Jon Stewart: "Soccer is like Nutella."

Recognize anyone you know?

Yup, this is Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart in the eighties when he played collegiate varsity soccer for William and Mary University. (Coincidentally, I also played collegiate varsity soccer in the eighties, wore number 11 on my jersey, and had this same haircut. {I had less chest hair though.} Mercifully, no soccer pictures of me exist from that time.) Back then, he was Jon Liebowitz and although short, he was a successful striker. The W&M soccer team still has an award they give out every year named after him, the ‘Leibo’, which is given to the player who makes everyone laugh the most.

Check out his leg muscles in this shot:


Who knew that behind his desk on the Daily Show, he had legs like that? (This picture makes me marginally less embarrassed that Stewart is my one permissible celebrity cheat. Steve wisely chose Salma Hayek for his. Look at Stewart’s hair. What was I thinking? )

Along with the pictures, I found an interview with Sports Illustrated that Stewart did five years ago in which he talks about soccer. Here are some quotes:

On soccer’s popularity:

“[Soccer is] ...like Nutella. The rest of the world clearly loves it and puts it on everything, but here in America we’re like “I don’t know, man, it tastes like almonds.”

On whether or not he still plays:

“Dude, I’m 43 and smoked for 20 years. I’m just happy to go out of the house without an inhaler.”

On his style of playing:

“Even Pele would agree I was not playing the beautiful game. I was playing the annoying game.”

On if he would be willing to go head to head with bowtie wearing Tucker Carlson in a UFC battle if Sports Illustrated sponsored it:

“Let me explain something about the frailness of my physical condition. You could put big dollars on the line there and I wouldn’t do it.”

Sigh. Isn’t he dreamy?

Yeah, maybe no. Funny though. I’m going to keep watching his show but I can't say for sure that I'm not going to switch to Salma Hayek too.

Harper Seven Beckham

The nursery has been done in pink
Becks will likely get new ink
Have you not heard? Give this a whirl:
Posh and Becks now have a girl.
With three big brothers, it's truly nice
That there's a different baby spice
The only thing that I find lame
is Harper Seven Beckham's name.
Why did they need to name her that?
For our PM is such a twat.
Yes Harper with his helmet hair,
his wet-lipped face, his vacant stare
Has made asbestos sales turn brisk
(Ignoring pesky cancer risks).
Her middle name is not much better
For it's a number, spelled in letters
That once was on his soccer kit
And George Costanza wanted it.
Guess rules of naming all need bending
To make a name that's twitter trending.

The Forest for the Trees

I was raised on a steady diet of hot dogs, kool-aid, tv dinners, and reruns. As kids, our summer days were spent loafing in front of the tube watching game shows while the sun blazed outside: the Price is Right, Family Feud, and whatever the one was where you yelled ‘no whammies!’ Our exercise was strolling to the kitchen to get a bag of Oreos. We also raised our heart rates by complaining vehemently when our siblings stole the good spot on the couch while we were in the bathroom. Sure, at night, sometimes we practiced cartwheels in the front yard, or played hide and seek with the neighbour kids. (Why did our parents let us use the fire hydrant as home base? Ewwww!) And, we did organized sports. Like soccer.

My husband Steve’s family, although he was also brought up in the same era, might as well have been raised on another planet. They had a cottage at the lake--with no tv. He spent his free time swimming, hiking, paddling the canoe and playing cards, and creating an elaborate pinecone fort in the woods behind his house in which the pinecones were people. As far as I can tell, very few of the seven kids ever did any organized sports. I once asked my mother-in-law if Doug, Steve’s dad, had ever been a sporty guy. “Well, when he was younger, he did some gymnastics. You know, tumbling.”

Tumbling? As in....falling down? (I think I showed admirable restraint and respect for my in-laws when I only thought this and did not say it out loud.) Of course, my father-in-law was one of the fittest men I’d ever seen, who canoed down the Yukon river in his late 70s, portaging the canoe and sleeping outside every night for weeks. Once, when we were all at the lake and Doug was maybe 80, he took his shirt off and Steve cringed, whispering to me “Look, my dad is more buff than me.” Meanwhile everyone in my family who has done years of playing on sports teams ages badly, our pathetic knees disintegrating like the weak legs of the crappy TV trays we used so often.

