Tag: sports

Out-of-season shape

There are no two ways around it. I am getting old. I’m one of the two oldest guys on my veteran’s team and it’s not even close; the average age is more than ten years younger than me. In the weight room, I’m usually one of the three oldest guys there. And the gradual weight of age and injuries is accumulating to the point that there are days when there are more exercises that I can’t do at full weight than those that I can.

And yet, ironically, in some ways I’m in better shape than I’ve been for fifteen years. I started stretching regularly and I’m back up to 130 degrees on the leg machine, which isn’t as good as the 150 degrees it was when I could kick six-footers in the face, but it’s a lot better than the 90 degrees it was when I first broke it out again. I definitely recovered a modicum of my lost speed through increasing my stride length. I’m not only able to play complete games when necessary, but I’m also the only player that the captain feels able to take out and put back in again, knowing that I’ll still be at something close to full speed by the end of the game.

What I’ve done is back down on the heavier weight exercises, increase the lighter ones, and increase my running. I run at least one 5k per week, ideally one 40-minute session that covers between 5.5k and 6k, and if I can find the time, a second 20-minute session doing 2.5k to 3k. It’s the time that matters, not the distance; we play 40-minute halves and I’m trying to keep my body accustomed to that time frame.

Despite the running, I’m at 192 these days, and I’m topping out my curls with 5-rep sets using the 60-pound dumbbells. I think I need to get down to 185 to really get ripped, but that’s not too bad considering all the holiday feasting of the last six weeks.

Three lifting days, two running days, and seven stretching days per week seems to be doing the trick. There is no fooling Father Time, but at least one can hope to mitigate some of his more deleterious effects.

Last season ended pretty well, as I got our only goal in the last game and ended up on five in seven fall games. I’d likely have had a second goal if the ball hadn’t abruptly stopped in a mud patch in the area when I was breaking on goal again.  But I’d really like to make it to the ten-goal mark in a half-season, so I’m training hard in order to try and make that possible. At the very least, I’d like to be sure I end up in double-digits for the full season as it’s already clear that playing a spoiler role is the most we can do.

We’ve actually played very well against the better teams, garnering ties against two of the top three teams, but we’ve also been playing down to the level of the lesser teams and failing to put them away. I’d like to win one more championship before I stop playing for good, but it won’t happen this year.

Finally, a good game

The difference between watching games between two teams who should be in the playoffs – Dallas and Detroit – and teams who shouldn’t be – pretty much the other six teams – was glaringly apparent yesterday. I think the playoffs worked best when there were three divisions and one wild card team; just as there are more teams than there are NFL-caliber quarterbacks, there are more teams in the playoffs than there are playoff-caliber teams.

But as long as there are four divisions (which works well for other reasons), it would be better if there was only one wild card team and one first-round bye. I have no regard for the “best teams” argument, because the only “best teams” that matter are already guaranteed entry. If you’re only the third-best team in your four-team division, you shouldn’t be in the playoffs. If you’re only the third-best of the non-division winners, you shouldn’t be in the playoffs.

The Eagles, who lost to the Seahawks, Cowboys, and Redskins before beating the Giants to close out the season, weren’t going to do anything that Carolina won’t do, which is to say lose to the Seahawks next weekend.

As for last night’s game, it was good to see Tony Romo finally get the playoff monkey off his back. The controversial call shouldn’t have been made in the first place, because a) it was offensive pass interference when Pettigrew grabbed Hitchens’s facemask, b) the contact was minimal, and most importantly, c) it was a completely uncatchable ball. Stafford literally hit Hitchens in the back right in the numbers; there was absolutely no way the receiver had any sort of play on the ball. Furtheremore, there is no “face-guarding” rule in the NFL, or, for that matter, in NCAA football; it is only deemed pass interference in high school football, specifically National Federation of State High School Associations rule 7-5-10: “Any player hinders an opponent’s vision without making an
attempt to catch, intercept or bat the ball, even though no contact was
made.”

When the officials call pass interference on a player who hasn’t turned around, they do so because he has crashed into a receiver who is coming back for a high ball, to distinguish them from defenders who crash into a receiver when they themselves are going for a high ball. That was not the case in the play being discussed, for the obvious reason that Stafford threw the ball into the Dallas linebacker’s back. Recall the NFL’s pass interference rules: Actions that do not constitute pass interference include but are not limited to: (c) Contact that would normally be considered pass interference, but the pass is clearly uncatchable by the involved players.

