Like a Man
Features Valter Birsa of the Slovenian national football team. Rene Krhin cameo. More often than not, football = hardship + disappointment. And also, integrity, courage and faith.
Messed up tenses. And the real Valter Birsa has been with a club team since he was five, unlike in my story. I forgot to give wikipedia a good read before commencing writing.
1666 words
In Slovenia, football is an uncommon love or a wild dream. The country is place that takes more pride in poets and internet connectivity, clean electric trains and high mountains shawled in rare flowers. Schools are for learning, art, mathematics, law and philosophy, these are the things which are welcome. Wisdom and intellect that accrues with time and makes a man better. Football is the sort of running in circles that people have learnt to turn away from.
So for a large part of his childhood, Valter saw himself as the kid who couldn’t grow up. He started playing football with his peers, when he was seven, boys who had a love of the sport were not hard to find. They would spend the mornings trying to study, to please their parents, even as they peered out the window and prayed it wouldn’t rain in the afternoons. And without fail, a small group would gather at the field at the outskirts of their suburban neighbourhood half an hour after lunch. Valter would bring his ball and lead play by selecting his team and asking others to form their own starting eleven. It made him feel special, taking the lead in this, like the gatekeeper to all games. He was the energetic one, not chatty like the other children, but willing to expend energy when it came to what he wanted. And they would play until the sun set over the rooftops, turning the muddy patches orange and outlining every blade of grass, a last bright blaze before the night chill set in.
After awhile, this didn’t make so much sense anymore. Valter accepts that the other children just saw other possibilities in life, like going through high school and university and sloughing off the old childishness to become someone else. He too tried to give football up, but after the bland school hours, he would find himself walking around the threadbare ground, watching younger kids take the routes that used to belong to him.
He takes bus trips down to the stadium nearest his home and walks in like any old fan who’s there to watch the team train. He sits in the part of the stands that is furthest away from other clumps of spectators and looks down at young men and boys just a little older than himself play in faded uniforms. It’s a tough life, a voice in the back of his head murmurs. But he comes whenever he can.
He circles the stadium like a slow and inert planet for two months, cutting class whenever the day’s scheduled teacher is a lenient one. A wish burns like a stifled coal and the sensation of running and dribbling streams back into his nerves and limbs. He can’t concentrate in class.
Then one day, it just feels right. His teacher is giving the class a short introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke and she reads a poem aloud, in awkwardly accented German and pacing up and down the aisles. She’s young and pretty and all the boys and girls love her. Just as she passes Valter’s desk, her black chiffon skirt, printed with tiny mauve roses, brushes against Valter’s arm and he’s jolted back into the present, far from the misty memories of early childhood.
... for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Because he had not been paying attention, he has no idea what she’s talking about. But the smell of her perfume and the skin-warmth of her dress, the slightly stern, accusatory tone of her voice makes this sudden clarity seem like an admonishment. He should be ashamed.
Immediately after the recess bell rings, Valter sweeps his books and pencils into his bag and rushes out to catch the bus. He bites his fingers raw during the bumpy ride to the stadium and as he sits in the front row, watching the players practice. He prays for the right time to come.
A whistle sounds across the pitch. The players take a slow walk to a corner of the pitch. The coach sits down on the grass where he is. Looks at nothing in particular. Valter takes this as his chance. He grabs his bag, a scuffed old duffle sack with scratched plastic buckles, and jogs across the field. It’s a hard pitch of dry, compacted earth. Which is probably why no one seems too upset when Valter steps onto it. Perhaps they think he’s one of them, which, in any case, he soon will be.
“Sir?”
Valter tries his best to sound polite even though he can’t help but look down at the top of the man’s head, since the man is sitting on the ground.
“Yes?” The man looks up. “Who are you?”
“I’m Valter Birsa, thirteen, and I’d like to train with this team. I read your club newsletter and they said something about a youth team.”
The man cocks his head and looks up at Valter, and then his eyes slowly travel down to take in the crumpled school uniform and bony long legs.
“You’re a bit old to start now. Why don’t you play for your school instead?”
“I’ve been playing since I was six. And I don’t want to play only against other schoolboys, they’re all more interested in studying than in football.”
The assertion is unsaid but clear. I’m serious.
The man shakes his head but does not dismiss Valter.
“Get that ball there. Show me some skills.”
Three hours later, Valter has permission to come back in the afternoon to train with the youth team members for the next two weeks. If he proves himself, he can join them.
The fulfilment of a dream leads to harsher waking hours. Sacrifices and a strong will are needed to bring Valter through the thorny path , like a magic lantern in an enchanted wood. He gets streamed off to the technical training college when he is sixteen, the boy who used to get lower marks than him is accepted into a biosciences prep course. He learns to argue with his parents and win them over by scoring a goal and setting a teammate up for another in a league game.
That’s when newspapers take notice. First a local paper does a profile of him, complete with colour photographs of him scoring and also sedately holding a ball and smiling for the camera. And then a nation-wide one runs a feature article about the new ND Gorica signing, as if he had come from nowhere, fully formed and ready to make everyone interested in Slovenian football.
