A football match with my father

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/07/football-match-with-my-father-michael-tierney

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If my father ever had to barter his way into heaven, he would be able to cite all the time he spent with his children out in our garden. From the minute we were born, he was the most reliable of our playmates. Other children used to wonder how he could spend so much time with us when their fathers never seemed to be around apart from at weekends. The truth was simple. He liked our company. And we liked his. And work was sometimes hard to find.

If his sandwiches weren't lying wrapped on the kitchen counter in the morning, then he probably didn't have work that day, so seeing him as soon as we were home from school became less of a surprise. The house kept him busy and he never hid from us, and him in the garden all the time was just his way of saying to us, look, I'm here. You might not need me and you might not always want me, but I'm here.

At the time I was playing football for Westpark boys' club in Glasgow and there was to be a fundraiser in which coaches and managers and parents and some of the boys would play against each other. I'd cleaned and polished my boots the night before. I'd shined them to perfection. My boots ritual was always part of the match.

My father had no rituals. He had no uncanny ability to remember Celtic Football Club statistics or facts. And that was fine. The problem on this occasion was that he didn't have a pair of boots either. Or anything, really, that resembled sports footwear. He wore his sandals in summer, and his good Sunday shoes for mass. He looked at his Sunday shoes. He would play the game regardless. It was a game of football. It wasn't going to hurt. Not a bit.

The fundraiser match was to be played on the big grass pitch at Bishopbriggs high school. It was the best grass pitch for miles around and you could dance a Sailor's Hornpipe across it without a stumble.

There were other fathers and sons already there and I prayed quietly to Mary, the Mother of God, that someone might have a spare pair of size 10s or 11s or even 12s in their bag. I asked around. He certainly wouldn't be asking anyone for a pair of spare boots himself, you could guarantee that. There were none anyway. He sighed a little bit and glanced a little forlornly at his feet before laughing and shaking his head at the absurdity of it all. Someone passed him a jersey and shorts and looked him up and down and said, "Christ, John," and that he didn't think they would fit but maybe he should try them anyway.

I was surprised my father had agreed to take part in the match. He certainly wasn't a bad player. But I didn't think he would agree to become public property for the day. My father was born quiet and stayed quiet his whole life. His shyness in public was the thing that held him back the most. He didn't like to be around people he didn't really know. It was a rare day when he was involved in anything public other than as a bystander. He didn't care for small talk.

A man he knew asked him if he was any good. He spoke with his cigarette between his lips and a cloud of smoke masked his face. "The older I get," he said, smiling, "the better I was." He looked happy to be there and I was happy too.

He kept his nylon ankle socks on and slowly tied the laces on his Sunday-best shoes. They were as shiny as the smartest Edinburgh lawyer's. His shins and ankles were hairless. The borrowed shorts left red rings on his thighs when they rode up. We both ran on to the grass and joined the others. The pitch had a fine sheen to it from the last heavy rain. It was as slippery as glass. "You be all right with those shoes, Dad?" I said.

"Course I will," he replied.

I'd only ever played football with my father in the garden. I called him Hot Shot Hamish, after the Hebridean giant from the Tiger comic, because he had a shot like a sledgehammer. That was his thing. But we both knew he found it impossible to get the ball from me in the garden once I had it at my feet.

The grass was our own battlefield. Our contests were good-natured. Sing-songs and slide tackles. A glancing header. We shared the adoration of the invisible crowd in the garden. But we always competed. That was the thing though, with fathers and sons. At a certain age, they always competed. I think that's what he always missed the most about his own father, two sets of footprints on the grass, not one.

After a few minutes he was already out of breath and holding the stitch in his side. He took a deep breath as he looked across at me. Other men pointed their fingers or shouted.

Some of the men took it a little too seriously, whipping balls around in a fury, forgetting that their chance to make it in the big leagues had long since passed them by. Others were nursing a hangover and spat gobs of saliva that the wind carried to land on your jersey. "Come on, Dad," I said, shaking a fist. "You need to get into the game more. Keep up."

Off the pitch, I was quiet like him. My father always said you need two people to have a conversation, one to talk and the other to listen. Neither was more or less important than the other. But he always stressed that if you really wanted to be heard, you needed to listen first.

The problem was that on the pitch I never stopped shouting and directing. It must have come from being the eldest boy in a big family. Before either of us knew what was really happening I was directing my father and shouting at him to run or sit or press or pass, and he would look over, mildly irritated by my incriminating voice. I was oblivious. The magic of fatherhood was leaking out of him with every raised shout.

At first he laughed when he slipped, but when the tackles went flying in he quickly realised that if it wasn't a completely serious game then it wasn't far from one. He held his ankles and rubbed his knees. His Sunday shoes were the death of him. There were few things as graceless as a father of any age playing football on a muddy pitch wearing black Sunday shoes. My father slipped and slid on to his backside, covered in dirt and mud. I could hear laughter from the sides each time.

The tone in his voice had changed. Now the shoes were funny but the joke was wearing thin. There was no escape hatch here. He was being watched. And he didn't like being watched. Half-time couldn't come quickly enough and, when it did, my father hobbled back to the side of the pitch and just sat on the grass and said nothing. My brothers and sisters ran across the pitch shouting that he had played great, that he was brilliant, but the more they said, the more uncomfortable he felt.

