When the Dream Became Reality

Introduction

Friday, July 8, 2016

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

The sun has long since set, the scoreboard turned black. All of the towers above the stadium have been switched off except one, a lone cluster shining the last light onto the corner of the field. A few dozen kids have stayed and lined up in front of the stands for autographs. The moon radiates a grayish blue behind them. They stare at us as we walk toward them. Their mouths move in response to their friends’, but their heads hardly turn. The soccer balls and posters in their hands swing in rhythm with their lips.

They look so happy. They must not have watched the game very closely. Do they know we just lost 3-0?

It feels like a bad dream. I never thought I’d let myself lose to the Richmond fucking Kickers. And now I have to deal with these kids, these smiling faces in front of me.

Great game, a blonde girl no older than 10 says to me, her wide smile showing white, unstraightened teeth.

You don’t know anything about soccer. Good for you. Keep it that way, I think to myself.

Thank you, I say.

She stands on her toes and holds a poster for me to sign. Her mom asks to see the latest signature and the girl hoists the picture up to her eye level.

The line turns into a semicircle as the onlookers move to get closer to the action. They are excited to have a real professional athlete, 27 and in his prime, in their presence. A group of three boys tell me they plan to hang the posters above their dressers. As I put my signature on their apparel, they survey me. Their eyes start on my face, then move to my cleats—kids like to inspect the newest styles—and finish on my jersey. Their pupils expand as they soak in the team logo over my heart and Capital BlueCross emblem across my chest.

Choose another dream, I want to tell them.

Thanks for coming, I force out.

The kids don’t see beyond the dirt and sweat to the pain and embarrassment underneath. They don’t know the only thing I want to do right now is sit in a dark room where nobody will know I exist.

The innocent faces should make me feel better. They should remind me of how far I’ve come. I used to be one of these kids. I used to watch the players in the big stadiums and imagine myself in their place. I used to dream of playing under the lights. The eager looks should lift my spirits and put it all in perspective, and yet I hate their smiles, hate the kids, and, in turn, hate myself.

I need to get out of here. Please don’t ask for a picture. I don’t want to hear about little Jamie’s hat trick last game. My hand curves the y’s under the double b’s like a machine turning out rivets. How many more to go? Grab ball, find empty panel, sign, return to outstretched hand, half-smile, nod, repeat.

Each kid tells me I played great. The scoreboard says otherwise, Jack. I need them to stop smiling. On the odd occasion the kids don’t thank me when I hand their ball back, their parents poke them into action. I hate the parents now, too.

I’m fully aware of how awful I’m being. I can’t find the energy to change. Every cheerful face and new signature feels worse than watching Richmond’s shots shake our net. I can’t take this anymore.

For so long I thought I was using soccer to push myself, to become the person I wanted to be, and yet I don’t feel any growth. I feel … I don’t even know. Broken, I think. Just broken, I hope.

This feeling has become all too common. The feeling of defeat, beyond the numbers on the scoreboard. It’s hard to reconcile my aspirations with my failures, the self-perceptions with the truth, the dream with the reality. The kids should make me forget, give me a moment of solace, but instead they only magnify all of it.

Going down the line, doing anything to avoid contact with the blameless eyes in front of me, trying to mask the contempt on my face, I wonder how I got here.

As I cruise down the final hill toward the locker room on my aqua Schwinn during my senior year at Stanford, the sun not yet up, tucking my hands into my sweatshirt sleeves to keep the cold morning air from flash-freezing my fingers, I see four of my teammates get out of a car in the parking lot. They’re laughing. I forget about the wind biting at my skin for a moment. What are they laughing about? I know they’ve spent the night together playing video games on the futon in Daniel’s room. Nine of us entered Stanford together as freshmen, and we all bonded right away. But I always recognized the others were closer with each other than they were with me. I was the one always yelling at them to tackle harder and to get to the weight room more often. We were all good friends, but they were better friends with each other. I rarely got out of the car with them in the morning. A consequence of my own choices, I remind myself, pulling up to the rack to lock my bike.

How some things never change, I think, forcing my mind back to the present, reaching for the sheets to pull back over my body.

In my bed I toss and my eyes get drawn to the clock as all the digits change: 3:00 AM, my eyelids no more ready to shut than they were when I got home five hours ago. I tug the sheets back onto the bed and over my shoulders. Three-to-fucking-nothing.

The lights are off in the house. The curtains are closed. There’s an empty liter of Breyer’s chocolate ice cream on my bedroom floor, the melted remains dripping off the side of the carton. The only light in the room comes from the screen on my laptop. The colors bounce off the bare walls every time the shot changes. I stare at the actors in front of me.

