Alan Twigg, author of Full-Time: A Soccer Story is interviewed by Fanny Kiefer on Studio 4 (Shaw TV), July, 2008.
Interview PART ONE:
Interview PART TWO:
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Alan Twigg interview, The Courier
The answers to that question are on the sidelines as much as they are on the field. For instance,
My god, where do I start? Soccer takes 90 minutes of mostly uninterrupted action, so it’s not good for commercial breaks. Whereas Europeans and South Americans learned their love of the game prior to television; most Canadian-born Canadians grew up watching Hockey Night in Canada. Our sports coverage remains sated with hockey to an absurd degree largely because newspapers and TV are dependent on ad revenues for their mandates. Meanwhile I see more people wearing soccer jerseys on the streets of
David Beckham only played one game with the LA Galaxy last year. It’s a farce. It’s an embarrassment. During the course of writing FULL-TIME, the year-in-the-life of a team, I predicted Beckham would come to
I had so many other things to worry about in Spain, managing the line-up and writing this book and dealing with a groin injury, I don’t remember Spain as a culinary experience at all.
No forgiveness was ever necessary. Nobody in our family would have wanted me to not make that trip. There was never any confusion about it. Tara, my wife, didn’t go to
Never trust a Spanish bar owner named Miguel if he promises to organize a match with guys your own age.
No. In fact, the behavior of our guys, under extreme duress, was really one of the triumphs of the expedition. We kept our cool. It reminds me of an old Kipling quote my Dad used to say. “If you can keep your head while others around you are losing theirs, then you will be a man, my son.” We certainly had grounds for griping in Spain, big-time, and yet everyone sucked it up. I ended up being proud of the way we behaved. Mind you, I would much rather have been proud of the way we played.
Super Socco was probably designed to appeal to the so-called Soccer Moms. I never tasted Super Socco, but I was blessed with a super soccer Mom.
Alan Cook, one of the main characters in FULL-TIME, has one of those fancy televisions with lots of channels. He lives a block away from me. I expect to be watching the big game in his basement. I’ll probably pull for Man. U. cuz I like little Paul Scholes. He plays his heart out in midfield every time, not an ounce of prima dona in him. And of course Owen Hargreaves plays for Man. U.
Actually I’ve never heard those expressions. I guess I lead a sheltered life. My favourite soccer quote is from the world’s greatest player, Ferenc Puskas, who said, “Without friendship, there is no soccer.”
One of our guys, Bill Allen, is into his early seventies. He played semi-pro in London in the ’50s. Every time he makes a decision on the pitch, you can see what a great player he was. He’s still effective. I plan to play as long as Bill Allen. Except my style of play is far too boisterous, so I’ll likely seriously injure myself before I get to 60. That’s okay. Just as long as I don’t injure anybody else. I am reminded of the great Sir Stanley Matthews who said, “You don’t stop playing football because you get old, you get old because you stop playing football.”
Why should people pick up your new book Full-Time: A Soccer Story?
FULL-TIME is not Bad New Bears Go Grey. It’s an intimate investigation of the game, and also sports. There’s a dark side to organized sports that most people don’t want to think about—the barbaric tribalism, how competition can breed contempt—and I try to touch upon that stuff. So anybody who has ever dreamed of playing for
Photo by Dan Toulgoet
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Alan Twigg radio interviews
Take5's Adil Lakhani speaks with "Canadian Soccer Guy" Alan Twigg about Full-Time, the first literary book about soccer from a distinctly Canadian perspective. This interview was first broadcast by CIUT in Toronto.
[photo of author in Spain, following a 4-nil drubbing.]
Click link to hear interview:
http://archives.take5.fm/2008/06/20/full-time--alan-twigg--june-9-2008.aspx
Also, click on the link below to hear Alan Twigg talk about his memoir Full-Time: A Soccer Story with Joseph Planta, editor of the web-based publication The Commentary, July 8, 2008.
http://www.thecommentary.ca/ontheline/20080707b.html
For the love of the game
Review By Sam Cooper, North Shore Outlook, May 29, 2008
It could have easily lapsed into the self-indulgence the “me” generation is known for. A team of soccer-mad baby boomers from Vancouver, perhaps seeking to re-capture competitive glories of youth, set out on a pilgrimage to the south of Spain, where the game is truly played beautifully, to test themselves against ex-professionals from the Spanish First Division.
