The Blind Goalie

 

A man's pride shall bring him low:

but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit.

                                                                        -- Proverbs 29:23

 

Maddy is the mighty mite on a soccer team of third-graders, most of them a head taller than she is. Her little legs motor around as fast as they can, but often the other players kind of blow by her. It looks like a herd of stampeding giraffes and a cute but hapless chipmunk.

 

Her coaches and the other soccer parents are kind and compassionate. They've heard her cartoon-like squeaks when she kicks the ball. They know she's trying her best, and that's all you can ask.

 

 

Maddy makes a fierce-looking goalie.

 

 

In the first game, Maddy got smacked by the ball, full in the face. The parents along the sideline gasped sympathetically. A dad called out, "Are you OK?" No doubt they thought she'd come up bawling.

 

They don't know Maddy. She flounced to a full stop, faced the sideline, jammed her hands on her hips, and shouted in exasperation, "I'm FINE!!!" Then broke into a grin and motored off, a chipmunk chasing the loping giraffes.

 

You know what they say: it's not the size of the chipmunk in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the chipmunk. Or something like that.

 

The other night, she managed to kick the ball 'way over everybody's heads in a game, and the crowd oohed and ahhed. Maddy whirled around and beamed at her parents, enjoying the spotlight for once. Pretty soon, the herd of giraffes came back with the ball and blew by her again.

 

 

Does she care, that she's far from a superstar? Heck, no. She's having a ball. That game, it was a cold and misty evening, and the field had just been aerated. So there were muddy plugs all over. At game's end, after hand-slaps and running under the arch of parents' arms, Maddy took a running start and then threw herself, Supergirl-style, onto the muddy field, sliding and putting up quite a spray, turning her white uniform into a muddy mess. But the grin on her face. . . .

 

Pretty soon, the kids on both teams were ALL doing it. Moms in laundry rooms across the city would be murmuring the name of Maddy that night.

 

But isn't that what we want, from kids' sports? Fun! I think so.

 

More and more, we hear stories about grownups who don't "get" that. They turn kids' sports into a fearsome battlefield, a workaholic nightmare, a place to take out their own aggressions and resentments, to use kids as emotional tackling dummies for their own personality problems.

 

I used to coach soccer for our older girls, and once encountered an opposing coach who was all of that, and more. Our team was named "The Grass Stains" or something cute; I think his were "The Pit Bulls," not meant to be funny. He looked like he had been a wrestler, with a 1950s crewcut and a booming voice. The girls were all unsmiling, big and strong, and their pre-game drills were like something out of a Marines boot camp.

 

During the game, Coach Bully stomped up and down the sidelines, yelling at his players. It continued even as they got ahead of us by one, two, three goals. He kept up the frenzy, and even benched one girl for getting out of position. Four, five, six goals . . . by game's end, they'd put seven over on us, and we were shut out.

 

I had to track him down to shake hands after the game. He seemed shocked that I could be cheerful after a drubbing like that.

 

I was shocked when he taunted me. "See that little girl over there, the shortest one on our team? She SCORED on you! That was the FIRST goal of any kind she ever scored in her life, and she scored it on YOU! What do you think about THAT?"

 

He was practically vibrating, he was so puffed up with humiliating me and my team.

 

Well, I'm as competitive as anybody else, and a boiling rage rose up in me. I was about to say something hurtful right back . . . but thankfully, the Holy Spirit intervened instantly, and gave me this to say instead:

 

"Well, did you see our goalie? She's BLIND!

 

"Didn't she play a great game, making all those stops?

 

"How does it FEEL to win a game against a team with a BLIND GOALIE?!?"

 

His jaw dropped open. His eyes searched mine. I kept a poker face.

 

Shoulders slumping, he mumbled something, and slunk away.

 

"Just kidding, Coach," I called after him. "Good luck, the rest of your season."

 

I really hope it brought him down a notch and gave him a little perspective, but doubt it. That's the thing about pride: it blinds you to the most important goal of all - that it isn't whether you win or lose, whether you're a giraffe or a pitbull . . . or a chipmunk. The main thing is how you play the game. †