Grown Man Assaults Child at Soccer Game Cliché Nightmare
by Jimmy Jazz

I have trouble understanding why the Palestinians and Israelis, the Kosavar Albanians and the Serbs, the East Timorese and the Indosesians, the Hutus and the Tsutsis, the Russians and the Chechyns can't get along without fighting, yet I found myself ready kill a soccer dad from the burbs.
 

My eleven year old daughter had to be at her Nutcracker ballet performance at 4:00 p.m. We didn’t expect to be playing soccer 40 miles north in the suburbs that day, but her team made it to the play-offs. The Pumas are some tough girls. After a victory a week before they got in trouble for slapping the other team’s hands too hard in the obligatory after-game high five. It had been tough balancing California’s new three hours of homework per night with ballet practice on Thursday and Saturday and soccer on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday, but we had made it to the finale of both. My kid is not one of the tough ones on the team, she has a bad habit of ducking when the ball comes at her. She’s clearly more ballerina than soccer hooligan. (Not that ballet doesn’t require strength and endurance, but they do wear frilly hair bows and pink tights.) My daughter wanted to quit the soccer team early in the season because some of the other girls were making fun of her. We asked the coach to have a talk with the team about being kind to each other which he twisted into a Knute Rockney speech about how they were good enough to be a winning team.

 It had been a long day. The first game was at nine a.m. The Pumas trounced the other team 5-1. I was glad that the other team scored a point, though our coach said in the play-off tournament we could get more points for a shut out. Fortunately our girls aren’t paying enough attention to appreciate the game at that level though both our goalies have shed tears after giving up a loss, and the days of peewee soccer when they would come up after the game and ask “Did we win?” were long gone. My daughter plays defender. She does her best to keep the other team from scoring, but sometimes they get past her, she accepts that this will happen. As soccer parents we expect her to give it her best, to run as fast as she can, to kick the ball. If she does an occasional Charlie Brown kick and misses the ball we still give her credit for trying. If she doesn’t run, or looks lazy on the field we get on her.

 I get excited when our team scores a goal or when my kid stops the other team’s advance. I yell, I cheer, I jump up and down. Yet, I was glad that my kid had a ballet performance at the same time as the game two weeks before the play-offs. Apparently, the referee was making some bad calls and our coach told him to “Pull his head out of his ass.” Then one of our little girls got a red card for shoulder checking a girl on the other team. Everyone on our side said she was going for the ball. A parent on the other side of the field yelled, “You should be ashamed to teach your kids to play like that!” I’m glad I wasn’t there.

 I wish I hadn’t been at the second play-off game, but I was. Our second game that day was supposed to start at 1:30, but didn’t get under way until 2:15. Our kids had been sitting or playing in the sun all day, five hours, like a part time job. We tried to keep them quiet, and keep them from eating too much sugar, but five hours is too much. Our usually tough girls played like wilted pansies. My daughter wanted to be taken out at the half because she had a sun burn. They were physically spent and got whooped by a team called the Blueberries. The parents on the Blueberry side were chanting “Shut out! Shut out!” when the score was four-zip in the fourth quarter but one of our girls put one in the net at the whistle. As soon as the game ended I told the coach that we had to rush to ballet and we left. My daughter came from her spot as defender, grabbed her snack (still the most fun part of the game) and we rushed to the car. We left before the high five ritual and the “good game tunnel.” The parents make a tunnel with their arms and cheer the girls as they run through. Anyway, we skipped that and ran to the car. It was 3:20 and we were going to be late for the ballet performance. As I was putting the beach chairs, cooler and umbrella into the trunk I saw this man running full speed toward us. I gave it little concern until he got right up to my daughter as she was waiting to get in the passenger side of the car and he started yelling at her.

 “Who do you think you are hitting that girl on our team and sneaking away!”
 Before he finished his sentence I was between him and my daughter. She was already scared to tears. Her mother pushed her into the car while I confronted the psycho-soccer dad. I was like a mountain lion defending the cub, I mean I lost control. “You better back the fuck up mother fucker!” I was screaming and physically pushing him back. My wife had also lost control and was yelling, “Get away from us asshole! My daughter didn’t hit anybody.” We had no idea what happened. We gleamed from the chaos that a girl on the Blueberries got hit by someone on our team, but the scene was too aggravated to get any straight facts. I couldn’t believe this forty year old man yelled at my kid. He doesn’t know me, I could have beat him to death with the metal umbrella pole I placed in the trunk a second before. I could have had a gun under the seat. Instead I shoved his chest to back him away. By this point two other Blueberry fathers ran up and were confronting us, one shouting “My daughter got hit!” and another yelling “Your daughter did it!” In retrospect it was a good thing none of the father’s from our team were around. We’ve got a biker who has hit other bikers over the head with pool sticks in barroom brawls, a six foot-four inch bouncer at a punk rock club,  a pair of barrel-chested construction workers with fake soda labels for their Budweiser cans and a wrestling coach who had been in training for the Universal Fighting Championship. Of course we do have a boorish little accountant who would talk them into submission, stupefying all with a non sequitur anecdote.

 So it was just me, the poet, shouting at this soccer-asshole, ready to fight, being held back by my wife who doesn’t want me to throw my bad neck out and prodded forward into blind rage by my daughter’s convulsive sobbing. My fists were clenched. Why didn’t he come up to me and say, “We have a problem that needs to be resolved?” Why didn’t he tell the coach or the referee. No he ran up on an eleven year old girl.
 Earlier in the day I was putting something away in the car and I overheard some parents sitting in a Crown Victoria talking about how the kids from our neighborhood’s soccer teams are coached to play dirty. There’s a prevailing attitude that speaks directly to class and race. Yes, the girls on our team have darker skin. The girl with the darkest skin on the team got the most yellow cards from white referees across the season. Yes, I am wearing Dr. Marten boots and a studded belt, and that’s all they need to see.

 The next day my daughter laughed at the man, “He yelled ‘Go to ballet then!’ I could have came up with a better come back than that.”

Apparently in the middle of the melee I had shouted that we were just trying to make it to our ballet performance. At the point of his retort the referees from the soccer game heard the shouting and came between us. One of the refs said to me, “What do you want to fight? Just get out of here.” My wife told the irate Blueberry boosters to take it up with our coach. We had bought into the stereotype, believing that perhaps one of our ghetto eleven year olds had been a sore looser and socked a Blueberry. For that I feel sorry. I also feel sorry that our coach saw it as an opportunity to get the Blueberries disqualified from the play-offs. At any rate traffic was light and we made it to the theater at 3:59. My daughter ran in with puffy red eyes, leapt into her costume and onto the stage on cue.

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