S: 19 of 26

Okay, only 2 more of these letters posts after this one. We are in the 25th installment of the No Longer Random Alphabet of SRH. This week it is the letter S. I am slammed at work at the moment, so I will make this relatively quick. Here comes the letter.

S: Big S, Little s, Silly Sammy Slick sipped six sodas and got sick, sick sick

This was one of those letters that took no time at all to come up with a word. S to me is for Soccer. I am going to focus on one particular aspect of my soccer life.

I started playing soccer when I was 5 years old on a YMCA team called the Little Rascals, we wore green. Eventually I joined my neighbor’s team the FIREBIRDS! (the exclamation point is absolutely necessary), probably when I was 10 or so. When I was 11 we switched out of the YMCA-leagues and transitioned into a more competitive league. That summer my coach (who went by the name Bibb for some unknown reason) went to England to get his coaching certification. We kicked everyone’s ass that year. When I was 12 we decided to take the team to England so he could get a higher level coaching certification and we could go to the esteemed Bobby Charlton School of Football in Manchester England (I have written about it before). That year was 1986. 1986 was the first year that David Beckham went to that very same footie camp.

Since we brought over our entire team one of the highlights of the camp was our playing the camp all-stars in our age bracket on the Thursday night before we left. Now, at most, the camp ran for 1 months with 4 one week camps going on (currently they only offer 2 one-week camps, but I am being generous here for sake of argument). Beckham is one year younger than me so he would have been in the same age bracket. He performed so well at the camp that year that the following year he moved into an age category higher than he should have been. Therefore he would have been on the field as an all-star that week (provided we were there the same week). Beckham has primarily been a right midfielder and at that time I was a left fullback. One of my favorite past-times on the pitch was to slide-tackle wingers who were attempting to cross the ball into the box, and I remember quite clearly tackling most people who came down MY flank that day. We lost the game 2 to 0 that evening, but no one scored coming down the my side of the field (as far as I recall). I was an enforcer, what can I say?

I propose that there is a 1 in 4 probability that I have played David Beckham in the international game of soccer, and I further propose that there is a 1 in 6 chance that I planted his ass in the turf for trying to come down my side of the field. All in all I like to think that my 25% chance of playing Beckham is nice, but a 16.667% chance of shutting down someone who has become the icon of a sport is even better.

Oh, and this is for the ladies…

By the way, if he did play that night, I shut him down!

To recap:
All that is left in this alphabet are H and Y
Hippos and Yetis…
I have to by a new DVD-ROM drive for my home PC
So I guess I have to travel to Best Buy this evening
If you want to watch that che-che-froo-froo midfielder I potentially pownd he will most likely play tonight on ESPN2 at 10pm EST
It has been raining buckets this week
I am back in the throes of my true addiction
Little Man calls it “caffeine sprite”
Wifey says she used to call her mom’s marijuana “seaweed”
She somehow connects these two things
I don’t see it
Wifey says a bunch of things
Great, now Mom-in-Law is going to be all defensive about the “seaweed” thing.
I myself think the world would be a slightly better (if smellier) place with an increase of the “seaweed”
I already have a drug of choice
It is green, cool, and tastes like heaven
Have a great weekend everyone