Full-Time by the Canadian Soccer Guy

Alan Twigg television interview

2008-07-22T13:48:00.000-07:00

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:

Alan Twigg interview, The Courier

2008-07-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

With more people in Canada playing soccer than hockey, why isn’t Canada producing more soccer stars or successful national teams?

The answers to that question are on the sidelines as much as they are on the field. For instance, Canada just sponsored the best-attended FIFA under-20 world championship in the history of the event—and still they lost money. It comes down to geography, money and organization. It’s not due to lack of soccer potential. We have soccer talent, aplenty.

What is about the North American mentality (Canada and U.S., specifically) that makes professional soccer a hard sell here?
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 Vancouver than hockey jerseys these days, so it’s going to change. I think there is a silent soccer majority out there that wants some decent coverage. My new dream is to be the Harry Neale of soccer, providing some intelligent soccer commentary. You just never know.

What can you tell us about Nettie Honeyball? How old is she? Where did she come from?

Nettie Honeyball was one of the pioneers of soccer in England. There’s a photo of her in the book on page 31. How could I write an intimate book about soccer and not include a soccer player in 1895 named Nettie Honeyball? So I made her into a character in the story.

What’s the secret to maintaining a lasting and meaningful relationship with a soccerball?

There is no secret to maintaining a love affair with soccer. Kicking a ball is as fundamental as sex.

What are your thoughts on David Beckham coming to America. Is it all a bunch of hype, or is actually good for soccer?

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 North America and play, just like Pelé did, strictly for the bucks, before the announcement was made. It was so obvious that he was reduced to playing on hype. I’ve never been a Beckham fan.

What sorts of food did you eat while playing soccer in Spain? Did it help your game?

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.

You missed the birth of your first grandchild to play soccer in Spain. How difficult a decision was that for you? Has your family forgiven you yet?

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 Spain, so I kept in touch. Receiving the news of the birth was one of the highlights of my life. It still makes me cry if I stop and think about it. So I didn’t miss out on anything; and I wasn’t missed. My grand-daughter, I think, will one day prefer her appearance on the last page of my book to having had another relative standing around in a waiting room.

What was the biggest thing you learned from playing against younger ex-professionals from the Spanish First Division?

Never trust a Spanish bar owner named Miguel if he promises to organize a match with guys your own age.

Did you learn any new Spanish swear words?

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.

What are you feelings about the proposed Whitecaps soccer stadium downtown?

Gotta have it. Never mind that Toronto got federal money for their stadium. I know that Suzanne Anton on city council has been very active in trying to make it happen, but I gotta throw some criticism towards Mayor Sullivan on this one. I haven’t seen or heard him providing leadership. Frankly, I would rather have a permanent, designated soccer stadium in Vancouver than the come ‘n’ go Olympics. I betcha I’m not the only one who feels that way.

What ever happened to the sports drink from the 1980s called SupperSocco? Do you think that might be the secret Canada’s soccer success?

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.

Who are you rooting for in this year’s Euro Cup? And where will you be watching the games?

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.

You’ve probably heard those jokey sayings “Carpenters do it with their belts on” or “Pilots do it in the air.” Do you have a favourite one that relates to soccer players?

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.”

How often do you play soccer and how long do you anticipate being able to play for?

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 Canada in a World Cup, male or female, ought to enjoy it. I hope it reads like a novel.

Photo by Dan Toulgoet

Alan Twigg radio interviews

2008-07-17T13:09:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-17T12:57:00.001-07:00

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

2008-07-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Canadian Soccer Hall of Fame

2008-06-02T17:28:00.000-07:00

Photos, Authors, Events

FULL-TIME: A Soccer Story

June 2, 2008 | 3:59 PM | By Nathan Whitlock

Quill & Quire

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

2008-06-02T17:18:00.000-07:00

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.

Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times-Colonist

2008-05-29T15:38:00.000-07:00

'A compelling story about sport in middle age'

Book chronicles the story of a trip to Spain by an obsessed over-50 team. "At some reptilian brain level, I realized I must make a choice: chase women or chase the ball"

Review by Joe Wiebe, Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times-Colonist, Saturday, May 17, 2008

FULL-TIME: A SOCCER STORY By Alan Twigg (Douglas Gibson Books - McClelland & Stewart 293 pages, $32.99)

In the foreword to Full-Time: A Soccer Story, Vancouver writer Alan Twigg explains the rationale of his book by describing the moment when he realized he wanted to write it. He was standing at the centre of a centuries-old Mayan ball court in the ruins of Lubaantum in southern Belize. Having written a book on the history of Belize, he knew that soccer's origins might be traced back to a similar game played by Mayans long before Europeans crossed the Atlantic.

"As I stood there, itching to run for a ball," he writes, "it first dawned on me that I should try to write a book about how soccer connects us."

Twigg is not a sports journalist, nor was he ever a professional soccer player. He did, however, have enough talent in his youth growing up in West Vancouver that a coach suggested to his parents that he go to school in Germany where he might eventually become a pro. But this was an absurd idea in the 1960s and his parents laughed it off. Twigg gave up soccer for writing in his early adult life and built a solid career with more than a dozen books on topics including Canadian writers, B.C. history, Cuba and Belize. Since 1987, he has been the Publisher of BC Bookworld, a well-respected quarterly newspaper about books and authors.

So where did soccer come back into the picture? As Twigg puts it, "Around the midway point of my life, on some reptilian brain level, I realized I must make a choice: chase women or chase the ball." He joined an over-30 team and found his obsession with the sport still burning inside him.

By the time of his visit to the Mayan ball court in 2006, he was the player-manager of the Point Grey Legends, an over-50 team that was gearing up for a trip to Spain where they would play against a team of ex-professionals -- players who had made names for themselves on teams such as Real Madrid and Barcelona. None of the Legends had ever played professionally. Their average age was 57, with several players over 60 and one who was 70. Two team members were undergoing chemotherapy, one for leukemia, the other for hepatitis, and Twigg himself had undergone brain surgery to remove a tumour in 2001 (he wrote a memoir about that experience called Intensive Care for Anvil Press in 2002). Clearly, they were all obsessed, and Twigg knew it.

"At Lubaantum, as I stood at midfield and it finally began to rain, I knew my animal desire to kick a ball and chase it was deeply embedded, and no amount of rationalizing was going to change that. When I'm 90 years old, I'll still have an eye for a pretty girl, and if an errant ball rolls my way, I'll still have the urge to kick it."

So Twigg decided to write a chronicle of the Legends' trip to Spain, starting a year before and culminating with the games in Granada themselves. The result is a compelling exploration of what it takes to play a sport competitively well into middle age: the toll of injuries and how much more difficult it is to recover from them; the foreboding sense of mortality as players are forced to cope with life-threatening illnesses; negotiating with family members and balancing career responsibilities; and the self-doubt that gnaws at one's psyche with each passing birthday.

Sometimes funny, sometimes embarrassingly honest, always entertaining and readable, this book is reminiscent of Dave Bidini's Baseballissimo (also McClelland & Stewart, 2004), in which the ex-rock star describes the season he played with a semi-pro baseball team in Italy, another unlikely idea that resulted in an interesting, incisive book. Both Baseballissimo and Full-Time succeed because they look at where sport and life intersect for regular, everyday folks, not superstar millionaire athletes.

Woven into the Legends' story is the historical development of the sport abroad, in Canada and particularly in Vancouver, as well as profiles of some of Twigg's teammates, each offering a different perspective on the game and why they are still playing it well past most athletes' best-before date.

But more important is Twigg's self-analysis, which he undertakes through a series of five interviews with an imaginary mistress, Nettie Honeyball, named after a real-life suffragette who founded the British Ladies Football Club in 1894. These sequences are some of the funniest in the book, but they also reveal much about the author's obsession and his need to understand it.

Twigg is a fine writer who knows how to draw his readers along, building up tension and excitement as the final pages near. His descriptions of game action are positively riveting. It's a shame he never had success as a novelist, which was his first writing dream, but perhaps he will try his hand at it again now that he is done with his soccer obsession.