But Full Time — by Alan Twigg, a West Van lad who grew up playing soccer at Ambleside before drifting away from the game in his late teens, only to return with an over-50 team who take the game surprisingly seriously — is chock-full of rigorously researched ruminations on soccer’s deeper meaning, quotes from its player-philosophers, and detail-packed anecdotes, from the annals of soccer history to the efforts of Twigg’s gang of boomers who won’t say die against the wisdom of spouses, doctors and scoreboards.
Suffice to say Twigg and his teammates, including a Croatian- Canadian postal worker, various professors, a head doctor, and a cadre of survivors who’ve battled cancer and other serious diseases (Twigg still insists on heading the ball after having a brain tumor removed), have high expectations of success on their 2007 Spanish trip, but are humbled and fulfilled in unexpected ways on the pitch.
The humour and touch Twigg employs, and the book’s humane conclusion, means a scroll that might have been the literary equivalent of a vain goal scorer beating his chest and throwing his jersey into the crowd, is instead more of a poetically arched cross finished with a graceful header, and a subdued fist pump.
Twigg examines the historical origins of soccer in Mayan ball courts and traces its richest growth to some of the poorest soil of the world. The favelas (ghettoes) of Brazil have produced the world’s most creative and joyful players; but wealthy Canada by comparison, Twigg says, is soccer poor.
Twigg explores the passion which those who talk about football and “playing beautifully” are always on about — while typical Canadians respond by rolling their eyes and tuning in to hockey. To Twigg’s credit, Full Time goes a long way towards conveying that mysterious love for football which Canadians just can’t seem to share with the majority of global citizens.
In part, Twigg concludes that the zest missing in soccer here comes from the lacking culture of street football played where the sport is strongest around the world. Of course, in Canada that poetic, youthful zeal and joyful, spin-o-rama, dipsy-doodling, no-look passing, sixth-sense play-making, is reserved for street and pond hockey.
The upshot is you can construct as many artificial turf fields and hire as many pro coaches and hold as many skills clinics as possible, but unless youngsters organize games themselves with passion, Canada will continue to come up dry at the highest levels of football.
“If the game cannot be played affectionately, with reverence, it should not be played at all,” Twigg concludes mid-book.
As much a rich exploration of the what and why of soccer around the world, Twigg seeks to understand the phenomenon of aging men coming back to the game, like he did. After all, more than the young boys who would be World Cup heroes, “balding men” (plus girls and women) are the energy behind soccer in this country, now. So why aging men?
On Twigg’s over-50 squad, “Most of us played soccer in our youth and have returned to the game after a lengthy intermission called marriage.”
But for the author specifically, and perhaps generally for the male who refuses to easily submit to the creeping of age, the core answer is more elemental.
“When I’m 90 years old I’ll still have an eye for a pretty girl, and if an errant soccer ball rolls my way, I’ll still have an urge to kick it.”
It's a beautiful game, even for old guys
Review by Douglas Bell, The Globe & Mail, June 14, 2008
On a warm summer day in 1982, I sat alone in the basement of my parents' house in Forest Hill, an affluent old neighbourhood in midtown Toronto, and watched the World Cup final pitting Germany against Italy. Led by the tournament's leading scorer, Paolo Rossi, Italy won the match 3-1.
Afterward, drawn by reports of a street celebration in the "Italian section" of the city west of Bathurst Street, I walked through the mostly deserted streets of my 'hood (it was a Sunday in July; everyone, it appeared, had gone to the cottage). As I passed Bathurst, I noted that the police were putting up barricades to block the traffic, and over the next couple of hours I wandered amid more than one million Torontonians who celebrated all along St. Clair Avenue. I learned that day what soccer meant to Canada.
Our national affections though have never really been reciprocated. Canada, it seems, means little or nothing to soccer. Sure, we've hosted a successful under-20 World Cup, and our women's team is competitive with the best in the world, but our men's team has only ever even qualified for a World Cup once - in 1986 - and failed to score even one goal at that.
And so, as the European championship gets into full swing and the country once again turns its attention to soccer, now might not be a bad moment to spend some time with Alan Twigg's latest effort. The publisher of BC Book World and serial non-fiction author takes as his brief an examination of Canada's ambivalent love affair with the game as seen and understood through the eyes of an old-timer athlete still seeking the thrill of competition. All this in the face of the inevitable tick-tock, tick-tock, his realization that the game is beginning to pass him by.