I can’t sleep. I can hardly blink. The kids’ faces see to that.

It’s been the same room, always the same room, the same scene. Mechanicsburg, Palo Alto, Dallas, Sweden, Norway—and now Harrisburg. The night after a league final or a Wednesday midseason match. The white walls, the curtains, the flickering colors. Many things have changed in my career, but this room has always stayed the same.

This morning, when I woke up in this bed, I was a regular guy. I got up when the sun started to creep through the blinds, and hopped out of bed toward the kitchen to put breakfast on the stove: two eggs, over easy, with a medium-sized avocado. I drove my Ford Fusion to the grocery store and then met some friends for lunch at the local farmer’s market. I don’t like eating out on game days, but it provided something to do. I smiled at people as I passed them in the narrow aisles. I called my brother on the drive home to ask about his day. I watched two episodes of Game of Thrones, closing my eyes halfway through the second one to get my pregame nap.

At 4:30 PM I got back in my Fusion to drive to work. I smiled at the woman behind the front desk in the stadium lobby. I hung my shirt and tie and changed my clothes, laced my boots, and sipped some water. I walked through the hall, down the stairs, onto the grass, and across the white line. Just a regular white painted line. But on the other side of that line, the rules changed—or, at least, I did.

I walked up to the three rows of cones laid out by the coaches. We got into lines and made our paces through the lanes. We started with a slow jog. Then we shuffled side to side, moving to the left first, then to the right on the way back. I started to get my arms involved, swinging them side to side as I slid my feet. My body started to move faster, my muscles began to fire quicker. The warm-up runs, though, weren’t for my muscles. The warm-up summoned a new person.

As we moved from cone to cone, it looked as though I was firing up my calves and hamstrings, but actually I was targeting my mind. My heart rate ticked up and my neurons began to fire. The good guy inside had been having a nice day, but I needed him to go away for a little while. He didn’t always depart quickly. Sometimes I barked out loud or slapped a wall or found a reason to yell at a teammate. Dante, what was that shit? Get focused! Dante was rattled, but I felt better. The words flew in Dante’s direction, but I wasn’t actually talking to Dante, I was talking to myself. Better him getting upset than me playing bad.

To steal a common sports psych line, I was letting the Big Dog in my soul bark. Or, as Timothy Gallwey says in The Inner Game of Tennis, I was putting away Self 1, the self-aware Bobby, and activating Self 2, the me that lets his body take over and doesn’t overthink.

My friends in the business world tell me I have a great job. They see the short hours and the free Nike gear and the big crowds. You work out for a living! You get to play soccer every day! They’d love to be done at 2:00 PM every afternoon, they constantly remind me. But I wonder how they would handle the dissonance, if they could manage living with split personalities.

In our junior year at Stanford we were playing St. Mary’s at home. Taylor, a tall winger with long hair, a smooth step-over, and one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met, didn’t pressure the ball hard enough near the sideline. St. Mary’s bypassed him and nearly scored on us. Everyone was relieved, except me. While the keeper set up the goal kick, I yelled at Taylor from halfway across the field, as loud as I could: Unacceptable! You win every fitness test, so you sure as hell could have sprinted at that guy! Everyone in the crowd heard me call him a lazy piece of shit. Taylor, one of my closest friends, stared at me for a second in disbelief, and then he turned his back and walked away.

From a young age, I’ve wondered if they were mutually exclusive: being a good person and a good player; whether I could be the center midfielder I dreamed of being and also the person I hoped to become. I wanted to dominate on the field, but I also wanted to be welcomed at the lunch table. Is it possible to be a part of the inside jokes as a friend and also hold the same person accountable as a teammate?

For many people, this is a no-brainer. Lighten up, relax, be a good guy! While I understand why a person might say this, I don’t want that guy on my team. I don’t even want to be on the same field as that person. He’s not worth my time.

Like me or not, you want me on your team. Because I’ve seen what happens when you cross the line with the wrong attitude, as the wrong person.

Waking the Big Dog is tough, but that’s not the part that troubles me. I’ve gotten good at letting out the howls. The bigger issue is coming back. Once the lights have been shut off and the stands cleared, my night isn’t even close to finished. The game hasn’t finished playing itself out. As I close my eyes, it still runs across my mind and through my veins. I can’t reenter the world yet. So I fire up the computer and stare at a screen for an hour, two hours, watching but not seeing. I can only hope, holding my breath, that I’ve returned by the time I wake up.

My friends are right: I do get home from work at 2:00 PM. I do play soccer every day. I do rock my free Nike gear as much as possible. They are wrong to think, however, that those are the essence of my job. They don’t realize I question every word coming out of my mouth and every thought running through my head—that every second is a tug-of-war in my conscience. I want to be the best player I can be, and I’d like to keep my soul intact while I do.