I’m telling you this because the other day, while my kids were at swimming lessons, I went for a walk in the woods. Now, this wasn’t the first time, of course. I was in Brownies as a kid, and I seem to remember going on walks sometimes with them. Most of the time I’d be needling the kid beside me to try to get a reaction while we were supposed to be learning about slugs or something. But as an adult? By choice? As a form of exercise? Bah. But it was......nice. It was quiet and green and I could hear birds chirping. It was cool in the forest and even I’ll admit, smelled much nicer than the chlorine-y pool we all endure while we watch swimming lessons. It looked like there were berries and stuff growing in there and I wondered when they would ripen. I was just starting to see the whole up-side to this nature thing when I tripped on a tree root and twisted my ankle. Damn! Shouldn’t they pave this and smooth it all out like a turf field? Someone could get really hurt in here!

As I limped back I began to imagine the conversation I would have about this with Steve:

“I went for a walk in the woods while the kids were at swimming lessons,” (me to him, while he only half listens and reads a book on Greek philosophy.)

“Who did? You?”

“I know, right?”

Steve is now actually paying attention and looking at me. “What happened, did a soccer ball accidently roll in there or something?”

“Har Har.” But then I started to think. You know what? It would probably be really good practice to dribble a soccer ball through that forest path. Hmm...

Now I’m starting to get this weird rash on my arm. Do you think it’s poison ivy? Also, does poison ivy just float around in the air, or do you have to actually touch the plant? Can it tell when you’re scared, like a horse, and pick on you? It’s all Greek to me.

Confessions of a Jeter Cheater

Derek Jeter cheats.

Yes, the 37 year old, future hall-of-fame baseball player, the Yankees shortstop who just signed a 51 million dollar contract to stay with the team another three years, was called out for cheating in the New York Times Magazine last weekend. I’m not talking about his tax dispute with New York State from 2008. I’m talking about the way he plays.

Cheating, in baseball, is what older players do when they make slight adjustments to their playing style to cope with their diminishing skills. It’s perfectly legal. They swing a little earlier at bat, since their eyesight might not be as good as it once was, or perhaps they try to hit without a stride to add precious seconds to their time at the plate. Since baseball is a game of statistics, people notice. (This year Jeter came dead last amongst shortstops in a couple of defensive statistics.) And aging as an athlete in front of millions of fans cannot be an easy experience.

Even though I’m a soccer player and not a professional ball player, I cheat too. Now Jeter and I make marginally different salaries (I don’t own a 30,000 square foot home nicknamed ‘St. Jetersburg’), I may have slightly less fans, and I have not been romantically linked with anyone with a title that includes the words ‘sexiest’ or ‘universe’, but otherwise, we’re identical. My soccer game, since my ACL repair, is more passing and less shooting. When it’s time for my team to take a corner kick, I often find it’s time for me to concentrate on tying something on my shoelace so that someone else will take it. It makes me glad no one is keeping track of my statistics, or writing national magazine articles about my cheating.



Can you spot the difference?








(Large aside: The more you think about it of course, the more you realize that almost everything we do in life as adults is a form of cheating-- sometimes to make up for our diminished capabilites, and sometimes because we run out of time. For example:
- Recently I bought one of those supermarket roast chickens and served it to my family as though I had prepared it myself. Cheating? Sort of. Although it is a bit of work to cut the meat off of there.
- When I put on makeup, I’ve noticed in the last year or so I don’t bother looking in the normal side of the round mirror- I always flip over to the magnified side. Cheating? Yup. Sometimes I even start out of the magnified side and don’t realize it, and then try to flip the mirror over to the magnified side only to find that everything has miraculously shrunk. What’s going on?
- I wear black almost all the time. This is double cheating, really. We all know black is slimming, so that’s a cheat for sure, but another reason I wear black is that I am filthy (and not in a good way.) Black hides almost all dirt. The other day as I was just about to leave the house, I dropped half a cup of coffee and splashed it all over myself. I swore, grabbed a towel and dabbed at the coffee on my black clothes, then said ‘meh’, and left the house without changing. Total cheat.)

Overall, the New York Times Magazine article about Jeter was totally depressing. Do I need to be reminded that aging sucks and that we all adjust to cope with it? But there were a couple of sweet spots in the article, and I will share them with you: the first is that the Dallas Mavericks, an aging basketball team, beat the much younger and much more hyped Miami Heat in the NBA finals recently. How? According to the article, “Crafty older players find ways to compensate for their loss of quickness. Cleverness matters.” I love it that sometimes, experience trumps youth.

