I grew up a small-town jock. This modest social role came with a number of comforting certainties. For instance, from about seventh grade onward, I played the same sports with basically the same teammates each season. My town was just barely large enough to field one team in most sports.
In our competitions, we faced mostly the same kids from each nearby town. And we all knew our assignments right away. For instance, on the soccer field, I was always the goalkeeper. I didn’t have any talent for the position, really — but I worked hard, obeyed coaching directives, and occasionally got lucky.
In soccer, I also had a ready-made nemesis. This was the regular goalkeeper from the next town over. His name was Ramon. Fucking Ramon.
It wasn’t just that Ramon was a better goalkeeper than I was. Or that his team kept beating mine, season after season. As a budding existentialist, I could handle those disappointments reasonably well: Free yourself from desire, young grasshopper. But what really bugged me about Ramon was that each time we faced each other, he had always developed some brand-new competitive edge on me. I wasn’t Ramon’s nemesis — I wasn’t good enough to qualify for that gig — but I still felt like he was trying to show me up personally each time we met:
- One year, Ramon’s coach was a German who was a bona-fide professional. While my coaches were usually volunteers — insurance adjusters or pharmaceutical salesmen whose kids played on the team.
- One year, Ramon’s team played a full schedule during both the fall and spring seasons. While I had to skip spring soccer because I also played tennis.
- One year, Ramon developed the ability to free-kick or punt all the way from his penalty box to mine. While I usually relied on a defender to handle our free kicks, and I tended to punt (ahem) for accuracy rather than distance.
- During our high-school sophomore year, Ramon not only obtained his driver’s license but a car too — a new Monte Carlo, for God’s sake. While I wasn’t eligible to take the wheel until much later, and I had no vehicle to drive anyway.
- During our junior year, the countywide rumor mill was constantly fizzing with stories about Ramon’s many sexual conquests (Monte-Carlo-enabled, probably). While I did manage to take the occasional cheerleader to the prom — but, yeah, no.
In the summer before our senior year of high school, Ramon’s and my regular teams faced each other once again, this time under special circumstances: An invitational tournament. Of course in the round-robin stage both our teams easily dispatched our opponents and breezed into the final. Although the playing conditions were a bit unusual: There had been torrential rains in the week before the tournament, and the low-lying soccer fields drained very poorly.
During the subsequent climactic battle between Ramon’s team and mine, something inexplicable happened: I began to feel unaccountably comfortable in the net. More comfortable than I felt on our home field, even. Surely this was a result of playing so many games on the same fields in the course of a single long weekend. But the effect was so strong that I started performing differently. I played much more aggressively. And well over my head.
But it worked. Twice during the championship game, I managed to swipe the ball dramatically away from opposing strikers inside the penalty box, when there were no defenders between them and me and all they had to do was square up and shoot. Somehow I managed to smother both scoring threats before either striker could turn around. (Very muddy field, remember.) I was simply dominant in the box, and completely shut out Ramon’s team. Zero goals.
But of course Ramon had blanked our offense as well: The final score in regulation was nil-nil. So the tournament winner would be settled by a shootout. Are you following this? The tournament would basically be decided by a head-to-head competition between the two goalies — Ramon and me.
I braced myself for a loss. Per my budding existentialism, of course. Plus the very significant fact that my team had never beaten Ramon’s before: For us, this 0-0 tie at the end of regulation was already a victory of sorts. For me, at least. Now I just wanted to get through the shootout without embarrassing myself.
But I still had that odd feeling of comfort and confidence in the net. Now, let’s be clear, a goalkeeper usually finds nothing comforting about lining up to defend against a penalty kick. That penalty spot, just twelve yards from the goal line and dead-center between the posts, is every goalkeeper’s least-favorite spot on the field. It’s so absurdly close; any striker should be able to score on anyone from there, easily. The unforgiving location of that penalty spot renders all of us goalkeepers equally helpless.
The main question that a goalkeeper faces at the moment of the penalty kick is which part of the goal to defend. You have three basic choices: You can guess left post; you can guess right post; or you can stay put and just try to react, playing mostly the middle of the goalmouth. Defending against a penalty shot is basically a head game, a game more of chance than of skill. Goalkeepers hate shootouts.