This is half nonsense, half true story. Valter can attest to that.
When he is twenty, Sochaux in the French Ligue 1 take him on. He doesn’t do so well there, is almost buried because everyone else, players from the far reaches of Africa and South Africa and Europeans, is so good. He feels like nobody and plays like he doesn’t quite believe in himself. After three years Sochaux gets rid of him in the cheapest way possible and soon he finds himself in a new, strange place, Auxerre. He feels like an old man and drinks beer at dinner. Then his girlfriend says she’s pregnant.
Valter had stared at her disbelievingly before his natural decency reasserted itself and made him smile and put his arms around her. He can feel the bump under her dress touching and pressing up against himself. He has to be a better man.
In 2009, he makes the news for asking the referee to withdraw a red card given to the opposing player who had elbowed him in the face. He didn’t think much of it but it must have seemed unusual to those people writing newspaper articles. His girlfriend cuts the article out of their morning paper and sticks it to the fridge door, to make him smile, he thinks. But he is more proud of the way he played this season, and he’s beginning to look forward to international matches too, especially World Cup qualifiers.
2009 is also the year Valter hears about Krhin. He’s known about him too for a longer time than newspapers have been bandying with his name, because they’re both Slovenian and both footballers. Rene Krhin is what Valter was a shadow of three years ago. Foreshadowing is the word he learnt at school for this sort of thing, but shadow seems better, more apt.
September is when Valter finally sees the boy. They couldn’t be any more different, Valter is winter pale with a gaze that seems almost transparent to his own eyes, Rene is tall and permanently sunburnt because he’s been attached to Inter since he was sixteen. When the national team trains so that they at least don’t get humiliated by England, Valter is surprised at how good the boy is. The label “prodigy” seems almost justified, Valter thinks almost not out of resentment but because he is fair. Nineteen is still early days yet and Valter was almost as good as Rene at that age.
The significant word here is almost. Almost is a small gap that grows bigger with passing years. Almost there means not there. Sometimes the phrase hides late blooming talent, not there yet, other times it signifies a shortfall of talent or luck or both, never will be. Almost but not yet. Almost there but never will be.
And the difference between these two is also a subtle one, like the difference between watercress and hemlock. One is harmless and serves to nourish in the long run, the other brings life to an end. Both come of this earth.
Valter is aware of all this, and maybe he knew this right from the beginning, when he was a young child with an occasional heaviness pressing at the back of his perceptions but unable to be voiced. But whether it be watercress or hemlock, Valter knows the pains he took were not for nothing.
Messed up tenses. And the real Valter Birsa has been with a club team since he was five, unlike in my story. I forgot to give wikipedia a good read before commencing writing.
1666 words
In Slovenia, football is an uncommon love or a wild dream. The country is place that takes more pride in poets and internet connectivity, clean electric trains and high mountains shawled in rare flowers. Schools are for learning, art, mathematics, law and philosophy, these are the things which are welcome. Wisdom and intellect that accrues with time and makes a man better. Football is the sort of running in circles that people have learnt to turn away from.
So for a large part of his childhood, Valter saw himself as the kid who couldn’t grow up. He started playing football with his peers, when he was seven, boys who had a love of the sport were not hard to find. They would spend the mornings trying to study, to please their parents, even as they peered out the window and prayed it wouldn’t rain in the afternoons. And without fail, a small group would gather at the field at the outskirts of their suburban neighbourhood half an hour after lunch. Valter would bring his ball and lead play by selecting his team and asking others to form their own starting eleven. It made him feel special, taking the lead in this, like the gatekeeper to all games. He was the energetic one, not chatty like the other children, but willing to expend energy when it came to what he wanted. And they would play until the sun set over the rooftops, turning the muddy patches orange and outlining every blade of grass, a last bright blaze before the night chill set in.
After awhile, this didn’t make so much sense anymore. Valter accepts that the other children just saw other possibilities in life, like going through high school and university and sloughing off the old childishness to become someone else. He too tried to give football up, but after the bland school hours, he would find himself walking around the threadbare ground, watching younger kids take the routes that used to belong to him.
He takes bus trips down to the stadium nearest his home and walks in like any old fan who’s there to watch the team train. He sits in the part of the stands that is furthest away from other clumps of spectators and looks down at young men and boys just a little older than himself play in faded uniforms. It’s a tough life, a voice in the back of his head murmurs. But he comes whenever he can.
He circles the stadium like a slow and inert planet for two months, cutting class whenever the day’s scheduled teacher is a lenient one. A wish burns like a stifled coal and the sensation of running and dribbling streams back into his nerves and limbs. He can’t concentrate in class.
Then one day, it just feels right. His teacher is giving the class a short introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke and she reads a poem aloud, in awkwardly accented German and pacing up and down the aisles. She’s young and pretty and all the boys and girls love her. Just as she passes Valter’s desk, her black chiffon skirt, printed with tiny mauve roses, brushes against Valter’s arm and he’s jolted back into the present, far from the misty memories of early childhood.
