How I became a writer Part XI

Title: How I became a writer

Part XI

It was my senior year of soccer and the game was getting rough.  You could feel the frustration building up in the other team as we were beating them easily.  We weren’t even running up the score (which we probably could have done) and it was still getting ugly.  I cleared a soccer ball and within a second I was kicked below the belt hard.  It was extremely uncalled for because the ball was now gone and the delay in the kick negated the “oops!” factor.  It was on the level of a karate front kick and it hit hard.  Over the years I had been hit there one too many times and now wore a cup system.  I was surprised how effective that armor was and I’m sure my opponent was shocked too.  It’s not often you full kick a guy in his privates and have him hardly blink.  The thing is there was a ref not ten feet away and as far as I know he saw the whole thing.  I looked over at the ref, which isn’t like me.  Normally I expect a certain level of rough playing and I kind of like it.  This though, even I felt was over the line…WAY over!!  The ref said, “Play on!”  Now, I realize my team technically had the advantage from my clear so I can understand the normal desire to “let it ride” but I think drop kicking someone below the belt should probably be a yellow card…at least.  One of my friends made the claim early in the game that they had home-grown refs, which meant that he felt like they were calling the game against us and were secretly rooting for the other team.  A thirteenth player as it were.  This call certainly seemed to validate that fear.  The most I talked to an official in most games was to ask for the time but otherwise I kept my big mouth shut.  This time I said, bitterly, “Nice call,” before returning to the game.

The other team and the officials made two poor decisions that game.  When we got there the coaches came over and explained they were from two separate small public schools.  They proposed the odd idea of playing us with one school one quarter and then the other school would play us the next quarter.  (At that time the public school system seemed to be playing quarters instead of halves like the Christian school league.)  I looked at their squads and remember thinking, “Why don’t you just merge your teams together?”  They seemed to be smaller teams and had some smaller students in starting positions.  In hindsight I think they must have believed that since we came from a small Christian school this game was going to be easy.  My school didn’t recruit or give out scholarships for sports, BUT our coach had built a good program and we were extremely good that year!  We had talent but to be honest the teams before us had a lot of talent too.  We did so well that year, I think God just chose to bless us.  Whatever the reason our team stats were available in the Erie Newspaper and if either coach had bothered to check our record they would have been very nervous.  That year we only lost to Mercyhurst twice, that was it.  We beat large Erie schools like Strong Vincent, East, and other similar schools.  You have to remember, this was the 1980s and in those large schools football was the big sport but still…those were schools that dwarfed us in size!  We even beat a PIAA Quad four school at a small tournament!  Apparently oblivious to what caliber of team they were playing, those two coaches must have been shell shocked when we began to easily crush them.  At some point they gave up on their convoluted system and put all their best players in.  I wish they would have started the game like that…it might have been more of a game if they had.  The other problem, as stated earlier, is that the refs decided to “let us play.”  As I said, I like a certain level of violence in the game but this level was shocking.  It was on the level of what my league in college was like, but this wasn’t college.  One important difference is that in college you are playing young adults and in high school you are playing teens whose bodies are still developing.  “Someone is going to get hurt!” I thought and that is exactly what happened.  One of their young men was taken off the field with a broken leg.

They weren’t the only ones who made a mistake though.  I was still in what is called “boom ball mode.”  I would blast the ball as far as I could as a defender and put it deep on the other team’s side.  This didn’t hurt my team too badly because the ball wasn’t on our side of the field very often that year.  Linemen had tried to talk to me about that habit but I blew them off and we would pay for it when we played Mercyhurst for the right to the city championship.  It was one of many reasons that we lost that game.  Anyway, with the strong wind favoring my team it was even easier for me to put the ball deep!  Early in the game I kicked ball so high I yelled, “Fore!” as if I was golfing.  It was an amazing kick that started at the midfield line and landed beyond the other team’s end line!  It may have been an awesome display of kicking ability (I could NEVER do that today) but it was bad for our team.  This wasn’t a track and field invitational, it was a soccer match.  Giving the other team a goal kick for no strategic reason is stupid.  It was another wrong decision…it just wasn’t as obvious as the other bad decisions that day. 

Bad decisions are part of life.  We all make them and my senior year I made a bad decision about writing.  Instead of continuing the survival story about the six teens, I grew bored of it, and now dreamed of writing a tribulation novel (a novel based on the events of Revelation in the Bible).  I thought I didn’t know enough about Revelation (even though I took a full semester course on it at Christian school taught by Mr. Bloomfield) and tried to get out books from the church library on the subject.  The teen survival story had a good plot and great characters!  It almost wrote itself!  Even with my lower writing skills at that time, I might have been able to manage a Juv book, if I would have asked my mother to do some HEAVY editing.  I had even bounced it off of a test audience and they had really liked it (yesterday’s blog).  I realize now it would have been so easy to finish but I moved on.  I imagined a three book tribulation fictional series and would meditate on it off and on for the next four years.  The problem was it was too complex a concept for my ability at that time. 

I tried to write it a few times in college but I was so taxed from all the school work I didn’t have a strong desire to write.  Besides, I had a beautiful girlfriend, and I wanted to spend every spare second I could with her:)  (We’ve been happily married for twenty-five years now and I still enjoy spending time with her!)  One summer she came down to visit me in Erie and we took a long walk together.  I told her the plot of all three books and she just listened quietly.  She agreed it was a strong plot and certainly a new direction for the genre in general.  The smash hit “Left Behind” (a series based on Revelation) came out and I didn’t want to “be a copycat.”  That was another stupid decision.  Companies were probably looking for clones of Tim’s massive work and Asylum was a very new take on the subject, even though it wasn’t called Asylum then.  It was called “The Deadman” and series (now named Asylum) wouldn’t be in print until twenty years later.