But for some reason, I didn’t hate this one. I started to have that strange sensation which people sometimes describe in moments like this: I could almost see what was going to happen next, before it occurred.
Shooter Number 1 aimed to the right, but his shot wound up veering wide of the net. This is a terrible mistake by any penalty-shooter. It’s like leaving a makeable putt short in golf — it’s a shot that doesn’t even have a chance of being successful.
Shooter Number 2 booted his shot over the crossbar. Same mistake by him, there.
Facing the first two shots, I had guessed right once and wrong once — but my guesses ultimately didn’t matter, since neither shot was properly on goal. As Shooter Number 3 raced toward the penalty spot, something told me to stay home in the center of the goalmouth and just react. His shot wound up coming right at me as I stood in the center of the goal line, and I blocked it easily. In fact I relaxed so quickly that the shot almost slipped by me — that was how startled I was to see this guy punch his shot dead center, easily within my reach.
Shooter Number 4, a slight but shrewd lefty who’d scored on me many times in the past, managed to squeeze his shot just inside the right post. Okay, well played, Number 4. Nothing I could do there. One goal allowed.
Meanwhile, my own team had launched some similarly poor shots at Ramon. One of our strikers hit the crossbar — I guess that’s just unlucky, instead of unwise. But another shot went wide, and Ramon managed to reach and block one more. So we only got one shot past Ramon in four tries. This was so frustrating to me that I considered asking our coach to make me our fifth shooter. Talk about absurd overconfidence: I guess I thought I could score on Ramon simply out of fury. But I wisely refrained from making this request, and the shootout score remained tied at 1-1 as Ramon and I each prepared to face our fifth and potentially final shooter.
Ramon went first. And my team’s best scorer, our anchorman — who was also the shortest player on our team, and the coach’s son — managed to blast a high drive just off Ramon’s left glove and into the net. Score, 2-1.
Then it was time for my own final turn in the net. The outcome of this shot would decide the tournament, if I stopped it. (Or if I managed to push it wide by force of brainwaves or something.)
Standing with my heels on the goal line, I once again felt that strange calm come over me. I didn’t worry about guessing left or right. Instead, I just decided to stay home again and react as soon as the ball was hit. Shooter Number 5, our opponents’ anchor, didn’t look to me like their best scorer. He looked kind of small and scrawny. But in soccer, you can never really tell who the exceptional athletes are just by looking. (Our own anchorman and star player was a case in point.)
As Number 5 approached the ball sitting on the penalty spot, I suppose I just watched his eyes. He stung the ball low and hard — the best trajectory for scoring on a penalty kick. (High shots are actually easier for a keeper to deflect; you can leap up faster than you can fall down.) And he had aimed to his left — my right.
But not far enough. Somehow I was already falling rightward and down to my knees the moment he hit the ball. My whole body landed squarely in the ball’s path, and my hands also came forward to block the shot for good measure. It was an easy save. We’d won the tournament.
My teammates came streaming off the sideline to surround me, exactly like the climax of every PG-rated sports movie. Of course I wanted nothing to do with my teammates at that moment, and instead sought to console the unlucky shooter who’d just lost the tournament on a mediocre but not terrible shot. (Budding existentialist, I’m telling you. I was serious about this stuff even as a teen.) We’d beaten Ramon’s team. And more incredibly, I’d beaten Ramon in a head-to-head contest. This was easily the greatest day of my competitive-sporting life.
I never did get any comment from Ramon on this lone loss. In fact I’m not even certain he knew my name. (He must have learned it, though, after he finally lost to me for the first time.) When our teams later faced each other during the regular scholastic season, I was injured and didn’t play, and Ramon’s team thrashed us mercilessly. Even later, in the spring, I faced scrawny Shooter Number 5 in tennis singles, and he actually defeated me even though I was by far the better tennis player. But I didn’t care about those outcomes, not really. Because during the summer I’d achieved the impossible goal of finally beating my nemesis — and in a direct head-to-head contest, in the most dramatic way possible.
Ramon went on to own a couple of retail stores in the county and become a generally well-liked, upstanding guy. The stories about his Monte-Carlo-based conquests dried up quickly. (Or maybe I just didn’t keep up with the gossip.) If I ever ran into Ramon again today, I’m not sure what I would discuss with him. I can only think of one topic, really.
Photo by user “tabula_electronica” via Flickr.
