Very often, our initial experiences in sport define our relationship with it. Our in-house writer takes us through his first time at a football stadium.
My father is the best of men.
He worked in the woods of Northern California, felling trees and wrestling them from the hillside to the lumber mill. It was June and his operation was in full swing after the long winter layoff, when snow and mud made the old logging roads that snaked through the Sierra Nevada Mountains inaccessible. Every moment counts in an industry with such a long off-season. Yet he had taken a Wednesday off to drive me and my brother the four hours to San Jose to see our first professional football match. He had little more than a passing interest in the game, but I was obsessed.
Every day, I would run outside with my worn Mitre ball and use the side of my house for target practice. The thump of the ball hitting that wall was the metronome of my childhood, and that rhythm peaked during the summer of 1998. Everybody thinks the best World Cup was the first he or she fully remembers. I had just turned 13, and I lived every moment of France ’98. By the end of the tournament, I had amassed a small library of recorded games on VHS tapes. It was all there: Prosinecki’s silky skills, the Laudrup brothers, Bergkamp’s incredible volley against Argentina, the Nike advert with Brazil playing in an airport, Beckham’s moment of madness, and France’s unlikely cast of heroes dragging themselves to World Cup glory.