BEHIND THE PLAY #8

It wasn’t until I started coaching that I even considered how I ended up being the type of player that I was. As I read more about four pillars and non-linear development and this being a late developer’s sport, I started trying to connect it to my own development and pathway as a player.

Mark Rogers at Vancouver FC actually sent those thoughts into over-drive when he contacted me last year ahead of the CPL club’s inaugural game and asked me what size I wear in a hoodie. They were doing something pretty cool. They had put together a list of everyone who had played for the men’s and women’s national teams and were inviting any of them that wanted to come to the game to do so as their guest in a tented suite. And they had a gift for us. I went. The gift?

A Vancouver FC hoodie with a Canadian flag and a number. The number is the genius part. I am the 247th person to play for the Canadian men’s national team. It actually made quite an impact on me.

Now am I a well-known national team player? Did I play in a World Cup, a Gold Cup or even qualifiers? No. I played two exhibition games in 1992 and the first against South Korea, was down-graded to a ‘B’ International. In the second against China, I dislocated my shoulder when we were up 3-0 late in the first half and had to go to hospital. And that was it. It’s an awkward legacy to get too excited about. I have literally asked journalists not to mention it when interviewed as the local soccer guy for stories involving local soccer.

Further dampening the enthusiasm is the knowledge that I got a vote on an old Voyageurs Forum post on who the worst player to ever play for Canada was!

Does that bother me?

Couldn’t care less.

I’m totally comfortable with my strengths and short comings as a player. I remain quietly super proud and appreciative of my fleeting, smash and grab voyage to the outer fringe of our national team and that hoodie was, is and will always be valued for the spirit in which it was given and as a reminder that I am one of only around 400 people who have done it. I played that 1992 CSL season with the Vancouver 86ers and then retired from high level soccer.

But back to how the hell I got there.

My path, as a six foot tall, 170lb centreback, to the national team is, like almost every player, unique in many ways. I’ve spent a lot of time in recent years, wondering how a guy built like a 10km runner, who never made a BC Provincial team, ended up being a late bloomer poster child.

Competitiveness, curiosity and sensitivity were actually my foundation. An odd three. My earliest memory, I would’ve been three, is of being competitive. Back when all kids were free-range and we played outside for hours with maybe an occasional visual check from a parent, I was playing in a large grassy play area in our North Vancouver apartment complex. It’s U-shape kept us fairly contained and an older brother of someone I was playing with devised some races and ‘games’ for me and his younger brother who was about my age to play. “Whoever wins get this piece of licorice!” was pretty much how it went. For whatever reason, I was hooked. I won the race but being a nice older brother he came up with a reason why we had to re-do the race so his little brother wouldn’t be upset. Won again. Goalposts moved again. I don’t even know how it ended. I just remember the determination to win and the annoyance of not getting my reward for it. The trait was set and for the most part it worked well for me. At times though, I’m sure I’ve been insufferable to be around. I don’t get invited to many board game parties.

On top of that, I was a curious kid. Asked a ton of questions. Loved pre-school which I was put in a year early to satiate and/or stimulate that curiosity. I read early and often. When my dad came home one day with a full set of Collier’s Enyclopedias I may have hyper-ventilated from excitement. Curiosity is a great trait but what it leads to is what makes it valuable in my eyes: it makes you, intrinsically, want to learn. For me this wasn’t about wanting to be smarter, it was about curiosity and not being humiliated by not knowing something. Feeling like others all knew something I didn’t rubbed a broad and easily inflamed streak of humiliation so I asked questions, read books and generally learned as much as I could to avoid that. That habit of being open to learning and instruction carried over to playing sports. I wanted to win so I wouldn’t feel humiliated so I was laser-focused on anything that would help me get better. Hockey? Learned to skate in the spring when I was eight, went to McMeekan’s hockey school in the summer having never played ice hockey and made the rep team in the fall. Lacrosse. Similar. Soccer was just the first of the three. Manically competitive, more relieved than joyful when we won. Embarrassed when we lost. Always.

Eventually, I focused on soccer and the approach was so honed that my best attribute as a player was that I quickly and ferociously adapted to new and better quality environments quickly. I was the kid who was deathly afraid of being cut so I listened, learned and lasted.

But eventually I got cut. For the first and what would prove to be the only time.

