My son, the two year old soccer prodigy

he just doesn't know it yet // S1E2

Hiya and, in all seriousness, tickle tickle.

Lotta new kids here bc of last week’s essay on AI sucking butt— welcome! Both Are True is usually absurd vulnerable essays about my feelings.

Today we’ve got Episode Two of Season One: I’m (Not?) The Best? — a multi-month deep dive into the ideas of competition, comparison, testing and achievement. It’s not as serious as it sounds.

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My son, the two year old soccer prodigy

Growing up, I wanted so badly to be good at sports. An athlete. 

An athlete with his smelly pads and bruises and practice. I’d imagine myself interrupting a convo with the girl I liked, "hey sorry I gotta go, I got practice."

I'd even have maybe said "jet".

"I gotta jet. To practice."

But that never happened; I was too weeny for football, too slow for track, and just too damn good at basketball¹. 

All parents want their kids to have an easier life than they do, and I'm no different. I want my 2.5yo son Wilder to be an athletic marvel, a phenom, a sensation, an out-of-this-world once-in-a-lifetime talent. 

— 

Things started strong. Wilder was kicking the soccer ball as soon as he could stand. And he was making great contact, too, I'd explain to friends. showing them the latest shaky video I’d taken, me huffing behind the camera, announcing his every move like a World Cup color commentator. 

There’s he’d be, bundled in a blue coat, waddling toward the ball, falling, and you could hear me saying, “He’s got the pass! He’s down! He’s up! He’s going for it, Wilder’s got it! He’s…distracted.”

"I know I sound like that dad but, I mean, he's great at soccer, right?” I’d ask my friends. 

“He’s really good!” they’d say.

Introducing…Wessi (Messi + Wilder)

Fast forward to this summer and, according to his parents and grandparents, Wilder’s a sensation. It was time for a soccer class, we agreed. Enter the Kidz Love Soccer organization.  

Their tagline, “Where the score is always Fun to Fun!™”, was absurd - and trademarked? - but the ‘z’ in kidz gave off a fun loving vibe, and they were the cheapest so we signed up for the 9am-925am class. Seemed short to me, but hey, they were the proz. 

En route to the first practice Wilder kept screaming “soccer practice!” like it was his favorite band and he was finally seeing them live. Lauren laughed. I was lost in a fantasy light in detail and heavy in feeling.

Wilder would be kicking ball after ball into the goal when, over my shoulder, a voice.

“Excuse me,” the coach of the nine and ten year old class would say, “how old is he?”

"About 2 and a half," I'll answer, zero-chalant.

"Wow," he'll respond, wowed, "he sure can kick."

"Don't I know it.”

He'll walk closer to me then, checking to see if the other parents are watching, not because it will stop him from saying what he's about to say but just so he knows which parents are gonna give him a hard time later about why he's not talking to them about their kid in these hushed tones. "I run a scrimmage for 2 year olds, every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, 9am till nap time. I think he - "

"Wilder."

" -Wilder could hang. I used to hand out a card but I don't really do that anymore. Here's the address."

And he'd read me the address and I'd put it into my phone, gorged on pride, and say with even less chalance than before, "cool - we'll try and stop by."

Just as I imagined myself as the natural genius of effortless talents, Good Will Hunting, I hoped Wilder might be that but in soccer. Undeniable and made special by the recognition of an undeniable talent that would lead him, naturally, to winning the 2038 World Cup.

Obviously I'm exaggerating. I honestly don't care when he wins the World Cup. 2042 is fine.

Practice

Pulling up to the park for the first practice, we saw a spritely man setting up tiny cones of purple, red, green and yellow. Coach Cosmo.

In his early 60s and tan but not in a weird, way he spoke with a European accent of indeterminate origin. He also somehow pulled off wearing this Mediterranean feeling cowboy hat.

I brought Wilder over to the field, already full of kids and their extended families, plopped him down with his ball - he brought his own doggy soccer ball from home - and said, "go ahead, bud kick it."

But Wilder did not kick it. 

Instead, he began making the noise he always makes when stressed out, a faint 'noooooo' that becomes an "ehhhh" that soon turns into a "i don't want to!" 

Lauren and I tried to calm him down, reminding him how much he loved to kick the ball.

Coach Cosmo started enthusiastically screaming, “come on Wilder, come on Jesse, come on Eli - kick it in the goal!!” Somehow this did not help.

“Noooooooooo” Wilder screamed and demanded to be picked up.

Meanwhile, Jesse hurled himself onto the ground, crying.

