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.