The Keeper: A Life of Saving Goals and Achieving Them Read Online Free PDF Page B

hardest.
    When other kids played badly, Mulch jogged over to me. “This is on you, Tim. Fix it.”
    Me? I was standing all the way back here. I couldn’t help what was happening in midfield.
    “Come on,” he’d push. “How do you make it better?”
    I watched them for a minute.
    “Well,” I said. “They’re pushing up too fast and leaving big gaps in the middle.”
    “Right,” Mulch said. “So talk to your midfielders. Tell them what they need to do differently.” And then he stood there while I directed our midfielders to close up the center and force the opposing forwards wide.
    If a kid came to practice even 40 seconds late, Mulch would yell at me. “Go have a word with him.”
    “Why me?”
    “ ’Cause I’m making you the leader. Go.”
    And if I hesitated even a moment, if I sat there blinking, wondering why is that my job , Mulch snapped. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Go!”
    Once, when our club team—the Central Jersey Cosmos—played a game in South Jersey, a few of the families got stuck in traffic on the way down. Mulch stormed over to me as I put my cleats on. “Four of your teammates are late, Tim.” He was fuming.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
    He stood there with his arms folded.
    “And?” I said. Nearby, players were already on the field, and I was ready to go warm up with them.
    “And so you don’t get to play,” Mulch said.
    “What?”
    I thought he must be kidding, but his face was dead serious.
    “Nope. Not when your teammates are late like this.”
    “That’s not fair!” I hadn’t been late. It’s not like I had any control over those parents. Besides, there was no one on thatteam—no one—who was half as good a keeper as I was. He was putting the whole damn team in jeopardy.
    “So I want you to make sure no one is ever late for a game again,” he said.
    O ur club team practiced in front of the Middlesex County correctional facility. As we played, the inmates watched through their bars. They called out to us, hooting and hollering and whistling. We did our best to pretend not to hear the catcalls and F-bombs.
    I was pretty good at tuning them out, but when the ball flew past the post or rolled over the end line and I had to fetch it, their calls came back into sharp focus.
    “Come on back here, boy,” the prisoners called to me.
    “Hey, kid!” they called. “You come on over here, and I’ll teach you how to play games.”
    I picked up that ball and sprinted back toward the goal, toward my teammates. Back toward my mom. Mulch. Back toward everything that made me feel safe.
    A s I moved up the ranks of youth soccer, Mom drove me all over the state—and eventually all over the East Coast—for my different teams.
    Although I continued to play midfield on my school team, I was by now a full-time goalkeeper everywhere else. I’d come to appreciate the subtleties of the position, especially the mental part. I liked anticipating three moves ahead, then setting up our defense so it would be ready for any possible danger. And when the opposing team was able to get behind our back four, I loved flying between the ball and the net, doing everything in my power to stop it.
    The night before we left for each tournament or game, I packed and repacked my bag. Obsessively. Hours would pass, and I was unfolding and refolding and reorganizing. It’s good now , I told myself. Leave it alone. Just go to sleep.
    But in the same way my OCD drove me to touch household items in a particular pattern, there was a right way to pack my bag, and a wrong way. Somehow I knew—with that familiar mounting sense of dread—that I’d packed it the wrong way. So I got out of bed again, unzipped my bag, and started all over.
    Not right yet. Do it again.
    Still wrong. Try again.
    There was always a team hotel somewhere, but it was invariably too expensive for Mom. She and I stayed separately in motels a notch down in quality, always on strips lined with fast-food restaurants and