Revenge is best served from a distance

Oh, I had the most amazing email conversation from a friend I had not talked to in 30 years. Suffice to say, when a fellow college soccer playing friend and I got left in a rural Iowa college locker room, who would have thought that years later one of us would be able to teach the stupidest coach in the history of college soccer a serious lesson in pay back.

A long time ago I took some time off undergrad studies to live and work in Los Angeles. I worked days building theatrical sets and picking up any additional jobs I could and many days, when I could spare the time, I would play soccer in these brutal men's leagues around the city. I had played soccer before, but it was friendly, almost technical soccer, you know, kick the ball, score a goal, slap your buddies and get some beers. In LA, the Latin player were tough and dirty. In retrospect it was one of the best times of my life.

During games these guys would take your ankles out any chance they got and as long as there was a ball nearby, no one called the penalty. First game I tried to play fair and friendly, but once I realized I was in a league with men who played dirty, I switched my game to match theirs. I was in shape and strong, so I enjoyed the confrontations and the overly physical aspect of competition.

One game, I got kicked in the chest. Imagine that for a second, because in previous games I had my knees taken out and ankles smashed, but no one had made it above my hips. The best thing about being kicked in the chest was that it was such an obvious foul, one of the players on my team came up to me and said "I'll take care of this." A few minutes later one of their players was on the ground, holding his ankle, screaming. My friend came jogging over, job done.

I liked the excessively tough part of the game in Los Angeles. It was soccer on steroids. That year, for whatever reason, I applied and was accepted to the University of South Dakota. I flew out, never having seen the university or the state. The school was filled with farm boys and some beautiful women, but this was a long time ago and as far as they were concerned I was from another planet. I think I had a mohawk and listened exclusively to The Talking Heads. The students at the university were big fans of rock and roll and had mullets.

The school had a soccer team, I went to a practice and the coach asked if I wanted to play. The team was made up of farm boys, an exchange student from Columbia and me. Roberto, the exchange student and I played the same sort of game, confident and aggressive. The farm boys played, well, sloppy.

Roberto and I took over the midfield. The other guys were limited in their skills and fairly soon Roberto and I were the coaches favorites, which did not sit well with the players. I befriended a fullback names "Joe" (not his real name, which will become obvious soon enough). Joe was the only local player who was OK with me and Roberto. The three of us did not do a lot at practice. We played, but the coaches were former football players and they thought the constant running and drills would make us a cohesive unit. Soccer is a lot different from football in that way, but the coaches were young and stupid.

I don't remember their names. They were young, probably mid-20's, nice enough white guys from South Dakota. They took coaching seriously, because in the Midwest, where there is not a lot of entertainment, sports have a lot of drawing power. Plus, the school supported all sports equally, so the coaches got paid to coach a sport they knew nothing about.

At some point, with the players subtly in revolt and the coaches beginning to not like the three of us, we started to get some painful lessons on being different. Lunches, we were no longer invited to the team table. Practices we would get confronted for not running the endurance course. Then we played Notre Dame. At the time they had an offensive player who was all American. This guy was a real athlete, and watching them warm up on our field, I saw a player who really had great ball control and a lot of confidence. The coach came over to me and asked if I thought I could slow him down. I promised to shut him down completely. I did. In the first half, when he came to my side of the field I would attack, going after the ball and his ankles every chance I got.

At one point I swept the ball and followed through and took out his left ankle. It did not break, but he was done. He played some more that game, but he never came to my side of the field again. Lesson learned. During the second half, Roberto was slid into by a defensive player, and he broke an ankle. We lost the game, 7 to zero, but not a single goal came from my side of the field. Joe was the fullback on the opposite side and his reckless and uninspired play gave them the game.

I liked Joe, he was a nice guy, a good player, but he was out of his skill level playing on a college soccer team against first tier teams. After Roberto was finished, Joe and I became close, we would spend practice working on stopping goals. It was our job and at some point he and I jelled.

Then we went to play Iowa. We left in the afternoon and played at 6 PM. A light rain fell for most of the game. We lost, which was what we did all year long. Joe and I went into the visiting teams locker room, undressed and jumped in the showers. We were not there for long when we noticed that the rest of the team was not there with us. I think we figured they were using another locker room, Iowa has a large athletic facility. Because of the mud and cold, the hot showers were amazing. It felt like we were in there for a long time.

When we walked out to the bus, it was gone.

We had been abandoned by our team, a team that really did not like us that much to begin with, but then again, we were in Iowa, no one gets left in Iowa. We did.

Keep in mind, this was years before cellphones. We had our soccer shorts and shirts in our travel bags, but we were dressed pretty lightly, since we traveled by bus, we did not worry about the elements. Almost immediately Joe started hitch hiking, which seemed dangerous in a state we both had never been in, then again, neither of us had any money and there was no one we could call for a ride anyway. It was about 110 miles back to our campus. It took 6 hours and one country bar to get back. We knocked on the head coaches door at 3 AM.

