Mosquito and Goliath

Not so their native-born neighbors. Almost nothing about soccer conforms to American conceptions about sports -- or life in general. For one thing, you can't use your hands, which makes everything else more difficult. For another, there's only so much you can do with your feet to make a speeding ball behave rationally. Efficiency and expediency, which might as well be lyrics in the National Anthem, are stymied at every turn. By necessity, legality becomes a much more fluid concept, based on snap interpretations of 17 bright line "laws" -- which date to the 19th century -- by referees who are beyond the checks and balances of instant replay or umpire conferences. For Americans, with their vestigial Puritan morality, their ornate codes of conduct and their Constitutional entitlement to be secure in their personal space, watching their kids play this immoral game can provoke a spontaneous infarction.

On the sidelines, they can be heard bleating at the absurdity of it all, especially the fathers. Men who have thrown, caught, hit, held and shot every manner of ball will clench their fists and pound their thighs at the sight of their children spastically struggling to achieve with their feet and heads what they could do in half the time with their hands. "Foul! God damn it, ref! Foul!"

Here is the sound of the Old Order dying, the anguished rattle of well-settled expectations shattering. It is the sound of the comfortable majority losing its grip on familiar and predictable entitlements. For them, this foreign game is like a plague, skimming off the cream of the nation's high school athletes and consuming vast tracts of land for "soccerplexes." They see it vying for the affection of their children, 14 million of whom now play soccer in organized leagues -- 6 million of them teenagers; the game is now a varsity sport in 8,000 U.S. high schools, up from just 800 about 30 years ago. Yes, soccer is here to stay, and the weekend soccer dad knows it, and it is driving him out of his mind because his kids love it and he doesn't know the first thing about it. Watching these parents squirm, I empathize. I once was among them, as mystified by the seeming lawlessness and hypnotic effects of soccer as I ever was by the Byzantine mysteries of curling and cricket. Football was my sport, the only thing I ever really cared about. But I was won over by this game that requires far more skill, where the violence is more discreet and less likely to cripple, where rules are less a constant factor and arbitration has no place at all.

"FOUL! HEY, REF, FOUL!"

It is too late. The moment has passed. Sluggo is eating dirt somewhere beneath the toppled Rhino, and the Mosquito is on the move, trailed by the tattered remnants of Beltsville's barbarian legion. Whatever slim hope their supporters had of inducing the referee to grant the team a penalty kick is gone in less than two seconds. In two "touches" -- two quick kicks of the ball -- Shelby is beyond their immediate reach, bobbing and weaving toward the sideline. She gives a glance and finds her strikers exactly where she expects them to be, strung out in a line at midfield, spaced a nearly perfect 12 feet apart, poised like relay sprinters awaiting a baton.

She does not have much time for decision. The drum of footsteps behind her is getting louder as the shellshocked opposition organizes itself in pursuit. In a matter of seconds, one of her opponents will pull even to shoulder her off the ball while the other two tear ahead to block her passing lanes. These kids are bigger, faster, stronger, and she is tiring. The element of surprise is now lost. The time is now. The Mosquito wallops the ball upfield -- whump! -- then slows and finally stops. Bending at the waist, hands on knees, she gulps in air.

What happens next is almost hard to believe, and Coach Pinchotti is the only one who sees it coming. His team is now hopelessly out of position. His midfielder, Sluggo, is struggling to untangle himself from the Rhino's embrace. His three strikers are exhausted from the long charge downfield and the unexpected chase back the way they came. The ball is gone, moving away from them faster than they can possibly run. And it is heading straight for the Hornets' most proficient dribbler -- the kid with the blond bowl haircut and the flying feet. The coach's kid. The lefty.

"Watch out for him," Pinchotti yells to his two defenders as they charge past. "That kid is dangerous."

If they hear him at all, they don't heed the warning. My boy is a blur now. He has always had a comically short stride on the run, and he moves so fast that it gives him an almost reckless appearance that worries opponents. He sweeps in behind Shelby's pass and pushes the ball out in front of him, away from the center of the field, in a wide arc that takes it very close to the right touchline. It's a practiced maneuver, designed to draw the defenders to him while cutting off their ability to move on the ball -- because most youth players have no idea that it is perfectly legal in soccer to step out-of-bounds to make a play, as long as the ball stays on the field. Hemmed in against the line, they rush straight at him, shoulder to shoulder. They're falling for one of his best tricks.

IT HELPS THAT BEN HAS BEEN PLAYING this game since he was old enough to walk. Before he could even speak in complete sentences, my son was being schooled in the basic mechanics of soccer by a West African nanny who would roll balls at him on the lawn and urge him in French to blast them to la lune -- the moon, outer space, his destiny. Her name was Maggie Dahl. She was a political refugee from Togo who fled under a death warrant for participating in a rural voter registration drive. An accountant by training, her English was not nearly serviceable enough to pursue her trade in the United States, so, like so many other immigrant women in the Washington area -- where industrial jobs are all but nonexistent -- she sought work in child care. When she moved in with us, in 1996, a great blessing was visited upon the future Hornet with the bowl haircut.

In her heavily accented English, Maggie pronounced her national game "sock-air," and on warm summer nights, as Ben whacked a ball around in the yard, she patiently explained to me that it is not merely a game, but rather "the game" -- so deeply ingrained in the fabric of everyday life in her country that it is, in many ways, the primary instrument of socialization for young children. How the game is played in one corner of the globe or another is seen as a manifestation of national character and identity everywhere else. And in learning how to play, children internalize the traits that are valued in their society. Maggie insisted that these things were generally understood everywhere but here. Soccer was a way of life, she assured me, the one perfect metaphor for everything.

"In Brazil, oh!" she said. "It is très beautiful! They play such soccer there, it is like dancing."