It was the BC Provincial U16 team. I was morose for weeks and that was a year or two before the first Smiths album came out! But it was the summer of the 1982 World Cup and that combo was really formative for me. I picked myself up and carried on.

The next layer to my pathway was fortuitousness. I ended up an embarrassingly stacked team in my U18 season called South West Marine Dolphins. Even though I lived in North Vancouver, I would drive over and train with some of the best players in the Province. The coaches knew what they had and somehow convinced Alan Errington to help coach the team. Alan was already at that point an assistant coach with the Vancouver Whitecaps and a staff coach with BC Soccer. It took him very little time to look at me and say I was going nowhere as a central midfielder (where I’d always played) and insist I play centreback because I could head the ball.

I thrived playing at the back, drawn to the bossiness the position affords and the rewards for being organized and decisive. Alan’s recommendation got me a look at the Canada West National Training Centre up at SFU. It was there that top players were rotated through for looks for the full and youth national teams.

My base qualities served me well there as I anticipated, adjusted and acclimated to the higher standard utilizing my internalized humiliation-avoidance tendency.

By the end of the season I’m on the National U19 team based at McMaster University. We go to Trinidad for a month of CONCACAF qualifiers to try qualify for the U19 World Cup the following year in the USSR. I start the first game, a 5-0 win vs Guatemala and start the next game vs El Salvador. At 0-0 with about 20 minutes to go, I get fully CONCACAF’d and I have what may be my most formative experience in the game. Long ball over the top, I shield it as it bounces and pass it back to our keeper Paul Dolan (who went on to be a legend of the game in Canada). As I play it, the El Salvador forward somehow gets beside me and kicks me in the chest. His studs cut my jersey. No call. I look at the linesman showing him my ripped jersey. “How did you not see that!” He waves to play on. I’m in a full teenage rage and about to get even more done by this guy. As I trot up the field behind El Salvy waiting for Doley to punt the ball, the same striker stops suddenly in front of me. I make light contact as I try to stop from running into him. Wham! Elbow in the ribs. Seething. As he goes to move away, I grab his jersey with one hand and unleash a punch that wouldn’t even have phased any of the two inch flying bugs we were regularly flailing at in our dorm rooms where we were staying for the tournament. It grazes him. Linesman’s flag goes up, waving furiously. He saw that. Red card. Boo’d by the crowd as I head to the dressing room. They start throwing coins at me. Alan Errington, now a staff member of the team, pushes me, “Run!” We get to the dressing room and I wait in silence. Game ends 0-0. Team files in. Our coach, Bob Bearpark, is pissed. The whole team senses it and is very quiet. He paces, thinking about how he wants to convey an important lesson to me. He opts for full hairdryer treatment. Inches from my face. Guess who didn’t get to play another minute of the remaining six games? We did qualify in the end but I didn’t get on the field in the USSR. Harsh? For years I thought it was over the top and symptomatic of a bias against BC players. Only three had made the team in Trinidad and by the time we got to the USSR I was the only one. Now? Different lens. It’s irrelevant what the underlying reason for not getting another chance was. What’s important is that I still got something positive out of it. That year of what was essentially exile within a team converted me from a pretty naive kid from the comfy North Shore to the type of player that helped me win three national championships with UBC and get those two men’s national team caps.

I leaned on my “you’re not cutting me” mentality full tilt. No complaints. No drop in work ethic at training. No more stupid cards. Less than a week after getting back to Vancouver when it was all over, I played my first game for UBC, against the team’s arch-rival U Vic, and in one game made it clear I was there to play and was there to win. I was determined, physical, loud, a bit nasty and still grimly opposed to the idea of losing. I was a good fit for that team and it was a great fit for me.

So from the ashes of a red card came a place to enjoy the game and experience success, belonging and joy on a team. Would it have happened without the red card against El Salvador, the hair dryer treatment and twelve more months of purgatory on that team? It would not. So I’m grateful for it and I’m grateful for those traits that began when I was three that still define me and have served me well.

UBC Soccer led me to be drafted and then play in the CSL for four years and it was heading into that last year that I was able to play for Canada.I wish every player got to have the experience I had there and the legacy of friendships that persists today, almost 40 years later.

I honestly look at that hoodie as a tactile symbol of that journey even if I only wear it around the house.

Next newsletter: Thursday, May 2 (but I’ll make it a short one)

_{Could only be one song for today’s newsletter: Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads: [Apple Music] [Spotify] [YouTube]}