ESPN’s Todd Archer asked Pete Morelli (who is admittedly not a very good ref: see the NFC Championship Game 2009) about the call turned non-call:

Todd Archer: Can you talk about the decision to overturn the call and why you overturned the call?
Pete Morelli: The back judge threw his flag for defensive pass
interference. We got other information from another official from a
different angle that thought the contact was minimal and didn’t warrant
pass interference. He thought it was face-guarding.
Archer: Which official?
Morelli: The head linesman.
Archer: What did you see?
Morelli: It’s not my responsibility. I’m a hundred miles away.
Archer: Face-guarding is not a foul?
Morelli: Face-guarding is not a foul. It is a penalty in college but not in professional football.
Archer: What is the process you go through after you announce the call? Should you have waited before you announced the call?
Morelli: Probably, yes. The information came and then the officials got
together a little bit later, after it was given to me, the first
information. It would have probably been smoother if we got together.

He did the right thing. It’s better to get it right and look like a fool or a fix than allow a bad call to stand when he knows better. As for the decision not to flag Dez Bryant for coming onto the field without his helmet in protest of the call, I think it was a correct no-call. We want to see the refs let minor things go in the playoffs (that’s why Suh was permitted to play when his suspension would never have been overturned in the regular season), and no one wants to see a playoff game settled by an off-the-field foul by an excited player in an overheated moment that harmed no one. I wish more NFL games this year had been refereed in the style Dallas-Detroit was; I simply do not understand those fans who seem to enjoy a blizzard of yellow flags and seeing every third play called back.

If the Lions fans want to blame anyone, they should blame Jim Caldwell for failing to go for it on 4th-and-1. The football gods obviously did not like that, as they promptly punished the Lions with a 10-yard shanked punt. Caldwell played to avoid losing throughout the second half; switching to a four-man rush and abandoning the blitz took the pressure off Romo, who made Detroit pay for it.

And besides, those petty flags would have caused us to miss the redemption of Dallas’s rookie defensive end, whose utter stupidity in not falling down to seal the game once he’d recovered the fumble was made up for by creating and recovering another fumble to win the game. In the end, with two minutes left and two timeouts, Stafford only managed to produce two fumbles. Game over. The better team won.

NFL Playoffs: Wildcard round

I felt rather sorry for the Cardinals. I have no doubt they would have won with even a journeyman starter, but it’s a little tough to generate offense with a 4th-stringer. As for the Steelers, it’s obviously time for Polamalu to retire. I don’t know why the media is always down on Flacco; he may not be Manning, Brady, or Rodgers, but you can obviously win a Super Bowl with him.

The Bengals are similarly overmatched. They’re playing hard, but I can’t see them coming back against the Colts. The only game I’m even all that interested in is Detroit-Dallas. I can’t help but notice that no one is clamoring for an expanded playoffs considering how bad the first-round matchups have been this year.

As for the Super Bowl, New England beating Seattle as the last hurrah of Brady and Belichick is my prediction.

I miss the bowls

When I was a kid, New Years Day meant hearing my mother, who grew up in Pasadena, watching the Rose Parade. I’d watch the four bowl games, the Sugar Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and finally, the Orange Bowl.

And sure, it wasn’t always possible to know who the “national champion” was, but nobody really cared all that much, what was important was that the Big Ten won the Rose Bowl, that Oklahoma didn’t win the Orange Bowl, and that the games featuring the sort of matchups you hadn’t seen before were either a) good games or b) ridiculous blowouts. I don’t even know why I hated Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Michigan, and Notre Dame, or why I liked Baylor, Texas, Ohio State, Pitt, Florida State, and USC. But I had a favorite in every major conference

For me, things started to fall apart with the Bowl Coalition in 1992. The Big 10 and Pac-10 wisely held out for three years, but everything went south, literally, with the Bowl Alliance and the creation of a national championship played at the Fiesta Bowl on January 2nd.

Now, I no longer even watch college football on New Years Day. I don’t know who is playing in the bowls, and I don’t care. Are people any happier or more interested in college football now that the “national championship” is the de facto SEC championship? It appears I’m not the only one who is less interested in the unambiguous national championship system.

