Last year, my son Clyde played Micro Soccer for the first time, and while he loved every minute of it, there were definitely some minutes he loved more than others (snack time, for one). However, unlike his sister Clementine, who loved snack time so much that she was willing to give up playing in exchange for the promise of more of it (well, her version of playing, at least: lying on the sidelines and crying), Clyde actually enjoyed a few things about soccer that didn’t involve juice boxes and fruit roll-ups. Unfortunately, the one thing he enjoyed the most was the fighting. Or rather, as Clyde calls it, the “wrestle-fighting.”
“Wrestle-fighting” is the term Clyde uses to explain the full body tackle he likes to perform on the members of his own team, the opposite team, and, in fact, anybody who seems like they might be the least bit willing (as well as those who clearly are not). It is a type of play that almost always happens off of the field (particularly when the coach is trying to signal Clyde that it is his turn to come in), and involves tackling, yelling, and–usually–some sort of crying. It is by far his favorite part of soccer, and it is also what makes me believe that Clyde might actually have a future in the world of major league sports; unfortunately, it is also what makes me believe that this future will most likely take place off of the playing fields.
When your favorite thing about organized sports is that they give you the opportunity to pummel passers-by, it would seem that your life in the sporting world could only follow one of two paths: you could either be that three hundred pound guy who paints his face and shouts obscenities in the end zone, or you could be a soccer hooligan. Except for the fact that blood is a lot easier to get out of clothes than the combination of greasepaint and mustard, I think that of the two I prefer the former. For one thing, it’s a lot less expensive. (Sure, both the fanatic and the hooligan have to shell out big bucks to fly in and watch their teams compete, but only the hooligan has to budget in enough money for bail.)
So how do I steer Clyde in the right direction? If I wanted him to be a hooligan it would be easy: there’s plenty of kid’s activities that would help him develop the aggression and quick reflexes he needs to throw bottles at the opposing team’s hooligans. But what about being a fanatic? Unless I find a Dungeons and Dragons club for six-year olds, it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be able to develop the kind of deep-seated social awkwardness that he’ll need to fit in as a #1 fan.
For a while there I thought that maybe I could find a nice compromise, and sign him up for something like tennis, or cricket, but then I heard about that the recent Australian Tennis Open, where–in what was possibly the world’s first instance of tennis hooliganism–roving gangs of Serbian and Croatian nationals traveled to Australia in order to mix it up with each other before the match between their two respective countrymen.
Hearing about this gave me pause–obviously, it doesn’t matter what your sport is: when the spirit is willing, the fistfight will follow. After all, didn’t Bobby Fischer come pretty close to blows with Boris Spassky during the 1972 world chess championship? And wasn’t a cricket coach just murdered in the Caribbean? I’m sure that if you looked hard enough, you could even find examples of shady dealing in the competitive world of shuffleboard or badminton.
And then, who knows what some people would do to get their hands on a +14 Elvish crossbow of accuracy–maybe even take a full body tackle.