Eli made a run for a bridge that connected the field to a playground. His dad caught him before ever leaving the field, carrying him back like a tiny human guitar cradled in front of his body. 

The whole scene looked like a bunch of toddlers all coming up on a megadose of LSD that was just starting to hit. Toddlers look this way all the time.

Parents, not so much. We were struggling. Samantha had laid down to admire the grass. Jesse ended up back in the red wagon that he came in, bawling. 

Chaz collected all of the cones into a big stack. Seeing this, his grandma told Lauren that Chaz loves cleaning up and organizing things. 

Jesse’s dad had carried him out of the wagon and back onto the field too, begging him to kick the ball toward Coach Cosmo, who’d just started a game of Red Light Green Light.

“See how everyone else is kicking the ball please bud go ahead and kick it,” he’d say to Jesse, who was choosing not to see.

Eli made another run for the playground, this time getting halfway across the bridge before being caught.

“You wanna try for the goal buddy?” I begged Wilder, knowing deep in my heart how much fun he’d have if he just tried.

As is often the case, Lauren was handling this without much issue. Easy for her to do, she was athletic growing up. Her whole family is athletes, so how could she understand what it was like to be the ‘indoor games’ kid during color war at camp? Oh everyone’s playing touch football? I’ll play chess inside. Capture the flag this week? I’ll try to win first place in Monopoly for Team Orange. Three on three basketball tournament? No thanks, I’ll just eat lunch early thank you oh and can I have some extra bug juice that shit slaps.

Coach Cosmo was now running around like a manic screaming ‘ice cream cones!’ as he put the ball into the wide part of a cone. None of the kids found this remotely interesting, including Wilder who had snuck over to the far off goal and, what’s this?, was reading himself for a kick.

“it’s duuuurty,” he said.

“That's okay its allowed to be dirty.”

“No dada its duuuuurty.”

“Ok I’ll clean it,” I said, picking up the ball and removing any speck of the ground it’d just been sitting on.

Placing it back down, I tried again. "Come on buddy, green light!!, I said with more excitement than I have for literally anything in my life.

Wilder did his ten little stutter steps to get himself ready and BAM kicked the ball right into the net.

GOAAAAL!!

Seeing this, Coach Cosmo blew his whistle with the intensity of a World Cup ref with serious hearing issues– ‘whoop-whoop whoop-whoop whoooooooooop.’

He stormed Wilder screaming “everyone look at wilder everyone look at Wilder.” 

This terrified Wilder, who ran back into my arms.

Time was up and class was over. An unmitigated disaster, sure, but for who?

Playground

Over the next few weeks, all but three of the kids in our class stopped showing up, leaving just Wilder, Jesse, and Eli. Each practice became a battle against the clock to get through the whole thing without running to the playground. 

“I want playground,” Wilder would say.

“We can’t do that yet.”

“Why?” he’d ask, somehow turning the last syllable into full on melody sort of thing like ‘whiyaah?’

“Because this is soccer practice time.”

“Whiyaaaaaah?”

“I don’t know, Wilder, “ I’d say, and on and on we’d go, withholding the longer explanation that we spent $140 on these soccer classes hoping they would inspire and further nurture his love for soccer while teaching him to listen, obey a coach, get along with his teammates, and smile at his loving parents on the sidelines beaming with pride at their 2 year old prodigy?

It didn’t help that the kids in the 930am class, also for two year olds, was full of all stars. One girl with braided hair had shin guards under long white socks. Shin guards! They were so obedient too, following Coach Cosmo’s instruction without issue making ice cream cones and obeying the traffic lights of red light green light??

Then, there was this little jackal by the name of Lincoln. Also wearing shin guards and a soccer jersey, he looked like a 2 year old frat boy, weaving and winding his way with the ball, showing off like a little idiot with these fast little footwork moves around the ball that made him look like an insecure fish. You could tell he thought he looked like hot shit and, unfortunately, he did. His dad was there too, big guy with a bulldog face, shouting instructions from the sidelines. I overheard his mom telling someone, “All they do is practice. Every day they’re just out there kicking the ball.”

Here it was, the dream I neither put into words nor actually wanted. But still, I sorta did. 

I wasn’t going to be a bulldog dad who turned his kids into a machine. No, I would show Wilder good art films. I'd teach him how to handle his anger and not be so competitive.

The last practice

"Playground?" Wilder asked with about fifteen minutes left of practice.

"Don't you want to go kick more with Coach Cosmo?" I asked.

"No. Playground?"

