Heroes

I haven’t had a sports hero for a long time. I can still be inspired by brilliant performances, but as former NBA great Charles Barkley has noted (and frequently demonstrated), athletes should not be looked to as role models. A Venn diagram of high school seniors voted both “Most Likely to Lead the NFL in Sacks” and “Best Personality” would probably be the loneliest population of overlap in the history of Venn diagrams. I don’t even need to recite the dumb and selfish shit that star athletes try to get away with. We read about it and hear about it every single day. Gene pool winners who can perform jaw-dropping athletic feats, yes. Heroes, no.

At least I used to believe that. Today I publicly announce that my hero opinion has changed. Understand that I am not admitting to being wrong, merely that additional evidence has come to light and I have adjusted an opinion accordingly. I have changed my opinion because I am the dad of a seven-year-old girl who loves soccer. The dad of a seven-year-old girl who insisted that we watch the 2015 Women’s World Cup soccer tournament together on television. A seven-year-old girl who was visibly thrilled, positively vibrating with excitement, as we watched Team USA win its World Cup championship.

Believe me when I tell you that this was not an example of dad projecting his passions onto his child. I’ve already established that I’m too old and too jaded to have sports heroes. Plus soccer to me is a strange, exotic spectacle. In the rural little corner of America where I grew up there was no soccer. We played football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in the spring and summer. Period.  (If at this point you are tempted to interrupt to explain the distinction between American football and fùtbol,  don’t be that guy. We all get it, dude.) Anyway, soccer was weird, something at which the foreign exchange students excelled. Not something that I had ever played or even watched. And then a few decades later I’m spending weekends watching my daughters chase soccer balls around fields (pitches?) and yelling “spread out” and “hustle” and “good job” while not really know a whole lot about what was going on out there.

Hanging out with my daughter watching the United States defeat Germany in the semi-finals and then Japan for the championship, part of me was maybe this will be the gateway drug that will hook her on watching real sports on television with me!  And by real sports, I meant major league baseball and college football.  But the more I watched, it gradually occurred to me that these soccer games (matches?) were sort of exciting. The athletes were amazing. Explosive quickness, endurance, bone-jarring mid-field collisions, advancing the ball up field like a basketball fast-break. The games were genuinely interesting. What I suddenly realized was that I hadn’t introduced my daughter to the concept of watching my sports on television so much as she introduced me to the thrill of watching world-class women’s soccer on television. Another day, another lesson taught to me by my children. God I get sick of their crap sometimes.

Watching the World Cup with my kid didn’t change my mind on heroes, though I liked the idea that she was inspired by watching strong young women compete on the playing field as she dreamed of someday becoming one of them. I am not so old that I can’t remember dreaming that I would grow up to play first base for the Seattle Mariners (until I finally accepted I couldn’t hit a breaking ball or even a decent fastball). A few weeks after the World Cup final, some friends asked if we’d like to watch a National Women’s Soccer League match between the Washington Spirit and Chicago Red Stars at a stadium not far from our home in the DC suburbs. The NWSL is a professional league that began play two years ago, and the Washington-Chicago match would feature prominent World Cup team members on both squads (Ali Krieger and back-up goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris for Washington; Julie Johnston, Christen Press, and Lori Chalupny for Chicago). The game was terrific and even a non-expert like me could recognize the skill and athleticism in front of me. Perhaps most amazing: I watched an entire soccer game that ended in a 1-1 tie and was completely entertained. I would not have predicted that.

Adding to the entertainment was the near capacity crowd of 5,000 plus. Of those 5,000 it seemed like 10,000 were school girls wearing soccer jerseys. When the World Cups stars made their appearance, the place erupted into a screaming noise chamber that made me wonder if Taylor Swift had crashed the party. Nope. It was Ali Krieger and Julie Johnston and their teammates and these school-aged soccer players were celebrating their heroes. And then I noticed my seven-year-old emerged from a scrum of screaming school girls wearing soccer jerseys with an autographed program from Lori Chalupny and another signature on her red and white soccer jersey from Julie Johnston. Utter joy. Living a moment she will remember forever.

That’s when I changed my mind about sports heroes.