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Kick the Balls |
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An Offensive Suburban Odyssey
Alan Black - Author
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| eBook: eReader | ISBN 9781436222044 | 12 Jun 2008 | Hudson Street Press |
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Click here for other formats
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Fever Pitch meets Trainspotting in this laugh-outloud, caustic account of one man’s attempt to coach a peewee soccer team
When Alan Black was a child growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, soccer—or what he called fitba’—was the be all and end all. His experience was not the little league, boys-of-summer stuff of modern America. For him, it was life and death. Now middleaged and living in California, Alan finds himself coaching a team of eight-year-olds in his beloved sport—and nothing is going right.
For a start, the kids are no good at soccer. Secondly, they’re pampered. Born and bred on the sport, Black’s hardscrabble Scottish upbringing consisted of playing tough and victory at all costs. Needless to say, his coaching methods are a far cry from the “winning isn’t everything” mentality his little leaguers have been reared with; and players and parents alike are shocked as Black attempts to transform the losing team through drills and bombast. Alone at night, watching evangelicals on TV, Black finds himself searching for some truth in the culture he finds so bizarre. And it’s with the Tigers that he feels most out of sync—faced with a mix of soft suburban children, a raft of overprotective parents, and an Iranian co-coach called Ali. Told with Black’s uproarious Scottish sensibility, Kick the Balls follows the abrasive, irreverent, and hilarious coach as he contends with a team that winds up with a zero-win record.
Both a celebration of his own tough childhood and an account of one man’s navigation of an alien culture, Kick the Balls will delight fans of well-told, laugh-out-loud memoirs.
The everybody-plays, everybody’s-a-winner approach to youth soccer has been criticized before but not, perhaps, by a brown-toothed Scotsman who grew up playing on the glass-strewn fields of Glasgow. A bartender in a literary San Francisco pub, Black moves to the suburbs and, facetiously contemplating a run for mayor, decides to first ingratiate himself into the community by coaching. There’s a problem, though: the players are “shite.” Worse, his tongue-lashings don’t go over well with the protective parents, which leaves him confused: “Where I grew up, whiners suffered.” As Black tries to lead his team not to victory but to the more reasonable target of scoring a goal, we enjoy a fast-moving mix of game recaps, childhood flashbacks, semi-sincere soul-searching, and politically incorrect analysis of his players’ and their parents’ shortcomings. The author doesn’t spare himself, either, and his self-mockery provides some of the funniest passages in this very funny book. And while we’d argue that there must be a happy medium between hard knocks and suburban softness, Black’s final thought—that it’s adults who ruin youth sports—is well worth pondering.—Keir Graff, ALA Booklist
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