Apropos of Nothing

In 1973 I entered high school. That year, my school, Jamaica College, did not play in the schools’ football (read soccer) contest—in fact, no school did. That year the entire season had been suspended for reasons I can’t recall right now. Something had happened the year before, and so there was no season. But there were games. And the games we played assured us that our team was the one that would have won had the contest happened. It was a painful year of going to various schools to watch the matches of these skilled young players. The illusion of greatness was so intense that I remember having serious arguments with my fellow eleven year olds about the best way for Jamaica to make it to the World Cup finals—a notion as absurd as anything we could conceive of then. I, along with other profound eleven-year-old thinkers, knew without a bit of doubt, that were the members of our current football team pulled out of the routine of everyday life, the mundane preoccupations of going to school, for instance, and were they then not compelled to play with the lesser players from other schools and clubs, that team, that stellar team, would go on to secure a place in the World Cup, and would, no doubt have won. This is how devoted we were to our high school team.

The next year, the season got under way, and everything we knew began to unfold in remarkable ways. We made it to the finals that year, convincingly and brilliantly. I felt so impossibly blessed that I was attending a school of gods, heroes, geniuses on the football field. Then in the finals, we defeated Kingston College, a massive juggernaut of school, a school that, truth be told, would for the entire stretch of my seven years in high school, be the Goliath to every aspiring David. Their idea of team spirit was basically the same as religious fervor. It is my conviction that even the most inept of KC students, one who had never picked up a ball or tried to run a few yards ever before, if compelled to somehow do so in a national contest, would win against any comers. They would win because these boys knew nothing else. They won because it was all they understood, and they won because we knew that winning was all they understood. That year, we beat KC. I have known only a few moments of such happiness.
The Manning Cup dates back at least a century. It is no small thing. It is important to understand, also, that a Manning Cup match in the National Stadium is a spectacle, and here I am not speaking of the athletes on the field, but of the spectators in the stand. The cheering is a fantastic ritual of call and response, improvisation and the occasional combative cheering chant that can sometimes lead to actual physical violence. The songs were drawn from gospel tunes, political songs, and best of all, version of popular songs that played on the radio. The poor, innocent seats in the “Grand Stand” where those with money to pay for a covered area seating, were metal backed, and these were beaten to submission to add a percussive power to the chanting. Those of us who sat in the bleachers and who were not brave enough or adept enough to scale the ten foot high barbed wire partition between the two areas, sat as close to the energy as we could and joined in the clamor. When a goal scored, it was pure pandemonium. I screamed, I shouted, I chanted, I clapped my hands to bruising, and when the game was over and we had won, I was ready to die. Ready to face my maker because the world could not have been righter. To confirm our absolute greatness and my theory about the World Cup, this team went on to win the Olivier Shield which was a championship game between the Kingston-based teams that played the Manning Cup, and the Dacosta Cup team that played in the rural competition (keep in mind that nearly half of Jamaica lives in Kingston and its suburbs).
I realize, now, that one of the reasons that my mood can seem to be inexplicable shifted in a given day has everything to do with the emotional definition of happiness that I gained from those matches. When we won, I was a happy person in every other area of my life. It was as if, despite the chaos, somewhere in the essential place of self, existed a rightness to the world: my team had won. I would sometimes not know why I was happy—not readily because it was not always a conscious sense of joy—but I was happy. To this day if I have even the slightest interest in a team winning a game, and that team loses, a low-grade depression will set in for me. And I mean here the NBA, the NFL, tennis, (not hockey--despite years in Canada, I have never had an emotional relationship to that sport), or cricket. It is hard for others to notice, and sometimes I don’t even know why I am feeling that way, but it is there. Indeed, Tiger Woods losing a close match will do this to me—and I barely watch Tiger Woods or follow golf. It is just a tragic habit developed as a young person.
In 1975 (a year after that great victory), I knew that my school and its football team, were the saviors of Jamaican football. That year we did not even struggle to make it to the finals as we had the year before. We may have won every single game, and during that march, legends were made. That was the year when Luke Whitney (what a name, eh? I gather he is an accountant now) removed all doubts that his name, “The God” was fitting. His other name was “Shenk”, but his genius in mid-field, his ability to shift past even the most aggressive of defenders with his extremely skinny and almost fragile looking limbs, and his capacity to make the kicking of a ball magical, all came together that year. Shenk, was The God. No doubt about it. That year he chipped a ball from the half line and it curled into the opponent’s goal. We were not shocked. We were in awe. But not shocked. This is what “The God” could do.
So it is that when we piled into the stadium that year to play Kingston College for the finals, I knew that we were going to win and do so handily. But we didn’t. We lost by a single goal. I wept. I wept in public. I wept on the bus home. I wept as a public act of mourning. I did not weep alone, not in my bedroom, but I did in public. Maybe that is why I have come to be able to weep at movies and at poetry readings. I wept. It seemed impossible to have lost I can’t think of anyway to describe my sadness, my complete devastation. I could not even muster irony. I believed, you see? In cricket, a game which I played, I had long developed a capacity for irony and humor at defeat. But not with this football team. This was a team that would lead Jamaica to the World Cup. And we lost. By a goal.
This has to have been the beginning of the development of my poetic heart. It has to have been. I understood the language of loss. I understood that things just did not have to work out as one would want them to work out or as one would expect them to work out. The year 1975 remains iconic for me—just those numbers—and that is because of this defeat.
Our team did not win that contest again while I was a student there. I don’t even think we can very close to doing so, even when my own friends and classmates were playing for the team.
I remember all of this today because I went to a High School football (read American football) game last night. My son is playing snare for the marching band. Well, the game was quite dull.