Every part of me wanted to keep him there, to stay, to honor the time and the space not to mention the money we'd spent on this. But for whose benefit? His? What would he learn if we stayed an extra fifteen minutes? That you have to do stuff you don't want to do? His brain isn't developed enough to understand that as a concept yet. All he'd get is "this sucks I have to do soccer when I don't want to" along with the meta associations of 'soccer = angry sad' and 'playground = forbidden' and 'dad = suck.'

Fuck it, sure let’s go to the playground. We walked off and crossed the bridge over to the land of playground where, all of a sudden, Wilder came alive. "Watch me!" he screamed, jump-spinning off a step onto the wood chip floor. It was genuinely a very sick move and I asked if I could try.

And then I did and he said 'good' like a coach training his student, quiet. Unimpressed.

Ten minutes later, Wilder demanded the swings. We saddled up next to Jesse and his dad, who was telling Jesse to stop being so goofy with how he was sitting on his swing. "No thank you" he'd say, again and again.

I did an internal cringe – poor Jesse. His dad’s hard on him and so competitive and intense. I wasn’t like that. 

Ok even if i was like that a little, I was good at hiding it. I was well adjusted and proud of my son no matter what. It just so happened that he was a prodigy who simply hadn’t realized it yet.

“What do you have planned for the weekend,” Jesse’s dad asked me. 

"Not much," I say. "My wife is in Santa Fe with friends so we're laying low. You?"

"My older one is eight - he's having friends over later, so we've got to get ready for that."

He tells me it gets easier but then immediately takes it back. "The tablets, man, the tablets."

"Ah yea how do you guys handle all that," I ask, genuinely curious.

"We held out as long as we could. Till six. But then all his friends got one and they have em at school, so..."

He continues, "It's all about making sure the content is good. Finding good stuff on there. That's the compromise."

“I know,” I say, giving Wilder an extra big push, “I feel guilty whenever he’s watching TV, like I’m bad for it.”

“Yeah! Me too,” he says, eyes bulging big through his glasses.”

Following Wilder to the pirate ship, I found myself connecting with Jesse’s dad.

Were he and I…the same? No. That can’t be. I was better than him, I reminded myself.

But better than him at what? Running back the subconscious comparisons I’d been calculating at every practice, it turned out I’d decided I was better than him at…hiding how obsessed I am with my son being the best. 

Here, once again, I was competing. stack ranking myself and Jesse’s dad on a scale I’d designed to make sure I won. 

But what was the alternative. That we were the same? No thank you.

Except we were. More similar than different, more together than apart. But my mind does not default to that truth, instead concocting systems of stack ranking on scales I’d designed to make sure I won.

But we were the same, he and I, just a couple of dads who, haunted by our own feelings of never being enough, were trying to protect our sons from the same.

—

There’s a line from the movie There Will Be Blood when the megalomaniac oil tycoon Daniel Plainview says, “I have a competition in me.”

That line plays on repeat in my head because I’ve got it too, and so does Jesse’s dad and just about everyone else, in one form or another.

But Wilder and Jesse don’t. Not yet. It’s coming though, by the hook of nature or the crook of nurture, it’ll come and it’ll stay and make a home for itself as it becomes the self, a vast emptiness to be occupied only in the rare occasion that you’re deemed the best. I know it'll come and I know it'll be my job to help him hold that competition alongside the little guy he is now. The baby on LSD for whom life is but a joy.

I know all this to be true because I myself crave a return to my beginnings, and yet, even knowing this, I find myself hurrying Wilder along, into the world of rules and winners that I’d do anything to leave. 

Maybe the 2yo soccer practice isn't even for the kids. Maybe it's for the parents, there to remind us of that magical window of time before the competition took us over, when nothing really mattered so every little thing could.  Grass ice cream cone soccer ball playground wagon red light green light green light green light. dada look at me jump spin jump spin jump spin dada watch me dada watch. 

This is S1E2 of Season One. If you’re receiving this and aren’t yet a paid subscriber, you can become one here. But don’t listen to me, listen to your heart. It knows the truth. Also tell it hi for me.

Comments

1. Are you a parent that’s competitive about your kids stuff? If you are not competitive, teach me how?

2. Do you find yourself competing in situations / context that you have no interest actually competing in?

3. What’s the one thing you thought / think you might be a prodigy at?

4. Do you have a competition in you like Daniel Plainview?

5. How haunting was the image of Wessi?

7. How absolutely fucked is the tagline “Where the score is always Fun to Fun!™???

1. Seriously the (MIAA) Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association saw me shooting three pointers one day and was just like, 'no. no fucking way can that kid play he's too good look.'

And they'd all look, having gathered from all over Massachusetts to see me shooting 3 pointers.