.
I mean, we had lost. Who cared? There were better things to think about.
Fortunately, when we got back to school, we had to rush for our buses, so there wasn’t much teasing.
That night, at dinner, my ma asked, as she usually did, how my day was.
“Great,” I said.
“Anything interesting?” Dad wanted to know.
“In history,” I said, “we’re starting on American Indians. We’re going to do projects and we get to work with someone.”
“Who are you with?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said, but to be honest, I couldn’t wait to get to school the next day to find out.
• NEXT WEEK: The most interesting practice session