Secondly, I love this: “...(the modern thinking is that) today’s players, who condition themselves year-round – often with the help of private trainers, the most up-to-date scientific methods, nutritionists and massage therapists- play longer and have more years of peak performance. It makes sense. It’s also not true.” Wait, WHAT?! Yup. Babe Ruth, who they lovingly call ‘rotund’ and ‘hard-living’, played longer professionally than many current ball players and is largely considered to be the greatest baseball player of all time. Do you think he had a nutritionist? Pfft.

To celebrate these small victories for us middle aged folks, I am going to have a milkshake. Don’t worry, I will wear black, in case I spill anything. Then maybe I'll play some soccer. Care to join me?

Happy

You know what I did today? I did not volunteer to walk with the grade three class over to the library. I did not visit my dementia dad in his carehome. I did not unload the dishwasher. I did not make any penguins or people out of fondant icing. I did not sew caterpillar and cardsmen costumes for the school play. I did not volunteer to go into work to help move stuff between classrooms. I did not read the paper and try to make thoughtful comparisons about soccer news that I was hoping you would find interesting or entertaining.

Instead I put on my cleats (that not unlike my knees, are held together with pins),

and I played soccer.

And I am happy.

(And sweaty.)

But seriously, why didn’t I unload the dishwasher? That takes like two seconds. Now my kitchen is a mess. Sigh.

Pull Yourself Together

As someone who writes about soccer, known for its hooliganism, I can’t help but weigh in on the Stanley Cup riots of this week. But what’s left to say? Like you, I’m embarrassed and angry. I love sport- but this week, some of the good things that go along with sports—endorphins, excitement, and national pride—all turned ugly. Why?

In his excellent book “How Soccer Explains the World”, Franklin Foer writes about how some feminists like Susan Faludi have tried to explain away soccer hooliganism as being a product of “downsized men....deprived of traditional work and knocked off patriarchal pedestals”, who “wanted to reassert their masculinity.” But Foer disagrees and says that the most notorious English hooligan soccer gang’s members include “middle-class thrill seekers.” That’s what we saw on Wednesday. Well dressed, middle class young men (and some women) who can not only afford hundred dollar hockey jerseys, but can afford to toss them onto burning cop cars as they photograph themselves doing so with expensive camera phones. UBC sociologist Rima Wilkes, looking at Wednesdays rioters in Vancouver, says “they weren’t even angry. They were having fun.”

To me, more than anything else, it speaks of boredom. And the thing is I remember some of those feelings of boredom from when I was young. Even though it was 25 years ago, I remember being a frustrated teenager and wanting to get drunk and do stupid, stupid things—just so I could feel something. But like you, I just don’t understand how that feeling translates into flipping cars and smashing things.

Sophie, my 8 year old, was so depressed watching the game after the Canucks went down 2-0 that she said “I’m going to get a piece of paper and draw a picture about my feelings,” and Steve and I struggled to keep straight faces. Of course, I don’t expect that drawing pictures of your feelings is the answer for every drunk and frustrated young man, but come on. Want to feel something? Why not shave your playoff beard, if you had enough cajones to grow one (although many I see in the riot photos don’t appear to be old enough), and splash some acidic aftershave on? I bet that would hurt like a bugger. Or get a hockey stick and ball and head over to the tennis court and whack the ball against the wall for half an hour-- that feels damn satisfying. Or why not stand up to some of those crowds of bastards who are smashing things? I’ve seen great videos of a few brave souls doing just that, and boy, I bet the tension in that moment would sure make you feel alive.

As I headed downtown to work Thursday morning, I saw some red faced young guys in Canucks shirts at Bridgeport Station – heading onto buses leading out of the city, as I was heading into it. Released from their night in the drunk tank? The red in their faces was the ruddy kind you see in those that are hungover, although I’d like to think some of the red was from embarrassment too.

I work at Granville and Georgia across from the Bay, in “Ground Zero” as I heard someone call it, and I was curious as to what I’d see as I headed up from the skytrain station. Plywood where the Bay and Sears once had windows. Spraypainting on the public art that was put up during the Olympics. Charred chunks of sidewalk. Blackened garbage cans. But I also saw tons and tons of people in Canucks jerseys cleaning. For every burned garbage bin, there were four people scrubbing at it, trying to get the black stains off. And tons of positive (and only positive) graffiti on the boarded-up stores, apologizing for our fellow citizens drunken rampage. There were crowds of people around, still writing messages. Whenever people even slightly brushed against each other in the crowd, they apologized. As schmaltzy as this sounds, all of this totally choked me up. I got tears in my eyes the way I do whenever I stand with my kids and sing O Canada before a sporting event, especially when we get to the part about the truth north, strong and free.