Is he finished with soccer? Perhaps. The title of the book's final chapter, "Outgrowing Soccer," certainly implies it. Having followed his obsession all the way to Spain even though his daughter was due to have her first baby at the same time, he finds out that he has become a grandfather during his final game. The closing line of the book sums up his epiphany perfectly: "If Indigo Taylor Twigg never wants to kick a soccer ball, that will be okay with me."

Joe Wiebe is a Vancouver writer who plays basketball, softball, squash and tennis--just not soccer. Read more at www.joewiebe.com.

Quill & Quire

2008-05-29T15:30:00.000-07:00

Reviewed by David Leonard (from the May 2008 issue of Quill & Quire)

Soccer is, without dispute, the world’s most popular sport. From casual games of kickabout to the heights of international competition, those who play and watch the game do so passionately. This passion is at the centre of Alan Twigg’s Full-Time. Twigg, publisher of BC BookWorld and a well-known writer and historian, is also a soccer player, and in this new memoir he tells the story of his love affair with the game.

Replete with references to the greatest players the world has seen, personal recollections of key moments in soccer history, and a “Mercifully Brief History of Soccer in Canada,” Full-Time will instantly connect with any reader who is more than a casual fan of the game. But to add yet another soccer history book to the piles that have come before clearly isn’t Twigg’s intention. Using his own trials and tribulations as a player to create a dramatic arc, Twigg takes us along as his own (men’s over-50) team prepares for a series of international exhibition games in the south of Spain.

This team story sets Full-Time apart from other sports memoirs. Twigg delves into the personal defeats and victories that help define his teammates and himself. By exploring the players’ illnesses, family difficulties, injuries, and much more, Full-Time serves a fascinating second role as a memoir of aging.

However, this dual story of the players’ battles on and off the pitch may also be what puts Full-Time in a sort of limbo in terms of readership. The many references to the sport’s greatest players and the blow-by-blow descriptions of Twigg’s own games will appeal to dedicated soccer fans, while his warm description of the bonds that exist between his teammates will resonate with readers who know very little about the game. It can be tricky, however, for a sports memoir to play to both of those audiences.

There are close to a million registered soccer players in Canada alone, however, and one can’t help but feel that Twigg’s deft writing and palpable passion for the game will allow his memoir to find its way to likeminded players and fans.

[Alan Twigg; $32.99 cloth 978-0-7710-8645-8, 276 pp., 6 x 9, McClelland & Stewart, May]

Full-Time review in Pacific Rim Review of Books

2008-05-29T15:25:00.000-07:00

Review by John Moore

“Sports don't build character, they reveal it;” American writer and film producer Nunnally Johnson observed. It would have made a good quotation for the flyleaf of Alan Twigg's memoir of his lifelong involvement with soccer from his boyhood on rep teams in West Vancouver to his current spot in the roster of a Vancouver over-50 squad called the Legends.

Football, a.k.a. soccer, is often called the World Game because it seems that in every culture, at every time in history, some variant has been played using a ball, a bundle of tied rags, or even a human head to dispute a territorial pitch. While visiting the magnificent ball-court of an ancient Mayan city in Belize, a sense of the deep universal roots of his chosen game overcame Twigg and, as a writer he began to explore it. Much of the resulting book is a witty and informative history of football, studded with quotes from famous players, coaches and sports writers. Had Twigg left it at that, he might have easily produced a steady seller that would stay on the shelves longer than the usual three months. Instead, he took a chance, went for the breakaway, and produced a unique mix of history, culture criticism, personal memoir and creative non-fiction that will become a classic in the genre of writing about sport.

These days, soccer is frequently called the Beautiful Game, a slightly imprecise translation of Joga Bonito, as it was dubbed by former Manchester United striker Eric Cantona. As Twigg points out, Joga Bonito actually means "play beautifully" and the greatest thing about the game is that it makes no difference whether you're watching a World Cup match or bunch of street kids playing a pick-up game in a Third World vacant lot (or even a polyglot crew of over-fifty amateurs); you can still witness moments in which quickened intelligence and athletic grace combine to turn the simple act of kicking a ball into something that brings a lump to your throat.

