I graduated from Memorial High
School in Houston, Texas, which, at the time, was known far more for its
academics than athletics. We had good
basketball teams, a decent football program (despite being a wealthy school in
a football-worshipping state like Texas), and a really good track and cross
country teams. I ran cross country and
played soccer during my four years at Memorial, and the photo above is – I
think – from my freshman or sophomore year on the junior varsity soccer team.
We were a pretty awful team. I’m not saying that the guys on the team were
bad human beings, but let’s call a dog a dog.
Our efforts produced a handful of wins during my two seasons on JV, and
when my coach mercifully granted me a spot on the bench on varsity as a junior,
our results weren’t much better. We got
a new coach my senior year, and his leadership apparently turned the program
around a couple of years after I graduated.
One of my treasured memories of
soccer involves a torrential storm and a nearly-empty stadium. First, the storm: growing up near the Gulf
Coast meant living with the reality of hurricane season and the non-hurricane (but still epic) storms which came with it. My JV soccer team just happened
to be scheduled to play a game on an evening when the local newscasters told
people to stay inside because of gale-force winds, heavy rain, lightning, and
thunder.
Now, the stadium: we
occasionally played games at Tully Stadium, which was owned by the
school district and had not been refurbished since the Eisenhower
administration. The grandeur of Tully
Stadium was the feeling of playing under the bright
lights on a brutally-unforgiving Astro-turf surface. The field was also slightly convex in its
shape, so the middle stripe across the center of the field was higher than the
sidelines – to help drain away the amazing amount of rain that would fall
periodically.
Junior varsity soccer game. Torrential rain. Huge, empty stadium. Actually, there were three fans in the stands
when our game started, and by the time the referees called us into the locker
rooms to wait out the lightning, only one fan remained. It was my grandfather, James Ferrero, and to
this day, I have no idea why he stuck around for that entire miserable game,
especially considering the fact that his grandson – me – probably didn’t play
more than five minutes all soggy evening.
I remember my grandfather – Papa, as we called him –
wearing a dark blue rain coat, sitting as close to the field as he could, sheets
of rain coming down through the bright lights of Tully Stadium, dousing the
field and the two hapless teams fighting the weather and our own ineptitude as
athletes. Papa stayed for the whole
game.
When the refs finally called us out
of the storm and into the locker room, much to my surprise, Papa came with
us. I remember watching him chat with the refs – both of whom were
soaked and I’m sure longing to get the game over with – in the doorway of the
locker room, laughing and kidding around about the weather and who knows what
else. What I remember most about that game was the fact that Papa stuck around till the end. That’s actually a good way to describe my
soccer career as a whole – I stuck around till the end.