... for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Because he had not been paying attention, he has no idea what she’s talking about. But the smell of her perfume and the skin-warmth of her dress, the slightly stern, accusatory tone of her voice makes this sudden clarity seem like an admonishment. He should be ashamed.
Immediately after the recess bell rings, Valter sweeps his books and pencils into his bag and rushes out to catch the bus. He bites his fingers raw during the bumpy ride to the stadium and as he sits in the front row, watching the players practice. He prays for the right time to come.
A whistle sounds across the pitch. The players take a slow walk to a corner of the pitch. The coach sits down on the grass where he is. Looks at nothing in particular. Valter takes this as his chance. He grabs his bag, a scuffed old duffle sack with scratched plastic buckles, and jogs across the field. It’s a hard pitch of dry, compacted earth. Which is probably why no one seems too upset when Valter steps onto it. Perhaps they think he’s one of them, which, in any case, he soon will be.
“Sir?”
Valter tries his best to sound polite even though he can’t help but look down at the top of the man’s head, since the man is sitting on the ground.
“Yes?” The man looks up. “Who are you?”
“I’m Valter Birsa, thirteen, and I’d like to train with this team. I read your club newsletter and they said something about a youth team.”
The man cocks his head and looks up at Valter, and then his eyes slowly travel down to take in the crumpled school uniform and bony long legs.
“You’re a bit old to start now. Why don’t you play for your school instead?”
“I’ve been playing since I was six. And I don’t want to play only against other schoolboys, they’re all more interested in studying than in football.”
The assertion is unsaid but clear. I’m serious.
The man shakes his head but does not dismiss Valter.
“Get that ball there. Show me some skills.”
Three hours later, Valter has permission to come back in the afternoon to train with the youth team members for the next two weeks. If he proves himself, he can join them.
The fulfilment of a dream leads to harsher waking hours. Sacrifices and a strong will are needed to bring Valter through the thorny path , like a magic lantern in an enchanted wood. He gets streamed off to the technical training college when he is sixteen, the boy who used to get lower marks than him is accepted into a biosciences prep course. He learns to argue with his parents and win them over by scoring a goal and setting a teammate up for another in a league game.
That’s when newspapers take notice. First a local paper does a profile of him, complete with colour photographs of him scoring and also sedately holding a ball and smiling for the camera. And then a nation-wide one runs a feature article about the new ND Gorica signing, as if he had come from nowhere, fully formed and ready to make everyone interested in Slovenian football.
This is half nonsense, half true story. Valter can attest to that.
When he is twenty, Sochaux in the French Ligue 1 take him on. He doesn’t do so well there, is almost buried because everyone else, players from the far reaches of Africa and South Africa and Europeans, is so good. He feels like nobody and plays like he doesn’t quite believe in himself. After three years Sochaux gets rid of him in the cheapest way possible and soon he finds himself in a new, strange place, Auxerre. He feels like an old man and drinks beer at dinner. Then his girlfriend says she’s pregnant.
Valter had stared at her disbelievingly before his natural decency reasserted itself and made him smile and put his arms around her. He can feel the bump under her dress touching and pressing up against himself. He has to be a better man.
In 2009, he makes the news for asking the referee to withdraw a red card given to the opposing player who had elbowed him in the face. He didn’t think much of it but it must have seemed unusual to those people writing newspaper articles. His girlfriend cuts the article out of their morning paper and sticks it to the fridge door, to make him smile, he thinks. But he is more proud of the way he played this season, and he’s beginning to look forward to international matches too, especially World Cup qualifiers.
2009 is also the year Valter hears about Krhin. He’s known about him too for a longer time than newspapers have been bandying with his name, because they’re both Slovenian and both footballers. Rene Krhin is what Valter was a shadow of three years ago. Foreshadowing is the word he learnt at school for this sort of thing, but shadow seems better, more apt.
September is when Valter finally sees the boy. They couldn’t be any more different, Valter is winter pale with a gaze that seems almost transparent to his own eyes, Rene is tall and permanently sunburnt because he’s been attached to Inter since he was sixteen. When the national team trains so that they at least don’t get humiliated by England, Valter is surprised at how good the boy is. The label “prodigy” seems almost justified, Valter thinks almost not out of resentment but because he is fair. Nineteen is still early days yet and Valter was almost as good as Rene at that age.
The significant word here is almost. Almost is a small gap that grows bigger with passing years. Almost there means not there. Sometimes the phrase hides late blooming talent, not there yet, other times it signifies a shortfall of talent or luck or both, never will be. Almost but not yet. Almost there but never will be.
And the difference between these two is also a subtle one, like the difference between watercress and hemlock. One is harmless and serves to nourish in the long run, the other brings life to an end. Both come of this earth.
Valter is aware of all this, and maybe he knew this right from the beginning, when he was a young child with an occasional heaviness pressing at the back of his perceptions but unable to be voiced. But whether it be watercress or hemlock, Valter knows the pains he took were not for nothing.