  • “The average attendance for bowl games has declined each of the past six
    seasons, down to 49,116 last season, the lowest mark since 1978-79, when
    there were 15 bowls, according to the NCAA bowl record book.”
  • “The Michigan State/Stanford Rose Bowl earned the top audience of the BCS
    slate, with a 10.2 U.S. rating and 18.6 million viewers on ESPN New
    Year’s Day — up 9% in ratings and viewership from Stanford/Wisconsin
    last year (9.4, 17.0M), and flat and up 6%, respectively, from
    TCU/Wisconsin in 2011 (10.2, 17.6M). Despite the increase, the game tied
    the second-lowest rating ever for the Rose Bowl.
  • The UCF/Baylor Fiesta Bowl drew a 6.6 U.S. rating and 11.2 million
    viewers Tuesday night, down 11% in ratings and 9% in viewership from
    Oregon/Kansas State last year (7.4, 12.3M), and down 21% and 18%,
    respectively, from Oklahoma State/Stanford in 2011 (8.4, 13.6M). The
    game earned the second-lowest rating and viewership for the Fiesta Bowl
    in the BCS era, ahead of only Oklahoma/Connecticut in 2010 (6.2, 10.8M). Overall, the Orange and Fiesta Bowls rank among the ten lowest rated BCS bowls of all time. 
  • In 2014, the BCS Championship game drew in 25.5 million viewers, and that was just the ninth-watched BCS title in history.

Here is what appears to be the root of the problem: “They (ESPN) need live content, even mediocre live content,” Maestas
told USA TODAY Sports. “Even 400,000 viewers in a sad bowl with 25,000
people in the stands is getting better (viewership) than 100 channels
out there.”

But what’s good for ESPN isn’t necessarily good for the game of college football. Quite the opposite, it appears. At least the NFL, for all its lunatic lurching about in its attempt to grow its female audience, is in control of its own destiny. This may explain why I won’t be watching a single bowl game today, but will not miss a single playoff game this weekend.

A portrait in lunacy

Considering that NFL head coach is one of the most difficult positions to successful fill anywhere in the world, it’s simply mind-blowing that what passes for the 49ers brain trust decided to get rid of Jim Harbaugh:

As expected, the Jim Harbaugh era has ended in San Francisco. The team has announced that Harbaugh and the franchise have mutually agreed to part ways after four years together.

“Jim and I have come to the conclusion that it is in our mutual best interest to move in different directions,” CEO Jed York said.  “We thank Jim for bringing a tremendous competitive nature and a great passion for the game to the 49ers.  He and his staff restored a winning culture that has been the standard for our franchise throughout its history.  Their commitment and hard work resulted in a period of success that should be looked back on proudly by our organization and our fans.  We wish Jim and his family all the best.”

Per a league source, the mutual parting makes Harbaugh free and clear to take any other job, including another NFL job, with no compensation to the 49ers.  So despite multiple, persistent reports that Harbaugh would be traded, the two sides ultimately decided to walk away, with no strings attached and no further obligation. 

However, it is an eloquent lesson on the way in which the bureaucratic elements of an organization always prioritize submission over all else, including both talent and performance. Keep this in mind if you think you’re safe in your workplace simply because you do a better job than your co-workers.

If you don’t kowtow to whatever regime controls your organization, they will do their damndest to run you out, no matter what the cost to the organization. This may seem irrational, but actually, it is your assumptions that are incorrect. They don’t care what happens to the organization, at least, not as much as they do about controlling it in an unchallenged capacity.

Most of the 49ers fans I know are in despair over this; one is even considering changing his allegiance to the Oakland Raiders. And frankly, I can’t blame him, considering that the York ownership is shaping up to be even more disastrous in the long term than the Snyder ownership in Washington.

On a tangential note, I’m sorry to see the Marc Trestman era come to an end in Chicago, as he’s the friend of a friend. But unlike the San Francisco situation, it’s impossible to question that decision. Trestman’s failure with the Bears is proof that sometimes, intelligence and hard work simply isn’t sufficient for success.

“Shut up, boys,” they explained

The St. Louis police appear to have been underwhelmed by the Black Power-style Ferguson gesture made by five of the St. Louis Rams at yesterday’s game:

“The St. Louis Police Officers Association is profoundly disappointed with the members of the St. Louis Rams football team who chose to ignore the mountains of evidence released from the St. Louis County Grand Jury this week and engage in a display that police officers around the nation found tasteless, offensive and inflammatory.

“All week long, the Rams and the NFL were on the phone with the St. Louis Police Department asking for assurances that the players and the fans would be kept safe from the violent protesters who had rioted, looted, and burned buildings in Ferguson. Our officers have been working 12-hour shifts for over a week, they had days off including Thanksgiving cancelled so that they could defend this community from those on the streets that perpetuate this myth that Michael Brown was executed by a brother police officer and then, as the players and their fans sit safely in their dome under the watchful protection of hundreds of St. Louis’s finest, they take to the turf to call a now-exonerated officer a murderer, that is way out-of-bounds, to put it in football parlance.