I'm not sure, at this distance, if we screamed or just stood there, wet and cold from riding the final 35 miles in the back of an old Ford pickup that smelled like cow shit. The coach was sincere in his apology. We missed the next days practice with his blessing.

Our next game in in Lincoln Nebraska, another big football school that had outrageous money to spend on sports. We played on the same field the football team played on, used the same locker room, and when I was injured (both legs, some sort of freak tackle) I was brought into the athletic training facility, all first class, with skilled experts to diagnose and immediately treat my injuries. Joe found me there after the game, reminding me about the Iowa mess and saying we should get to the bus. I was hobbled, but I was moving, we made the bus.

The next day the coach called Joe and I into his office and threw us off the team for smoking pot in the back of the bus. Now, at that time, pot smoking was something I may have done, and to be honest, we had been in the back of team buses when pot was being smoked, but on the ride back from Lincoln, Joe and I sat in the front. He sat with me, and my injured legs kept me from even trying to navigate the small walkway of the bus to make it to the back. So the coach, using pot smoking as his final straw, removed the trouble making players from his team.

Without Roberto the season was already a waste. Without Joe and I, the team lost the final 4 games by a combined score of 31 to 2. We did not regret being removed from the team. What we did not appreciate was how this egotistical and idiotic coach, who did not understand the dynamics of the sport, and who diminished the only players who did, would chose to remove us, in a disgraceful lie, and keep these over fed farm boys who had no clue how to play soccer.

Joe and I became close friends for the rest of that semester. I went back to Los Angeles for winter break, never to return to the university.

Then a couple of days ago, "Joe" emailed me. He said he had randomly Googled me, followed some links and saw this blog. He wanted to touch base, so one email led to another, we caught up and then he shared with me the most amazing story. See, Joe stayed at the university and got his BA. He then got an MA from an East Coast school and a Phd from another East Coast school and with all that education, he has been working his way from one college administration job to another, climbing the ladder.

Then he got a choice job. The fabled University of Nebraska offered and he accepted, a position that would be a career making job. He has been there over a decade, he gets recruited by other well known universities, but he has put down roots, has a family and a car and likes to take vacations. He is a baseball fan, never played soccer again and has only fond memories of our time together. He has a much more detailed version of the Iowa trip and his anger at the coach was a lot more intense than I remembered.

Then he told me this. As part of his job at the University of Nebraska, he reviews and interviews candidates for a variety of jobs. One of them was a position with the soccer team. He was flooded with resumes and one stood out. It seems our old college coach was out of the game for many years, but a divorce and unemployment were wearing him out, so he was searching for a break. Joe told me that the moment he was holding the resume he felt this intense sense of retribution.

Almost 30 years ago we were college soccer players, left at a college we knew nothing about, begging for rides from strangers we knew even less about. We got lucky and we got back home safely, but something has stuck with Joe for many years, what if we had not got lucky. All it would have taken was one whacko to pick us up and do whatever Midwest whackos did to scantily clad soccer players.

His anger was still surface.

To be honest, in retrospect I guess I was angry with the coach for a few weeks, but I have forgotten about it, until the email. Even communicating with Joe, I could not bring myself to remember any sort of danger, it was really more an inconvenience. Then again, there was the truck filled with cow shit and the country and western bar where a couple of ugly men made sure we understood that we did not belong in their bar. Yeah, I guess looking back on it, a coach who leaves two young players at a college a hundred miles away is kind of a douche.

So Joe invited our former coach to the halls of Lincoln and had him interview with him for the job. 30 Years on, Joe has aged, the coach has aged and he did not recognize Joe at all. Joe described it as a standard interview, simple questions, availability, philosophy. He wanted his former coach to feel like he aced it. Joe never asked about the policy of leaving loud mouthed players at foreign schools.

Joe said he left knowing the coach was feeling like he stood a chance. He has never contacted the coach again. Left him hanging like that, feeling confident, but as the days and weeks wore on, he would realize that he did not win, he did not get the job, he was alone, no team.

When I was finished reading Joes story of the tease and let down of the coach, I was neither happy or impressed. First, for the life of me, I could not muster the hate needed to enjoy such a cruel story and I was part of the original story. For me, that long ago soccer mishap has been forgotten. For Joe, it was a lot more fresh and maybe he understood more of the danger and irresponsibility that the coach had exhibited. For me, once we were back and all was safe, I let it go.

I am not sure what this story means. I think it means that bad people will someday get what they have coming to them, even if they don't know it. After all, the coach has probably moved on and simply forgot he even was considered for a job at the university. Joe gets the satisfaction, even if it's not real, of getting to mess with someone who obviously messed with him. I am left feeling like sometimes, especially in states in the Midwest, it is best to keep your head down, because there are people who hold grudges that you might not even know about.