"It's the shoes, Dad," I said. He shook his head. He looked sharply at me.

"The shoes? There's nothing wrong with the shoes," he said. "They're good shoes. Look at them. They're great shoes. Good leather. Your mother got me them. I clean them every Saturday or Sunday. There's nothing wrong with the shoes. You see anything wrong with those shoes? Tell me what you think is wrong about a pair of shoes that get polished every week for Sunday mass and get me into the chapel without so much as a grumble about the shoes. What's wrong with the shoes?"

"It's the shoes and the pitch, Dad," I said, quietly. I could see his teeth. I felt a foot tall. "That's what I mean. The shoes can't grip on the slippy pitch."

He pursed his lips and then shook his head. He groomed his hair with the palm of his hand. "The pitch is fine too. A bit wet, but it's fine. It's good grass and the man who tends it keeps it well. The grass is brand flippin' new."

He pulled some grass from the ground, dropped it and watched it fall. "It's a bad workman that blames his tools, don't you think?" Then he dug a hole with the heel of his shoe. "You're doing good out there, Michael. I know you're good but you're playing better than I thought among the older boys and the men. Well done …"

"Thanks …"

"You know why?"

"No."

"Simple. Because you prepared. And you practised. I'm 39 or 40 years old, I don't even know, and I smoke all day and I haven't done anything that might pass for exercise for over 20 years and I wear a pair of good Sunday shoes to a game and I'm disappointed that I'm not playing well. It's not the shoes. It's not the pitch. It's me. I'm disappointed … in me."

"It's just a game, Dad. You don't need to prepare for a silly game like this."

"Son, there's people laughing out there. And I'm your father. I know you're embarrassed when you see me falling about." He looked up at me and I diverted my gaze. "I wasn't supposed to prepare for the game. The game is irrelevant. I was supposed to prepare for you. And for the twins. And Iain and Mark. And the children up in the house."

"I wasn't embarrassed," I said, lying.

"You were. I could see you. I've known every line on your face since you were a baby and I know every look. I know your brothers and sisters too."

"Sorry, Dad … I just wanted you to play well."

He nodded and rubbed his hands and fingers together. He made a clicking sound in his throat. "You shout quite loudly when you want to, don't you?" Both of us laughed together. "It's good to laugh, eh?" We kept laughing, like a couple of happy evangelists with their toe in your front door. It would have been a great story if he'd gone out in the second half and played his heart out and scored a hat-trick, but he didn't. When he stood up, that's exactly how I thought it would be. I watched as he walked on to the pitch with purpose. But things never worked out that way.

Another 45 minutes to go. My father still slid around the pitch and some of the spectators still laughed. But he tried his best to keep on his feet. And then he landed on the grass like pork chops on a butcher's counter.

The game developed an edge. The score is impossible to recall, but the tackles are not. Some of the men felt they had a point to prove and today would be as good a day as any to prove it. When I was hit, I felt hit. I stayed hit. The tackles arrived like buses: none at first and then four at a time.

Then I heard someone crying out loudly and realised it was me. I'd been battered once again. I thought my youth was protection enough, that they might lay off me a little. I got up off the ground, wobbled a little and then fell over again. I clutched at the gash on my shin and felt the tears welling up and I tried to hold them in. He had gone right through me. The player was lying beside me on the grass. He looked over and winked and then started to get up. "Man's game, wee man," he said.

So he tried to get up. But for some reason he couldn't. My father was standing on his ankles. He just stood on him like a parrot sits on a man's shoulders. My father bent down with meanness disguised as a smile and said sorry, and could he give the man a hand up? He put out his hand and the man put out his and my father squeezed as tight as he could and the man recoiled as his fingers started to crack. The man kicked his feet into the mud for enough leverage to move my father but couldn't.

My father looked at me.

"Good tackle," said my father. "Up you get now, pal."

My face was chalk pale. "No, it wasn't, Dad." I shouted. "He battered me."

"You were too slow … it was a good tackle. It was fair."

He still held on to the man's hand, squeezing and crushing, and the man yelped, but my father ignored him and looked at me. I could smell his cigarettes.

"You want to play football when you're older, Michael?"

"Yes," I said, stammering.

He nodded. Then he pumped a few more times on the man's fingers.

"You think you can dance about there all day long? Sometimes a tackle like that can help you see things a little more … clearly. You know what I mean? Don't be Mr Showy all the time."

He didn't say anything else. Whatever happened next didn't matter. The game continued. I hobbled around and it ended soon after. We shook hands and we might even have hugged. He was covered from head to toe in mud and he walked off the pitch with his shoes in his hands, cleaning them with his sleeve and some spit. The following Sunday he wore the same shoes, black as a liquorice stick, with his pressed Sunday clothes and he put a few pence in the collection plate as he always did.

That game of football passed quickly into memory and was rarely talked about. But it was a small death in our relationship. A small, deep cut. I was never sure then if he was trying to teach me a lesson and I'm still not sure even now. Whatever it was he intended, he showed me that, as well as heroes, sons needed ordinary fathers too. They needed men who wore jerseys that didn't fit and shoes that belonged in a pew.

I once heard it said that we glory in our fathers in victory and success. But we fall in love with them in defeat. I would have liked that game to go on for ever. And I still do, even now.

• Extracted from The First Game With My Father by Michael Tierney.