Finally I walked by the Canucks team store at Robson and Granville. It was closed, but everything about it was untouched—no glass smashed, no spray painted graffiti—it was as though the Canucks had nothing whatsoever to do with the rioting. Accustomed to reading messages on every surface in sight, I glanced around and noticed the only word was near the handle on the door-- a sign that said Pull. I found myself thinking I was glad it did not say push—we’ve definitely seen enough pushing for now. Come on, Vancouver. I’m pulling for you.

The Internet is Scary, or, Cristiano Ronaldo calls Soccer Mom ‘Douchebag’ after Sideboob Incident

I want to talk about my blog. I realize that technologically, I’ve always been a late adapter and that blogs are considered passé. It’s all about ‘the Twitter’ now. But blogs might not be dead yet: in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, in a review of a book that grew out of a popular mom blog, columnist Leah McLaren said she felt ‘wistful for the (blog’s) cyber verbiage of yesteryear’ when writers posted entries of more than 200 words. Then Sunday’s New York Times Magazine mentioned that the most prominent sportswriter in America is Bill Simmons, a blogger who sometimes posts up to 6000 words on some topics, and that his blogs are downloaded an average of 600,000 times each. Of course, these are actual writers writing about relevant things, not just navel gazing in soccer cleats, as I have been known to do— but reading about these popular bloggers made me curious about my stats. Who reads me? And then I discovered a button on my blog that can tell me just that.

Don’t worry. I can’t see individual people and I don’t know if you are ignoring me. But I do have a button called Stats that tells me which countries people are viewing my blog from. It’s totally addictive. Why? The other day I checked it to see who was reading me and it turns out my blog had already been looked at 19 times in the Ukraine since that morning . That’s more than the 12 Canadian readers I had in the same time period. The Ukraine? (Oh dear. Given my dodgy grasp of geography, I’m ashamed to admit that if I was handed a blank map of the world and forced to pinpoint the location of the Ukraine, I would kinda wave my hand over one general area, hesitantly, and I might be wrongish.) I’m also inexplicably read by a fair number of readers in the BRIC countries (other than China, who doesn’t give a damn about me.) I even have 1 reader in Zimbabwe.

Naturally, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Luckily it can be easily explained by another kind of statistics my blog gathers for me: the keywords people google which help them find my blog. Of course, there are the expected ones—people who know me and google me by name. But yesterday someone found my blog by googling ‘garbage cans that go up stairs’, because of a piece I wrote about my physiotherapist that mentioned both stairs and garbage cans.

A surprising number of people also google Cristiano Ronaldo and end up on my page. Why? Because a year ago I posted a fake interview I pretended that I had done with Ronaldo. Also, people that googled the word ‘sideboob’ found my blog because of a piece I wrote back in March. ‘Soccer Mom’, and another popular key word, ‘douchebag’, have also landed people on my page in reference to posts I wrote or a friend guest wrote, in the past. Does the title of this post make sense to you now? Cristiano Ronaldo is probably perfectly nice and did not do anything wrong; but, rather, my title might just be the tiniest shameless attempt to increase traffic to my blog. (It’s pathetic, I know. The New York Times Magazine article I referenced earlier has Simmons quoted on others sports blogs as saying “The worst thing that’s happening now is that people are writing things just to drive traffic and get attention.” Oh yeah? Suck it, Simmons, with your 600,000 readers and your ESPN masthead.)

Now I almost wish I didn’t know these statistics at all because it makes me wonder what to write about. In a ridiculous attempt to appeal to my newfound Ukranian readers I actually googled ‘soccer pierogies’ to look for a picture I could use- because pierogies are one of the only Ukranian things I can think of- but sadly, Google Images came up with nothing. (I did find a race where men dress up like pierogi mascots and run on a field {see above}, but there was no soccer ball, so that’s out. I also found a Jesus pierogy that a woman discovered one Easter in her frying pan and sold for $1775 to Golden Palace, the same people that bought the Virgin Mary grilled cheese a few years ago for a much higher price.)

The last stat I discovered is the hardest one to face: my most popular blog ever, by a wide margin, is the only one I did not have a hand in writing. Yup, my friend Frank’s An Open Letter to Soccer Douchebags is my (his) most popular blog ever, having been looked at hundreds of times. Dang.

To console myself I’m going to try to scrape the pentagram shapes of a soccer ball into an uncooked perogy so I can hopefully sell it and make millions. I clearly won’t be making any dough (pun intended) from my writing. Except, perhaps, in the Ukraine. (Wherever that is.)