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Full-time: A Private Investigation of Soccer

It’s easy to fool yourself, for the first half of your life, into believing your life is unique, you’re somehow special. In the second half, you have to stop fooling yourself. You slowly grow up.

Full-time is a memoir about putting both halves together. This non-fiction examination of the culture of soccer—to be published by McClelland & Stewart [Douglas Gibson Books] in the Spring of 2008—will describe a year in the life of an Over-50s soccer team that travels from Vancouver to the south of Spain to play against a team of ex-professionals from the Spanish First Division in June of 2007.

Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may.

There is nothing special about the team. The best player is a Croatian Canadian postal worker. Two guys have already recovered from chemotherapy; one for leukemia, the other for hepatitis. Another is the head doctor at Vancouver General Hospital Emergency. Two are geography professors. Another is the former head of Fine Arts at a university. Another is a guy who just happens to be a professional writer. They are all passionately pursuing their collective dream of competing against players who once played for Real Madrid and Malaga.

You’d think Over-50s soccer would be sort of pathetic, but it’s not. It has its moments, like ‘real’ soccer, and our league has its own stars like Sam Lenarduzzi, who played for the NASL championship Vancouver Whitecaps team when they beat the New York Cosmos. Some of our games are punctuated by fisticuffs. Players who behaved childishly in their teens and twenties tend to play childishly in their fifties. It’s the human comedy, with beer afterwards.

After brain surgery in 2001, I still tell my wife I don’t head the ball. I know she doesn’t believe me but sometimes she pretends she does. I am not being unfaithful to her; I am being faithful to me. This is the person she married.

More people are playing soccer in the United States and Canada than any other organized sport, and yet there is relatively little literature that celebrates and reflects the expanding popularity of the game from a North American perspective. Where I live, boys still live to play on Saturday mornings, but on Sunday mornings you’ll see the playing fields of Vancouver are full of balding guys and teenage girls. Soccer for women and old guys is the new frontier for the world’s most popular game.

When our team won a tournament in the south of France in 2005, I became curious about the phenomenon of old guys soccer and how my pleasure in the game has greatly increased with maturity. When an opportunity arose for us to return to Europe, I decided I wanted to record the Cinderella story of a bunch of decidedly non-pathetic seniors from the far side of a hockey-mad country (currently ranked 86th in the FIFA international world soccer ratings, tied with North Korea), heading off to Europe to test themselves against Europeans, culminating in a match in a large stadium in Granada that is also used for bullfighting.

In a world in which we are easily divided into self-sufficient, capitalist units called families, isolated from our fellows, the concept of being a good team-player is given lip service in job interviews, but teamwork survives within the tribalism of sports. As a journalist, I hope to adequately describe some of the hopes, the fears, the split-second decisions, the intricate passes and the not-so-subtle spousal negotiations of a typical soccer team (regardless of age) as it prepares for battle on another continent.

Soccer has a much richer past in the United States and Canada than most people realize. This book will examine the North American history of the game, the rise of the Canadian women (among the top ten teams in the world), the history of soccer and film, and undertake a survey of soccer-related literature. As a continuous storyline, the journey to Spain will be a Quixotic undertaking that will reflect the universal allure of soccer, while doubling as an adventure story about not getting old.

Five central characters will be profiled to exemplify the never-say-die Baby-boomers as a new and possibly foolhardy breed, refusing to quit. The Legends hail from a province that recently attained the highest average male life expectancy in the world, even surpassing Japan, but when is enough enough? Nowadays men and women with grey hair can routinely afford the luxury of being intercontinental warriors on friendly terms with international opponents. Full-time records this new sporting phenomenon, for better or for worse.

Life is sport, sport is life. On the good days, one makes you appreciate the other. Some of us want to go down kicking and screaming and kicking and kicking. For the Vancouver team, into their Fifties and Sixties (with one player in his Seventies), battles are constantly being fought in hospitals as well as on the pitch. Complaining about the unfairness of the refereeing each week makes for a welcome detour from questioning the whims of God.

When death starts to loom, the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat are tempered by the consolations of philosophy. The greatest enemy is no longer the other team. It is the Grim Reaper.

At least with soccer, the outcome isn’t entirely predictable.