The spine of Twigg's story is a sometimes eccentric, often rambling, discourse on his Vancouver-based over-50 squad. It's a decidedly mixed group, crossing ethnic and class backgrounds in a way that Twigg suggests makes soccer among the great equalizers. We follow the team on and off the pitch. One member suffers through a bout of chemo to combat leukemia. Twigg's description of his return to old-timers' soccer is unsentimental, even brutal. But it gets exactly the dire paradox of aging athleticism. "Ken looked somewhat dazed, even fragile ... he was stumbling as much as running. ... In the second half, Ken took another tumble and he didn't bounce back. It could have been any one of us, at any time ... stumbling, weak, old."
Those sneer italics are emblematic of Twigg's unsentimental tone. Sure, he loves the game, and he loves to play the game, but he knows the sands are running through and out. Twigg salts his narrative with potted micro-histories of important events and players in Canadian and world soccer. The most competent and engaging of these is a chapter devoted to his watching all 64 games of the 2006 World Cup.
Twigg's a knowledgeable, intelligent commentator. He also has a point of view that is on full display in his discussion of possibly the most famous moment in modern soccer - French superstar Zinedine Zidane's infamous head butt on Italy's Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final: "Certainly in sports it is admirable never to show fear. Zidane has always had a lethal air about him, but advertising to others that You Cannot Beat Me is a relatively crude form of intimidation. Ruthlessness comes with a price - and Zidane ultimately paid it - but how sad and pathetic and disturbing his display of ruthlessness turned out to be!"
At the end of the day, Twigg is both a moralist and a realist. He wants there to be meaning in his soccer, but the more rational angels of his nature know there's only so much you can take from the ball's random bounce. The book winds its way to a finish by way of the team's much-anticipated trip to Spain, wherein our heroes are handed their hats (what's your hurry?). They don't score a goal, and a game performance means losing by less than 8-0.
All's well that ends well when the squad finishes off its tour with a mixed-team scrimmage that reminds Twigg that the game is meant to be something other than a competitive chore: "If the game cannot be played affectionately, with reverence, it should not be played at all." It's a simple formula simply put. A nice cap on a book whose pleasures are in a similar vein.
Douglas Bell writes the spectator blog at http://www.torontolife.com. His 11-year-old daughter Anne plays midfield for Mooredale selects.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame
FULL-TIME: A Soccer Story
Alan Twigg, author of Full-Time: A Soccer Story (McClelland & Stewart), presents the jersey that was featured on the book’s cover to Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame representative and Canada Soccer Centre co-founder William Hoyle in Vaughan, Ontario. The book was reviewed in Quill & Quire in May of 2008, prior to its publication. (Photo: M&S.)
Literary Review of Canada
FULL-TIME, “Joga Bonito”
A Vancouver soccer addict bares his soul.
A REVIEW by John Doyle, Literary Review of Canada, Volume 16, Number 5, June 2008
Full-Time: A Soccer Story
Alan Twigg
312 pages, hardcover
Random House
ISBN 9780771086458
It was a relief to read in Alan Twigg’s knowing and witty book that I am not alone. At one point in Full-Time: A Soccer Story, Twigg relates how he deals with sleepless nights. He explains that at 4 a.m. he tiptoes downstairs and turns on the TV. He is not looking for news reports or old movies. He uses soccer to soothe his soul. “I don’t care if it’s the Argentinian league, the Mexican league or Bundesliga. I have gained access to 140 channels in order to watch the only one that regularly shows soccer highlights.”
On many nights I’ve been there and done that. I know the program Twigg is watching in the night: it is on the Fox Sports World Channel and it originates in Winnipeg, of all places. The nightly soccer news round-up show airs multiple times during every 24 hours. I’ve often watched it, at odd hours, and know exactly how it transports me. It is strange how an hour of soccer news and highlights from around the world, packaged in some TV studio in Winnipeg, can get so many men through the night.
Twigg’s little vignette of late-night comfort seeking in his Vancouver-area home is rich in meaning. Soccer is the world’s game, not the Canadian game. Until television began to deliver live and tape-delayed games from England, Italy, Germany, Spain and France and from all over South America, soccer in Canada was World Cup celebrations in urban neighbourhoods every four years. Even in the large cities, most Canadians paid no attention until certain areas were strangely empty in the afternoon and then full of street celebrations at night. Soccer was for English ex-pats and Italian or Portuguese guys sitting in smoke-filled bars on weekends, awaiting news of Arsenal, Roma, Juventus or Benfica.
Before there was so much soccer on TV, you could say soccer connected much of the world. It was the Esperanto of sports. Anyone at a loss in Rio, Rome or Moscow had only to mention a team or a player’s name, and a connection was made. Soccer is a poor man’s game. All you need is a ball, and that is why it’s played with such intensity and devotion wherever a patch of level land is found.