It is those moments the ageing amateur players of the Legends seek, drawn to football perhaps because it does not reward brute power or strategic pre-game planning. Of all games, it is the simplest, yet the most complex, demanding patience, improvised tactical thinking on the run, a sense of timing rather than mere quick reflexes and valuing endurance above mere strength.

Twigg's account of the preparations of the Legends for a trip to Spain to play several similarly aged and skilled teams provides the narrative frame of the book, which he stuffs liberally with asides, historical detours and diversions without losing the basic story of a bunch of middle-aged guys who probably take soccer too seriously, but whose wives know that there are worse things they could be obsessed with in middle age.

No longer boys, the Legends all have adult lives and career responsibilities, yet they support each other through all the ills flesh is heir to with a camaraderie that, because of their age and experience, runs much deeper than notions of 'team spirit' fostered by coaches of juvenile squads.

Parallel to the struggle of the Legends to put their best foot forward for their own private international debut, runs Twigg's record of his obsession with the 2006 World Cup, getting up at all hours of the night to watch matches televised live from Europe, reading all the sports pages, becoming the Total Fan until the shocking moment when French superstar Zindine Zidane lost his temper and head-butted an Italian defender in the final while the whole world watched and gasped. The revelation that the Italian had been deliberately baiting him by saying foul things about his sister mitigated Zidane's behavior, but only made the black eye on the face of international soccer that much bigger, confirming the view of those who hold that “Rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen, while soccer is a gentleman's game played by thugs:”

In Spain, the Legends get a taste of the 'international style' of soccer when they find themselves facing not a team of equals in age and skill, as supposedly arranged, but a squad stacked with ringers of lesser years and greater ability. Despite a second fairer and more collegial match in another town, it is a sobering moment for the amateur Vancouver Legends as they discover just how seriously the rest of the world takes their beloved game.

Alan Twigg has enjoyed a long career as a respected journalist, literary critic and publisher of B.C. Bookworld magazine, as well as authoring historical travel guides to Cuba and Belize, yet Full Time represents a quantum leap in his development as a writer. With the exception of Intensive Care, (Anvil Press), a collection of his first writings after being operated on for a brain tumor a few years ago, Full Time is his most intimate book to date, the most daring and the most complete; a self-portrait of 'the man in full' that reveals the boy inside the man-alone, kicking a soccer ball repeatedly against a playground wall or dribbling it along an empty field, polishing his skills against imaginary opponents, endlessly preparing for the perfect moment of the Beautiful Game.

John Moore is author of The Flea Market and The Blue Parrot. He writes from Garibaldi Highlands, B.C.

Soccer brings out the philosopher in us

2008-05-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

by Douglas Todd, Vancouver Sun

When I need real insight into the meaning of life, I have been known to sidestep famous philosophers like William James, Jean-Paul Sartre and Lao-Tzu and go straight to the hard stuff: Books about soccer.

There is nothing like soccer to focus the mind on the art of living, on making sense of the sweet bitterness of existence. For me soccer (a.k.a. football) has a complexity and cohesiveness the Olympics do not.

The Olympics don't speak to me about philosophy, whereas the globe's most popular sport offers natural metaphors for life's fluidity, ambiguity, corruption, idealism, communality and beauty.

Too many Olympic sports, with exceptions such as soccer, of course, and field hockey, require women and men to become like machines, fixated on going just a millimetre higher or a microgram heavier or a millisecond faster.

I am a tad biased (my sons, by the way, play soccer far more than I ever did.) But even those who don't like soccer have to acknowledge that a flood of good-to-great books have been written about it since Nick Hornby's surprising 1992 bestseller, Fever Pitch. Fever Pitch is about the inner workings of a boy-man from a divorced household who finds delight, torment and healing in the then-dreary London soccer team, Arsenal (which happens to be my favorite team in the English Premier League, whose season kicks off today.)