I’ve never had millions of dollars or big trophies on the line. I’ve been fighting much more important battles.

Looking children in the eye shouldn’t be so hard.

Section 1:

Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania

Chapter One:

Accepting the Responsibility

My parents have a long driveway that arcs from the street upward to their house. Trees, evergreen on the left and deciduous on the right, line the pavement. The deer have eaten the bottom three feet of needles off the pines. Sometimes the creek on the other side of the road floods and covers our mailbox. At the top of the hill, the driveway splits and forms a big circle for cars to drive around. Inside the circle driveway is a patch of grass. When I was eight, my dad bought two small goals, around five feet high and four feet across, to put in that circle.

Today the goals are tucked under the trees near the garage, leaves and spider webs caught in the nets, or what’s left of them. For close to a decade, though, the goals didn’t move from the circle.

My middle brother, Andy, six years older than me, liked to challenge me to One-Touch. We would go to Giant, the local supermarket, and buy a lightweight rubber ball—not the kind for kickball, but the one that is so thin it gets blown around in the wind before it travels very far. The goals would be set 20 yards apart, a few feet inside the edge of the circle on each end. The rules were simple: Each player gets one touch of the ball in a row at any time. If you block a shot, that’s your touch and the other person gets the next attempt.

To hit the rubber ball well, you have to make perfect contact. The slightest strike off-center and the ball will spin, twisting in helicopter mode, revolving rapidly but not moving fast toward any particular target. The block can’t be thoughtless, either. If you don’t make enough contact with the ball, it will stop in a dangerous position near your goal; and if you swing too hard, the ball could loop over your foot. We teased each other when one of us hit a shot that spun to the side, but we knew one thing: One-Touch wasn’t random; it was about precision.

On hot days we placed sprinklers in the grass to the side of our playing area, the little green block connected to the hose, ticking from left to right, the water shooting up in six thin, rhythmic darts. When the ball got slippery, the margins got finer. Precision. I loved One-Touch, and even after Andy got to high school and started driving his Mercury Sable to pick up girls for dates, I begged him to join me for a game.

When Andy went to college before I turned 12, I needed a new partner in the circle. My dad bought David Bascome’s skill video. Bascome had been a star for our local professional indoor team, the Harrisburg Heat. He made his name with his quick acceleration and flashes of skill on the ball, moving his feet so fast the people in the stands couldn’t follow what he’d done.

My dad would put the video into the VCR, and I would sit with my soccer ball as Bascome went through his favorite drills and moves. Every now and then I’d pause the video and try the move on my parents’ rug in front of the couch.

When the video ended, I would go outside to the circle and dribble around in between the goals. After a few attempts at Bascome’s moves, I’d turn and shoot my ball into the goal. When I hit the target, the net would glide up as the ball powered through, because my brother and I never bothered to secure the nets to the ground. Whether I hit or missed the goal, I had to go and fetch the ball out of the bushes before I got to dribbling again.

In his memoir, Open, tennis great Andre Agassi describes a childhood of pressure and expectation laid upon him by his father. The elder Agassi made his son take hour after hour of practice balls fired over the net from a homemade machine—a machine Andre dubbed the dragon. Andre dreaded the hours his father made him take thousands of balls from the dragon. He silently hated taking shot after shot. His father, though, openly declared that Andre would one day be #1 in the world, and so Andre continued to play, day after day.

My parents never pushed me to touch a soccer ball. It happened organically on a Sunday afternoon on the Lower Paxton soccer fields. My dad played on a men’s league team outside of Harrisburg, and when I was two weeks old, sitting in a baby stroller next to my mom behind the goal at one of his games, he shanked a shot that flew into my head. He never apologized, instead only reminding me that he was a defender by nature. For some reason he has always proudly told the story about the time he hit his two-week-old son in the head with a ball. When his three sons got into travel soccer, he liked to yell, There’s a goal there for a reason! whenever we missed a shot. I’ve always found the statement to be more ironic than he has.

I had a sleepover with a couple teammates from my club soccer team, Super Nova FC, when we were in sixth grade. We stayed up late watching TV and eating the chips and brownies my mom kept bringing into my room. The next morning I woke everyone up and proclaimed we had to head to the park. We would start with the two-mile jog and then do some drills on the field next to the tennis courts. They told me to shut up and went back to sleep. I poked them again, starting to get angry.

It’s training time, I told them.

After a few more nudges, they finally got up and laced their sneakers for the run. For the entire jog, Shane ran next to me, shouting, It’s training time, guys in a mocking tone. I turned and screamed at him, Shut up, Shane! realizing they probably didn’t think I was serious when I had invited them for a sleepover and training session.

