futbol

Football, fútbol, soccer brings the world together

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In this polarized world, something brings people together on a global level: Football, fútbol, soccer.

At a recent soccer tournament, I overheard a couple of our men chatting (in Spanish) with players from another team, explaining the seminary to them. The men, with a nervous, embarrassed laugh, explained they were “ilegales.” Our men took it in stride and continued the good-hearted banter. That conversation made it worthwhile for me to get up at five fifteen on a Saturday morning for a soccer tournament, the trophy we won, as they say, was gravy on top.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Every Fall, our soccer team usually plays our Miami counterpart (read about that here). With a new term calendar in our school, that game was cancelled. So, the students found the Diocese of Palm Beach Young Adult Soccer Tournament. We signed up.

The tournament involved 12 teams from the Palm Beach area.

Early Saturday morning, after weeks of training, we drove to Halpatiokee Park in Stuart. The day started with a wonderful outdoor Mass. Five games followed. We won all our succeeding games 3-2 then 2-1. As our opponents got harder, our wins became narrower. The quarterfinal was 1-0, and the semifinal 0-0, which we then lost on a nail-biting 9 shot penalty shootout.

With all these games, our starting-and only-goalie got a massive leg cramp. We had to pull him out of the game. Gilbert, one of our players-not a goalie-selflessly volunteered to go under the arches, and what a job he did, stopping critical shots.

It was now time to decide the third and fourth place teams, and who would take home a trophy. By now it was well past 6, so the captains decided to change the game to another penalty shootout. We scored on the last goal, and Gilbert made sure to stop the last shot, making him the hero of the tournament!

After an extraordinarily long day and five games, that third place trophy tasted like victory, we were elated. What a marvelous celebration of community, and the common ground football brings us to.

The social media video. Credit: Thomas Hammen

Soccer vs football vs fútbol, Major League Soccer, a night at the Miami Inter game.

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Soccer, football, fútbol has always been played in the US, it was just never popular like baseball, American football, basketball or hockey, it was a college sport, like volleyball. Much has been written about this, but my reasoning on why soccer never became popular in the US reflects American isolation and provincialism.

The US was for decades self sufficient, it lacked the necessary international flow of goods and ideas to be on equal terms with the rest of the world. America did not so much trade as buy (or take, depending on the country) what they needed. Examples of this might be not using the metric system, not participating in WWI (until later), not joining the League of Nations (until later), etc. Sure, there were millions of immigrants, but their first concern was to assimilate into the local population as fast as possible; forgetting their language and adopting local “traditions” and way of life as a means of achieving the “American Dream”.

Only in the latter part of the 20th C until now, have many of those cultural barriers fallen and the US has (begrudgingly?)  opened up to the world. Maybe the new waves of immigrants were more reluctant to drop their heritage upon stepping on US soil, clearly technology has broken many walls, and so on.

But enough of my ramblings. The other day I was invited to the opening game of Inter Miami against Montreal. Some of my students generously offered tickets to a couple of us football loving teachers. The excursion was led by the Jesus Youth students; what a great bunch of generous, kind people.

One of the reasons Inter Miami is famous is because the president and one of the shareholders is David Beckham, husband of “Posh Spice” Victoria Beckham, and one of football’s great players, who like many greats played his golden years at Real Madrid. My sister Rocky was the first person to interview him when he arrived in Madrid in 2003!

We had a blast. Inter Miami still does not have a permanent stadium, playing out of a temporary facility, the AutoNation DRV PNK stadium. The beauty of a small stadium is how close everyone is to the field, it feels very intimate and enjoyable. Oh, Miami won 2-0.

Family holiday in Chapel Hill

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This year I had the privilege of ending my summer holiday by inviting my younger sister and her two oldest kids to spend a few days with me in Chapel Hill. It was fantastic! We all flew at the end of July into North Carolina only to find that the battery had died on old Helmut. So the next day, after a delicious breakfast at Ye Olde Waffle Shoppe and jump starting the car, we headed out to Audi Cary where they lent us a wonderful Q5 for the day while they changed the battery!

We drove to Raleigh where we visited Ray Price Harley Davidson, with its great drag racing museum. Then we went to downtown where we visited the Museum of Natural Sciences and had lunch at the Museum of History.

During our ten days here we went to church, visited every corner of campus, the Basketball Museum, the Planetarium, the Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, Wilson Library, the Ackland Museum, Hillsborough with its fantastic Matthew´s chocolates and Ayr Mount plantation, we even went to Duke (shhhh!!) and Durham.

They met some of my favorite people from Chapel Hill: my classmate, office mate, and little sister (in the absence of my real little sister) Alejandra who picked us up at the airport, Patrick my mailman, the folks at Ye Olde Waffle Shop, Missy Julian Fox, the folks at the Ronald McDonald House, Father Bill and Adam at church, the folks at Trader Joe’s, even the High Priest, Professor Frank Dominguez.

The culinary experience was just as awesome, we went to Five Guys, Suttons, Maple View farm for ice cream, Buns for their grilled salmon sandwich, Mellow Mushroom for Pizza, Top of the Hill, Akai Hana for sushi, and the highlight being North Carolina barbecue.

Other highlights were when we played soccer on one of the soccer fields, or when we set up the big screen digital projector home theater to watch Disney’s Alexander and Annie, volunteering at the Ronald McDonald House of Chapel Hill, visiting the Mall (and the outlet mall), Dick’s Sporting Goods, Target, and of course Walmart, which Jimmy loved.

We had a blast. My niece, infused by the entrepreneurial spirit of the land set up a table on the street to sell her hand-made bracelets. Unfortunately, living in a dead-end street in August meant that she did not have many costumers – although she did manage a couple of sales, the proceeds of which she donated to the Ronald McDonald House of Chapel Hill!

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