“I know that there are those that will say that these players are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Well, I’ve got news for people who think that way, cops have first amendment rights too, and we plan to exercise ours.  I’d remind the NFL and their players that it is not the violent thugs burning down buildings that buy their advertiser’s products.  It’s cops and the good people of St. Louis and other NFL towns that do.”

It was a remarkably stupid gesture. But young men are foolish, and spoiled young black male athletes are more foolish than most. It signifies nothing. What I find more interesting about their gesture was the public reaction to it. It tends to support the notion that blacks have lost the average white American’s inclination towards sympathy. The 60’s-instilled white guilt over slavery and white enthusiasm for the civil rights charade is rapidly dissipating in a considerably less white country where tens of millions of Hispanics, Asians, and Arabs simply don’t give a quantumn of a damn about blacks or their historical sob story.

“Oh, lawsy, mah great-great-great grandpappy wuz a slave!”

“Qué chingados, cabron. I just got here five minutes ago. What the fuck do I care about your pendejo grandpappy?” 

This mass indifference quite naturally causes many whites to wonder why they are expected to feel guilty about the continued inability of Africans to behave, or even to want to behave, like 18th century Englishmen. Not that there aren’t plenty of white SJWs who will salute the five players for their “courage” and “inclusivity” and spew all the customary buzzwords, but the anger and contempt most fans felt for the anti-police gesture was palpable on a number of sports-related sites. I also suspect that the half-hearted nature of the riots may have been in part due to blacks correctly sensing that there are an increasing number of whites who would welcome the race war that blacks have been threatening for fifty years.

It’s easy to be magnanimous and optimistic about the prospects for a permanent state of kumbaya when everything is going well economically and the majority population doesn’t feel threatened. It’s when the economy goes south and the majority is in the process of becoming a minority itself that race relations, class relations, and ideological relations tend to disintegrate.

Remember, majorities exist in almost every human society for a reason. And where they don’t exist naturally, they usually create themselves, often through less than entirely peaceful means. Fred points out the observable reality:

We need to realize, but will not, that blacks are a separate people, self-aware and cohesive. They have their own dialect, music, and modes of dress, which they value. They name their kids LaToya and Keeshawn instead of Robert and Carol because they want to maintain a distance from whites.

The races spring from utterly different cultures. Compulsory integration is thus a form of social imperialism in which whites try to force blacks to conform to European norms. Blacks have no historical connection at all to Greece, Rome, the Old Testament Hebrews, Christianity, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, to Newton, LaGrange, or Galois, to the philosophic tradition of Thales, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, or Hegel. Nor do Eurowhites have roots in Africa. No commonality exists.

Postracialism isn’t merely one of the many equalitarian unicorns, it is intrinsically opposed to black self-determination. They don’t want to be white. They have their own identity, their own pride, and their own culture. And there is nothing wrong with that, except for the fact that it has been forcibly intertwined with white American culture.

The pursuit of safety

Is often counterproductive, as was seen in the accidental death of the young EnglishAustralian cricketer, Phil Hughes:

Most of my career I batted on uncovered pitches without a helmet. This taught me how important it was to have a good technique and courage against fast bowling. Why? Because you required judgment of what to leave, when to duck and when to play the ball. But you had to be even more careful about attempting to hook because at the back of your mind you knew that if you made a mistake you could get seriously hurt.

I once asked Len Hutton, a great iconic player, whether he hooked Ray Lindwall or Keith Miller. He said he once tried it at the Oval and he got halfway through the shot then cut it out because out of the corner of his eye he could see the hospital. That tells you everything.

Before the advent of helmets in Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the late 1970s, if a team had a genuine fast bowler, tail-enders did not hang around. You did not see tail-enders propping and copping. They played shots or got out because at the back of their mind they were terrified of being hurt.

Helmets have unfortunately now taken away a lot of that fear and have given every batsman a false sense of security. They feel safe and people will now attempt to either pull or hook almost every short ball that is bowled at them.

Even tail-enders come in and bat like millionaires, flailing away and having a go at short balls with poor technique and a lack of footwork. Helmets have made batsmen feel safe in the belief that they cannot be hurt and made batsmen more carefree and careless. As a consequence more players get hit on the helmet nowadays than ever got hit on the head, before we batted without this protection.