Before highlighting some of the remarkable books written about soccer in the past 16 years, it's pleasing to confirm Vancouver author Alan Twigg has recently added the first Canadian voice to the pantheon of those who have leaned on the sport to say something important.

In Full-Time: A Soccer Story, Twigg, with complete lack of pretension, offers large dollops of down-home philosophy as he recounts the way his over-50s team, the Point Grey Legends, jet off on a risky adventure to Spain to play several teams of ex-professionals.

Along the journey, Twigg muses honestly about his own semi-erotic obsession with the ball. He delves into the vagaries of romance, the need for glory, self-doubt, the Canadian identity, aging, loyalty and how soccer connects people in weird ways.

In a fine section on the unusual courage it takes to be a referee, Twigg pulls out the philosophical stops about the value of bringing order to the apparent chaos of life, comparing the ref to a priest.

"The referee, like the priest, must be a complex personality. He must have a strong ego in order to rise to the challenge of his job, and yet he must resist all signs of his egocentricity."

The referee plays a transcendent role. "In the eyes of the others, the referee can only be a loser, never a winner, and so he enters each match with the private hope that he might walk off the pitch at the end of ninety minutes as a completely unsung hero."

Full-Time illustrates how serious content can be packed into books about this deceptively simple game enjoyed by billions globally, including millions of Canadian youth. These books explore the intersection of soccer with history, national culture, economics, politics and philosophy.

Some of the best titles include Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano, a lyrical history of the game; Franklin Foer's How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, and Alex Bellos's Futebol: The Brazilian Way Of Life, which brings out the game's perennial mix of joy and pathos.

To my mind, however, no soccer book reveals a more subtle philosophical mind at work than David Winner's Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer.

Brilliant Orange argues that the "Total Football" developed three decades ago by the Dutch national team reflects the often-difficult personalities of the people of the Netherlands.

"Total Soccer" requires every player to, in effect, be able to switch to any position. Because space is always at a premium in their small country, Winner maintains the Dutch have learned to use it in wildly innovative ways. This is seen in Dutch architecture, art and society -- and soccer.

That said, understanding soccer fan(atic)s can be as interesting as analyzing the game and its implications. For raw literary power, there may be no more persuasive book than Among the Thugs: The Experience, and the Seduction, of Crowd Violence.

In this early 1990s account, Granta Books editor Bill Buford enters the horrifying culture of British soccer hooligans. His gift is to make the reader feel the intoxicating attraction of mob mayhem.

Why does soccer evoke wider horizons of meaning in so many? American writer David Goldblatt, author of The Ball is Round, said:

"Milan Kundera (author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being) defended the role of the literary critic by arguing 'Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.' I would say the same of social history and sport."

Soccer especially brings out the contemplative side of many people because it doesn't lend itself to statistics, as do baseball and the Olympics.

And it doesn't require body-disguising equipment, like American football and hockey.
Soccer is also so fluid, so non-mechanical, that describing the game and everything that goes into it often requires a touch of poetry.

Twigg's book provides bursts of such poetry, in much the same way as the highly evocative Miracle of Castel Di Sangro. In that book, famous crime writer Joe McGinnis goes to Italy and uncovers the mix of valour, solidarity and immorality that go into how a tiny village's team climbs momentarily into the big leagues.

One of the refreshing peculiarities of Twigg's soccer book is that he writes about actually trying to play the game with some skill. Twigg's also in his mid-50s, so his final reflections on the bravery of the solitary referee illustrate the wisdom that can come with age, the wisdom of bringing impartiality to a rough and tumble contest.

By the end of the book, Twigg even thinks about the value for himself of "outgrowing" soccer. He quotes the Nigerian striker Kanu saying, "If you make football too important, you deprive it of its beauty."

As Twigg considers detaching from the game that has provided him so much passion, purpose and meaning, it's not at all a stretch to say he is offering up ultimate philosophical insights about life itself.

Although he was raised in a family of staunch atheists, Douglas Todd has gone on to become one of the most decorated spirituality and ethics writers in North America. He has received more than 60 journalistic and educational honours, many of them international.