I’m happy to report that I am now a Grade 8 soccer referee as certified by the United States Soccer Federation. Pretty cool, eh? I passed the test yesterday with a 93, which was the second highest score of anyone in the class and well above the 75 needed to pass. Boo yeah. I got my official 2004/2005 patch, a South Texas Soccer Referees coin (to use for the coin flips, of course), and got registered with the local league. I just have to go buy a cool referee’s shirt and call the assignor and tell him I’m ready to start calling games and he’ll assign me to some. I’m not sure what age group I’ll start with, but I imagine that my first few games (at least) will be kids, probably 10 and under.
My favorite question of the weekend came from a 12-year-old girl on the front row. We were certifying to be Grade 8 referees; the lowest grade is 12 and the highest is 1. “What happens when you become a Grade 1 referee?” she asked. The instructor paused for a moment and then responded with “well, you shave your head, become Italian, and start reffing the World Cup!”
Hee hee.
Last night I found myself watching water polo at midnight. Water polo. I don’t really know anything about water polo, but it was fascinating. That’s when I realized that the Olympics are going to cost me a lot of sleep over the next few weeks.
I love the Olympics. I mean, I really love them. I love how sports that no one ever pays attention to are suddenly thrust into the limelight. I love that swimmers, beach volleyball players, sailors, and gymnasts get their 15 minutes of fame, along with all the even lesser-known athletes. I love the patriotism that everyone shows for their country, the flag-waving and anthem-singing. I love the crazy fans in the stands decked out in bizarre costumes all for the sake of cheering on someone most people have never heard of.
I don’t have any memories of the Los Angeles games. Seoul is hazy except for Matt Biondi’s seven medals and Janet Evans’s three golds, all in swimming. I do remember the Calgary Winter Olympics from 1988 very clearly, as I watched Debi Thomas and Katarina Witt skate, but the first Summer Olympics I remember with real clarity were in Barcelona in 1992. I was 14 and sat on the couch watching the swimming, and the diving, and drawing.
Swimming has always been my favorite of the summer Olympic sports. At 14, I was playing soccer for my junior high, and I was still on the swim team winning ribbons in the breaststroke and on the relay teams, and I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. I did a lot of sketches that summer, copying photographs from the newspaper. I thought I still had a lot of them, but when I went through all my old artwork last night I only managed to find one. But finding it brought back a lot of memories.
With only a couple exceptions (Cayce, mainly), none of my friends today knew me before high school, and most of them didn’t know me until college. During those six years, I was an engineer, and a good one, but I was definitely not an athlete or an artist. To them, the interest I’ve shown in both sports (running, triathlons, soccer) and art (web design, wanting to do graphic design) over the past couple years probably seems strange and sudden.
I played soccer from ages 8-14 or so, and I almost played in high school. I went to the summer workouts before I started 9th grade…but then I wussed out. I was intimidated by the older girls, and I didn’t try out for the high school team. I stopped taking art lessons when my teacher got sick, and I didn’t bother to find a new one. By the time I got to college, I thought I was too overweight and out-of-shape to play any sports, and not well-trained or talented enough to do any art.
But as I’m watching the Olympics and remembering the things I used to dream about when I was barely even a teenager, I realize that maybe I’ve always been an athlete and an artist; I just took a break for a while. I won’t ever win any gold medals (heck, I won’t even ever win a local road race) and I won’t ever have anything gracing the walls of a museum, but I’ve always loved sports and art.
I had forgotten that.