On the Death of a Teammate

When I was 15 years old a teammate of mine died in a car accident. His name was Matt, and he was one of the senior goalkeepers on our team. He died right before the season started, and I remember the feeling for months afterwards when he or the situation would cross my mind. It felt like swimming up and realizing you’ve been tied to the bottom. Usually, I’d just about get the knot undone. Not always.

I remember wearing a wristband with his last name through the whole of that season. We all did. I feel proud and amazed that I found mine this morning, sitting in the cloth compartment that holds my formal ties and dress socks. I put it on, and it fits better now than it did on me back then. Those skinny wrists I had. Could never have been a goalkeeper.

When I think about things Matt can’t do anymore, it’s screaming that comes to mind first. He was a goalkeeper through voice, a prowling presence in his box even if nothing was happening there. Like a gorilla in a cage too small, hollerin’, impacting play as often as possible. I think Matt was almost 17 when he died. I know he could drive and I couldn’t yet. He wasn’t my closest friend on the team, but proximity doesn’t matter to a light. It is on or off. You see or you don’t.

The kid that was driving the car survived. I think Matt was in the passenger seat. I remember seeing him in the stands at one of our home games in a neck brace with relatively minor injuries. If you didn’t know who he was, the neck brace made sure you could figure it out.

What respect I have for him, looking back. Showing up to support Matt’s teammates would have been near impossible to do. As young men we wanted someone to blame. We all went to the same parties, talked to the same girls, banged lockers in the same hallways. To our unruly, adolescent hearts he was to blame. But he still showed up, sitting alone at the top of that stand, leaving a little before the final whistle.

This event and several others like it caused me to pull back… and pull back hard. I pulled back from everything that meant I’d have to leave the house in a car. I became agoraphobic for everything I couldn’t walk to, or ride my bike. That might be easy in more metropolitan areas, but in Texas, getting anywhere was hard.

I skipped a lot of practice. I didn’t want to play anymore. I didn’t want this ultimate risk associated with my ultimate joy. Soccer, in Texas, was a miracle for me to find. To say it saved me is an understatement. It was a miracle for my father to allow me to try. It was a gift when he came to every game, sometimes yelling, sometimes containing himself with the red Tootsie Roll pop he always brought, like maybe his Dad would have done with a cigar.

That season, thinking of Matt did feel like a ton of bricks. You never knew when it would come up. So the surprise just amplified the grief, like surprise amplifies joy or fear. I remember the first time we smelled the incredible stench from a used goalie glove. The first time we saw his mom at a game. The first time we won… that was complicated. It felt wrong to celebrate, like eating your dinner before everyone sits down at the table.

In Texas, soccer was NOT the cool thing to choose. It’s American football first, second, and third… then baseball, then probably basketball. Band was probably a cooler thing to be in than soccer. Tennis was cooler. We all came to the sport because we didn’t fit in somewhere else. I was too small to play football. I was decent at baseball, but all they ever did was bean me in the head when it was my turn to bat. And so much waiting… For those of us with perpetual motion, in our bodies and in our minds, soccer was the thing that saved us all from ADHD diagnoses, ritalin prescriptions, loneliness… Sometimes it saved us from being at home.

To run towards soccer, we all had to be running away from something else. I didn’t know Matt well enough to know what brought him towards soccer. He was a big enough athlete to have gone with other sports, and maybe he did! There’s a ton of stuff only he knows about himself, like it true with all of us.

Over time, that ton of bricks feeling turns into a ton of feathers. We had wings beneath us sometimes. An incredible save from our keeper would trigger the thought That’s a Matt save when just yesterday it might have triggered Matt should have been the one to save that. We would say Matt was here for this one boys! instead of just thinking Matt isn’t here on a loop. Eventually, someone would have hugged the young man in the neck brace, probably Matt’s best friend and our teammate Blair who stood up for me and others countless times. It would have taken time - well after the young man’s injuries healed and he regained some anonymity in the crowd.

Now let’s be clear, a ton of feathers is still a ton. It’s the same weight as all those bricks. Being lifted in the air has a come down, and sometimes the futility of life still hit us on the way back. What’s it all for? A thought most young men don’t, and maybe shouldn’t be grappling with. I remember fights when some of my teammates weren’t feeling it enough, correctly, or whatever. None of us had any clue.

Fortunately it’s one of the questions football helps us answer. For the same reason football saved me before, it saved me again just by being there, going on, normally. It was the groove I could get back into, the active body pursuit that took me out of my mind, which is not the only place to feel grief. You can feel it in your feet. You can feel it in your sweat. You certainly feel it in your heart, as it loudly proclaims life.

For what it’s worth, I played some of my best stuff that season. I think because I needed it more at the same time it mattered less.

Missing you Matt - wishing I had known you better.

Missing those I never knew at all, but of course do.