This is true in the broader historical culture as well as the world of sport. We attempt to protect our women and children, to ensconce them in a rubber-and-plastic safety bubble that will keep them from all harm, forgetting that in protecting them from the petty dangers, they tend to forget about the existence of the more serious ones.

It is when we feel invulnerable that we are most susceptible to being taught otherwise.

So much for the reinvention of the position

Steve Sailer observes that despite the NFL’s being openly desirous of the success of black quarterbacks, they’re simply not very successful in the league anymore despite the growing number of them coming out of the NCAA:

Back in 2003 Rush Limbaugh got fired from being a color commentator on Monday Night Football for pointing out that the media had been pushing hard for more black quarterbacks for decades. So Rush got fired because everybody knows that the only reasons don’t make up 75% of NFL starting quarterbacks is discrimination and the burdens of history.

So I like to check in on how black quarterbacks are doing. This QBR rating counts their running contributions, so it’s the best measure yet.

Here are black QBs (treating Colin Kaepernick as black) who ranked in the top 20 for each year as far back as QBR has been calculated. I counted the top 20 in a 32 team league since it’s pretty safe to assume that if you rank in the top 20 you deserve to start, whereas if you are, say, 29th, then there’s probably a benchwarmer another team that deserves your job.

2014: 2 (Russell Wilson 14, Colin Kaepernick 16)

2013: 3 (Colin Kaepernick 6, Russell Wilson 12, Cam Newton 13)

2012: 4 (Robert Griffin 5, Russell Wilson 6, Cam Newton 14, Josh Freeman 15)

2011: 2 (Michael Vick 7, Cam Newton 15)

2010: 3 (Michael Vick 5, Josh Freeman 6, David Garrard 13)

2009: 3 (Vince Young 7, Donovan McNabb 13, David Garrard 19)

2008: 3 (David Garrard 16, Jason Campbell 17, Donovan McNabb 18)

2007: 4 (David Garrard 3, Jason Campbell 15, Donovan McNabb 16, Tarvaris Jackson 19)

2006: 4 (Steve McNair 6, Donovan McNabb 7, Vince Young 11, Michael Vick 15)

It’s fairly obvious to me why blacks are increasingly unable to successfully play quarterback in the NFL. The new passing rules tend to benefit the mentally faster quarterbacks, nearly all of whom are white. Michael Vick’s much-ballyhooed “reinvention of the quarterback position” has failed for the very reason that detractors of running quarterbacks predicted: sooner or later a running quarterback is going to take a hit that slows him down.

Look at the difference between Robert Griffin and Andrew Luck. In 2012, you could seriously argue that Griffin was the better quarterback. One injury later, Griffin has lost his superhuman quickness, and having proved himself to be almost embarrassingly incompetent as a pocket passer, has just been benched for the second and possibly final time as a Redskin. He simply can’t see the field and process it quickly enough; the image shows a play in which he had no less than FIVE receivers open and somehow ended up throwing it away while also managing to take a shot from a defensive lineman.

It’s almost always the same. A running quarterback simply isn’t going to a) start many games in a row, or b) maintain his peak level of play very long. As a long-suffering Vikings fan, I very well know the difference between a scrambler who moves around to buy time – Tarkenton, Cunningham – and a runner who takes off in a panic as soon as his scripted first option fails to come open: Gannon, Culpepper, Ponder, although hopefully NOT Bridgewater.

NFL quarterback is arguably the single most difficult thing for a human being to do. It requires a bizarre blend of physical ability and mental agility that is incredibly rare, and today’s physically gifted runners are the modern version of yesterday’s rocket-armed blockheads. I find it very puzzling that NFL teams still haven’t learned that you simply can’t teach seeing the field and reacting to it. It’s interesting to see that Tarvaris Jackson cracked the top 20 in QBR at one point. He may have been the most perfectly coached quarterback I’ve ever seen play. He was a team player, he worked very hard, he always did his absolute best, he listened to his coaches as if their words were coming from on high, and his movements were so perfectly rehearsed that he looked like a well-oiled robot. I wasn’t at all surprised to see him go on to have a very successful career as a backup quarterback. But he just processed everything too slowly. Drop back, check one, check two… sack!

Anyhow, I won’t be surprised if in another year or two, we start seeing the football media start to complain that the new passing rules are racist. Because they observably place a premium on a particular skill that no current black quarterbacks – yes, zero, which you’ll know if you’ve seen Wilson or Kaepernick play this year – appear to possess.