Twigg’s personal story — and this is a very personal book — is probably commonplace in Canada. As a child in Vancouver in the 1950s he played soccer on Saturday mornings, with other boys. They knew little about the game except the basic rules and Twigg knew he loved playing. He lived for Saturday mornings, “high on the drug of anticipation.” He was a good player. A German-born local coach suggested that he should go to Europe and try out for the youth teams of some of the big clubs. This, of course, was unthinkable then. Soccer was a boy’s game and everybody stopped playing at about the age of 16, when hockey, baseball and football became the important sports. Besides, no one from Canada had ever gone to Europe and succeeded as a soccer player, had they?
Decades later, a longing for that Saturday morning feeling returned. Twigg began playing in an over-thirties league and then an over-fifties league in Vancouver. He played after he had brain surgery. He rediscovered the pleasure of the game. He also discovered for the first time, thanks to television, the depth and breadth of soccer in the world. He began to appreciate the true meaning of a key phrase used in commercials before and during the World Cup in 2006. The phrase was Joga Bonito and it means “play beautiful.” Twigg became addicted to the search for that — the elegant play, the balletic movement, the skilled player’s breathtaking mastery of the flying ball that ends in a goal. In that too he is typical. It’s what we all want, really, those of us who watch TV at 4 a.m. or travel the world to the big tournaments. We are like the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano who describes himself, simply, as “a beggar for good soccer.”
Full-Time is part rumination on the murky origins and history of soccer and part tale of Twigg’s over-fifties team travelling to France and Spain to play equivalent teams there. His probing of soccer’s origins is captivating, but not meant to be definitive, and that is as it should be. The book opens with Twigg standing in the ruins of a Mayan ball court in Belize. (He has written a book about Belize as well as several books about Cuba.) There, before Christ was born, he points out, teams of players moved a ball back and forth. Later he delves into the roots of the game in ancient Britain where, perhaps, a skull was kicked around. And then there are the Greeks, who took time off from fashioning democracy to kick around an inflated pig bladder, or the Chinese, who, around 500 BC, enjoyed watching players try to kick a ball between two upright sticks. Throughout these ruminations Twigg quotes from Desmond Morris and in particular Morris’s idea of modern man endlessly repeating the ancient rituals of the hunter-gatherer.
Indeed one of the pleasures of Full-Time is Twigg’s erudition on the matter of soccer as a social force and political weapon. He has read Galeano, and English writer Tim Parks, who lives in Italy, and Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, and a great many more obscure writings on soccer. He has a good eye for little gems of revealing wisdom to be found in the stories and reminiscences of retired players and managers.
There are times when I think Twigg is terribly wrong. He was horrified by Zinedine Zidane’s head butt of the mouthy Italian defender Marco Materazzi in the World Cup final in 2006. He describes it as “disastrous” and, later, “pure ugliness.” Oh it was ugly, certainly, but for me and some others, Zidane’s head butt was an avant-garde act, a Situationist gesture aimed at deflating the spectacle of the World Cup final and a protest (by a gifted, thoughtful man playing his last game) against the tough-tackling mediocrities who have diminished soccer by refusing to allow its grace and beauty to flourish. It was an ugly act in defence of the beautiful game.
And there is the matter of Twigg’s imaginary conversations with the real and marvellously named Nettie Honeyball, who pioneered women’s soccer in England in the 1890s. These conversations are used to raise questions about soccer and life but they are frustratingly banal, like those periods of uninspired play in any soccer game.
The climactic account of the over-fifty Canadian guys going to play in Spain is very nicely done. They are a motley crew. The top player is a postal worker. Two guys have already recovered from chemotherapy, one for leukemia, the other for hepatitis. Another is a doctor and three are academics. Twigg describes their soccer games as “human comedy” and they are. In fact, this book, Twigg’s account of his soccer life and devotion to soccer as a way of life, has an abundance of small truths that are as captivating and unsentimental as the game he celebrates. This book is as full of pleasures as those 4 a.m. soccer highlight shows on TV and just as soothing.
The LRC welcomes letters. We reserve the right to publish such letters and edit them for length, clarity and accuracy. E-mail editor[at]lrcreview[dot]com.
John Doyle is the television critic for The Globe and Mail and has covered two World Cup tournaments and one European championship for the paper. His book Beautiful Game: Travels in Search of Soccer’s Small Wars and Big Peace will be published by Doubleday Canada in 2010.
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