If you wanted to take a class picture of the soccer generation, you could have just aimed your camera at the crowd here Wednesday night at the Battery game on Daniel Island.
And you wouldn't even have to say smile. Because they are always smiling, these soccer kids. They dress in soccer colors and speak the soccer lingo and walk the soccer walk and have mastered that aloofness that seems to say you aren't cool if you don't think soccer is cool.
Because they are very cool. Maybe, too cool.
They are a product of the whatever-generation. Whatever they want, they get. Whatever they want to do, they do. Whatever they need, is supplied. Whatever they desire, is provided. Whatever they think, just might be.
Which is why soccer suits their lifestyle. Kick it over here. Kick it over there. Run around for a while. Try to score. Don't try to score. You know, whatever.
LIFE OR DEATH
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
But it occurs to me that the reason my generation has trouble accepting soccer as a real sport is because it seems too darned accepting.
Part of its allure is that kids of all ages can play. And they don't have to be particularly big or fast either. Come one, come all. Kick the ball. The field is big enough for everybody. You can get lost out there and nobody will notice.
All of which makes it the perfect participation sport. But it's also what makes it feel so phoofy.
For somewhere in our primal thinking we came to believe there must be mental and physical cruelty involved in our sports. That unless the slow and uncoordinated are systematically culled, the purity and the passion of the whole is surely weakened.
This process of elimination rather than inclusion has been the driving force that forever separated sports from, say, summer camp.
But, hey, that's my generation. We're less evolved.
We were raised with a win-or-lose mentality. There were no scoreless ties. Every game was life or death. There was no such thing as, you know, whatever.
DESIGNER DESIRES
So recently I've really tried to get in touch with my inner soccer child. You know, the one who never gets mad and always plays nice and lives in the backseat of Mom's SUV and always has a clean uniform and doesn't know what anything costs.
The one whose parents take off from work to see him play. The one who gets private lessons for everything. The one who has never been to public school or ridden on a school bus. The one who has options. The one who's already pre-enrolled in daddy's alma mater.
But sometimes as I stroll through these crowds, feeling safe and secure and unthreatened, I can hear my inner soccer child whining that his $2 bottle of water is not chilled enough, or that his pizza pocket was too spicy or that his designer shirt has last year's logo.
That, of course, is when reality returns and my inner football child beats up my inner soccer child.
Ken Burger is executive sports editor of The Post and Courier. He can be reached by phone at 937-5598 or you can send him an E-mail message by clicking here: kburger@postandcourier.com
Check out Ken Burger's Book:
Life through the Earholes of Our Youth