FIRE GOODELL NOW

Actually, forget firing him. Roger Goodell should be stripped naked, whipped with tree branches, and then locked in an elevator with Ray Rice and Bill Simmons until he resigns:

Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings was notified today that he has
been suspended without pay for at least the remainder of the 2014 NFL
season, and will not be considered for reinstatement before April 15,
for violating the NFL Personal Conduct Policy in an incident of abusive
discipline that he inflicted on his four-year-old son last May. Peterson
pled no contest on November 4 in state court in Montgomery County,
Texas to reckless assault of the child.

What an utter fucking joke. I hope the NFLPA declares a strike. As if Goodell gives a quantum of a damn about anything but how he thinks the league looks to women who don’t watch football anyhow.

“The NFL Players Association released a statement shortly after the NFL
announced Peterson’s suspension, and in it the union said the league
lacks the credibility to appropriately handle player discipline. Smith
said the players have lost confidence in Goodell.”

So have the fans. The real fans of the game.

The 18-year delta

Ender was excited last night because, with his B team season at an end, the first team had extended an open invitation to the B team players to practice with them. It’s a chance for the coaches to see which young men are ready to play with the men, and who the eventual up-and-comers are. The first team practices at the same time my veteran’s team does, so we drove over to the clubhouse together despite a howling wind and a black sky that threatened some serious rain.

It’s getting near the end of our season too, three-quarters of my teammates are banged up, and I discovered when I got there that a) the veteran’s practice had been canceled, and b) the first team was missing half its players due to vacations and whatnot. But I know several of the first team players and coaches fairly well because we’re permitted to field two players below 32, but over 25, and some of them play with us when they have an evening free. So, I asked one of the guys I know if they needed an extra player – thinking that they were just going to scrimmage – and he suggested that I stick around and join the practice. So, I changed, put on my cleats, and joined them in the middle of the field.

There were about eight of Ender’s teammates there, huddled together against the cold rain that had begun to fall and vaguely intimidated by the first team players. They know who I am, of course, and were visibly startled by my presence there – let’s face it, no one is more contemptuous of a middle-aged dad than an elite teenage athlete – and were further taken aback when the player-coach leading the practice greeted me with an enthusiastic handshake-hug. What they didn’t know is that I’ve played several games up front with Stefan and we are molto sympatico on the field despite him being much better than I am. We’ve both given assists on each other’s goals, and like most stellar strikers, he prefers having a strike partner who looks to feed him the ball rather than shoot.

However, Stefan had a full practice in mind, not a scrimmage. It wasn’t brutal, but it was strenuous, enough so that he came over twice during the repeated agility drills to make sure I wasn’t about to keel over. His concern wasn’t entirely unjustified, as I’m beyond old by first team standards; the oldest player on the team is 28. I would have been insulted, especially given the fact that I was pretty much keeping up with the tall B team defender in front of me in the line, were it not for the fact that I was fairly certain two more run-throughs would have resulted in vomiting. Ender and the midfielders were having no problem, but some of the defenders looked to be mildly in shock at doing 2.5x more repetitions, and doing them at faster speed, than they’d ever done before. Fortunately, we moved on to the team keep-away drill next, which is fast-paced, but gives you a chance to catch your breath if need be. Which was, in fact, the case.

The bad thing about being a sprinter is that you quickly run out of steam. The good thing about being a sprinter is that you bounce back just as fast. So, by the time we were doing the final drill, which involved a 20-meter sprint to a cone, turning around to receive the ball and firing a one-touch shot on goal, most of the B team kids had slowed to a jog, but I was still running. I even managed to put a few past Ender, who was alternating with the first team keeper in net. Ender acquitted himself well, making some diving saves and drawing praise from the first-team guys, which pleased him immensely.

I was more than a little pleased myself when, back in the clubhouse, Stefan clapped me on the shoulder and said, “hey, why don’t you come to the next one too?” Which, I have decided, I am absolutely going to do. It’s not that I will ever play for the first team, but I suspect he may find me to be useful in goading the younger players. None of them will have any excuse for falling behind, given that I’m literally three decades older than most of them. The best compliment, however, came from Ender, when I asked him if he’d found it embarrassing to have his old man running around the field.

“Actually, Dad, I didn’t even notice except for when you were the one shooting at me.”

I’ll take it. It’s a rare pleasure to be able to play sports with one’s son on an equal footing, so I will enjoy it, however long it lasts.