My Mother, the Hooligan
by Brian Schwartz
My mother’s sports fanaticism, like any religion, has its canonical narratives. One of my favorite Mom-as-Fanatic myths has been passed down to me—on several occasions—by my mother herself, despite the fact that most adults would find the story embarrassing. It’s the one about Mr. Snape asking Mom to sit on the school bus.
Mr. Snape was my older brother’s soccer coach, a silver-haired man with deep-set eyes who rarely raised his voice, even in the thick of a game. Although I later came to know Mr. Snape as a shy man, not particularly tall or commanding, in my boyhood memory he will always be a kind of hometown Tom Landry—an intimidating figure, laconic, with a military bearing. Coach Snape, a grown man trying to meld a group of teenagers into a coherent team, had a difficult job; the hormone-addled boys under his tutelage were only part of the challenge, though.
In our part of upstate New York, football and basketball conferred instant credibility. Basketball teams had shiny gyms, up-to-date uniforms, electronic scoreboards; football teams had carefully tended fields surrounded by high metal bleachers. On the other hand, at the high school my brother and I attended—nine years apart—the soccer team had nothing. Our home field was a rocky, largely grassless rectangle sandwiched between an elementary school and a Baptist church; as afternoon faded into evening, the words JESUS SAVES would light up in red neon on the church’s brick exterior. As with most soccer fields in the area, there were no bleachers to speak of; parents and friends who came to the games roamed the sidelines, right up next to the action. Part of the experience of playing in a soccer game was hearing the voices of people you knew. You might be locked in a struggle with an opposing fullback, trying to keep the ball in bounds while the other player breathed down your neck, when you’d hear someone saying, “That’s it, Brian, that’s it!” Then you’d recognize, in a complicated, disconcerting fraction of a moment, that the speaker wasn’t some anonymous team supporter; it was Mrs. Carlin. Or Anthony Stefanella’s stepfather. There was a network of kinship and community on the sidelines, a thicket of overlapping relationships worthy of a major ethnography.
What you have to understand about my mother, in order for the rest of the story to make sense, is that she has always been intuitively musical, and sensitive to sound. Groups of people singing or shouting or praying somewhat in unison make her misty-eyed. Also, while my mother can effortlessly carry a tune, she has never been able to remember the words to any song longer than “Little Lambs Eat Ivy.” This indicates, I think, that she is unusually susceptible to music and voices and sound, conduits of energy that can move and manipulate us in ways we’re not conscious of. (I understand this about my mother because I resemble her in this way: for instance, I am often quick to respond to what I perceive as someone’s tone of voice, without paying attention to the content of their speech.) So my mother can build nuanced if semi-fictional accounts of meaning based on gestures, aural impressions, the harmonies or disharmonies of language. To some extent we all do this, but I’d guess that my mother is more likely than most to have forceful convictions about these impressions, to act on them. Especially when these sounds and impressions and actions are flowing out of a soccer game in which one of her children is playing.
My brother was on the field; my mother was on the sidelines, milling around with the other parents, watching the game, watching her son in particular. Steve, my brother, was an excellent high school soccer player; he practiced constantly, and his interest in the sport coincided with the late-1970s disco glamour of professional soccer in America. My brother’s bedroom walls were plastered with color photos of European soccer stars who were playing in the fledgling North American Soccer League; I remember a particularly fierce image of the Dutch star Johan Cruijff, in a white New York Cosmos uniform, hurdling over an ineffectual slide-tackle. Steve and his friend Robbie used to kick around on our street all the time, shouting out the names of famous players they were emulating until our bland, manicured neighborhood in Binghamton, NY, rang with cries of “Oh—Beckenbauer! Oh—Chinaglia!”
Getting back to the game, though: my brother was on the field, my mother was on the sidelines. My mother, who did not own a pair of blue jeans, was no doubt slightly over-dressed for a soccer game, by which I mean she was the only spectator worried about the leather shoes she’d ordered from Bergdorf Goodman sinking gently into the mud. And my brother was probably playing well, as he usually did, and possibly getting roughed up a little because he was good, and the players on the other team felt threatened or irritated by his skills. And the sounds of the crowd rose and fell as the action on the field became more and less intense; it was like a Greek chorus, the gathering of parents on the sidelines, and my mother was in the middle of this choric ritual, swept along by the voices and the game. Something happened: my brother was knocked over, or maybe a parent supporting the opposing team said something angry or untoward, and in the swell of parents’ voices and players’ voices and coaches’ voices, my mother’s voice suddenly was the loudest. Mom was screaming because she sensed a threat to her child, and because her acute hearing had already begun carrying her away. Maybe she knew what she was screaming; maybe she didn’t. But the sideline energy and the action of the game had pushed her over a boundary—she had now left the land of polite, supportive mothers and become a raging hooligan. It was the sort of transformation that German police were instructed to look out for during last summer’s World Cup, except my mother hadn’t had a drop to drink. She didn’t need it. The ritual itself had lifted her away from her self, her self-possession, until she was loud, impassioned, out of control; and my mother’s voice, musical as it is, can be discordant and shrill.
I would guess that other people were looking at my mother, but that she wasn’t aware of it. Maybe one of the other parents tried to calm her down. What I do know is that Mr. Snape, my brother’s coach, walked away from the team bench and came over to her. “Mrs. Schwartz,” he said, “I can’t have you screaming like that. I’m going to have to ask you to leave the field. I have to ask you to calm yourself down and go sit on the bus until the game’s over.”
The incident occurred at an away game. Since we lived in upstate New York, playing an “away game” usually meant gathering the team in a school bus and driving 15 minutes or so to another school; while the game was played, the empty bus sat in the parking lot, and the bus driver smoked a cigarette and looked in on the action occasionally, or maybe sat behind the wheel the whole time, alone, reading the paper. I don’t know. At any rate, there was a parking lot, and there was an empty school bus. And apparently, my mother went to the bus and sat on it for the remainder of the game. My mother did not ever leave our house, ever, without arranging her hair, applying make up, and wearing jewelry, so she would have been sitting on the school bus carefully coiffed, in gold earrings, wearing a nice sweater—perhaps cashmere—with her leather-gloved hands folded in her lap. And if the bus driver saw her there, sitting on the team bus, he would have asked himself, “What the hell did that lady do? Why did she come to a soccer game all dressed up like that, and why is she sitting on my bus?” He could not have known that she was a dangerous thug.
great story brian. I wish she were yelling tonight at our broomball game!
— tyson Jan 23, 08:40 PM #