It seemed obvious to me. I didn’t understand how four soccer players could get together and not want to get a session in. They appeased me and did 30 minutes of passing before we went back and jumped in the pool.

The soccer field became my second home. On Mondays and Wednesdays, my parents drove me to train with the Super Nova ’87 boys team, two years older than me. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I trained with the team my age. On the weekends I played with whichever team needed me for a tournament. Our coach, a former professional from Yugoslavia, couldn’t pronounce Bobby, so he called me Bubba. He didn’t say Bubba in the way a man sitting in his chair in front of the TV with a beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other would say Bubba. He said it with the endearing effort of someone doing his best to pronounce syllables his mouth couldn’t form. Everyone in the Super Nova community called me by my soccer name. My friends at school and on the Little League team knew me as Bobby. I enjoyed baseball and excelled at snagging ground balls off the hop, but I wasn’t really anyone there. When I got to the soccer field, I became Bubba.

Most people start their stories with tales of struggle or hardship. My story starts on third base. I had two supportive brothers, Chris and Andy, and two healthy, loving parents with good jobs. We lived in a safe neighborhood with good schools and had food on the table every night. My parents made it clear early on that I could do and be whatever I wanted in life. More so, they emphasized that, as someone who got lucky in the lottery of birth—you have all these opportunities that most people don’t have by the chance of birth, my mom constantly told me—I had a responsibility to do something great. The seed was planted early.

The more I dribbled around the circle, the better I got. My ability with a soccer ball exceeded my skills at baseball or math or guitar. The better I got at soccer, the more I liked it; the better I got, the more I needed it. A responsibility to be great.

My family never had an endgame. My parents never discussed college scholarships or giant signing bonuses; they rarely pushed me to go to practice or to do extra training. I never really planned on being a professional player. I simply liked soccer. Or, at least, I liked being good. My parents never said it directly, but the prerogative was clear: When you’re born on third base, you sure as hell better make it home. Soccer became my avenue to do something, to be someone.

Soccer fulfilled a purpose, and, as always, the value came with a cost.

Chapter Two:

The Monster in the Backseat

One exit west from Mechanicsburg on the Pennsylvania turnpike there used to be a big indoor soccer and roller hockey facility called Pine Hill Sports Complex. It had blue plastic tiles for a playing surface and walls around the field to keep the ball in play. Next to the indoor complex sat an outdoor field backed by woods on one side and a reservoir on another, so when you missed a shot on either goal it became a pain to get it back. On a hot and sticky East Coast summer afternoon, when the sweat starts to gather on your forehead the second you step from the car, we arrived for the second round of the Under-15 Eastern Pennsylvania State Cup.

The game went to overtime. In our white Adidas tops and black shorts, we went down 1–0. I was dribbling the ball near midfield when someone from the other team, a skinny, shaggy-haired kid in a puke-yellow jersey, grabbed my shirt. He had been nipping at my ankles and tugging me back for 10 yards. I stopped running, grabbed his shirt, and threw him to the ground. The ball kept rolling. The referee sprinted up, reached into his pocket, and showed me a yellow card—my second of the game—and sent me off the field. We ended up losing.

I had spent the entire match screaming. At the ref. At my teammates. At myself. It wasn’t the screaming of a man leading his troops, but of a little boy whose mom wouldn’t give him any more dessert. The parents on the sideline weren’t upset at the kid yelling at their children. They felt awkward—sorry for the pathetic kid out there losing control.

On the way home, I sat in the backseat of my parents’ car with a sick feeling in my stomach. My parents didn’t scold me. They didn’t need to. I had embarrassed myself—and worse, them. I could feel the regret from head to toe, a shiver pulsing through my body. I wanted to get home as fast as possible and hide. I wanted to hide from the world, and even more, I wanted to hide from myself.

I had seen the looks from everyone around me, the eyes watching me on the field like I had taken an axe to the neighbors; I could sense the remorse they expected me to feel, a remorse I didn’t have.

The other boys on the team, they just gave up. Wasn’t screaming better than quitting?

I never decided to open my mouth to yell at anyone. I didn’t determine to reach back to grab the kid’s jersey. My body just did what it had to do. We had to win. We weren’t playing well. I was just trying to help.

More than guilty, staring out the window, trying to count the cars that passed to distract my mind, I felt trapped, ensnared between two equally intolerable outcomes.

I tried to calculate an excuse to tell to my parents. I pondered blaming it on the ref or leaning close enough to the window to make my forehead warm. I decided to stay quiet. I knew the truth. I was living with a secret.

I’m a monster. I’m sorry.

When I was eight,