MY little two-year-old son wants to play soccer like a girl and I think that's just wonderful.
We're potty training him these days and we've been using a big stack of old sports magazines to keep him occupied while he learns the business. I figure we're giving him two life skills - hygienic waste disposal and strategic bathroom time-killing.
Hopefully, 30-some years down the road he'll be able to use the knowledge he's acquiring now to gain a few moments of peace from his own squealing children. That is, assuming magazines and bathrooms still exist 30 years from now when people are living in their moon condos or ozone shields or whatever.
For some strange reason - let's call it a mixture of laziness and nostalgia - I've stockpiled a bunch of old Sports Illustrated magazines throughout the years, even moving them from city to city along with other important heirlooms like the notes from my Journalism Ethics class and my Big Lebowski bobble-head doll.
The old magazines, however, have allowed me to give my son an education in the sporting landscape over the last decade. I'm a big proponent of sports brainwashing so of course magazines with stories about Steve Nash in them have featured prominently. Other stars who pop up frequently have also been added to his early vocabulary. Lebwon James, Kobe Bwyant, Dirk Novisky, Leonmess Messi, Ho Bautista - that's Jose Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays, in case this baby-babble game has gone too far.
And of course there's Drew Brees!, a name that my son always pronounces correctly, including the exclamation point.
Last year Sportsnet came out with a Canadian national magazine that has allowed my son to meet some of the athletes mostly ignored by Sports Illustrated, folks like Sidney Cwosby and Alex Lovechkin. Even shot putter Dylan Armstwong was a favourite for a while after the Olympics.
The process does pose some problems though.
My son loves motorcycles and fire so he's drawn to a certain flashy page that often appears at the beginning of the magazine. It's awkward for me to continually explain that Old Spice is not a real team and that the man in a suit riding a flaming chopper with a girl in a bikini on the back of it is not a real athlete. Unless, maybe . . . is that Tiger Woods? Nah.
It's also tougher to drive home the "we don't punch people" rule with Sports Illustrated continuing to believe that professional boxing is a sport that people care about. The Canadian version isn't much better, what with Georges St-Pierre beating the crap out of someone on every fourth page. Ah well, it isn't the magazine's job to raise my kid. That task falls to my wife. And, in all likelihood, Google.
Flipping through pages from the past also offers some interesting looks at the world that was. Hey, there's a triumphant Barry Bonds. And what a glowing article on Lance Armstrong.
My son can ID both of those guys by their pictures but he can't quite get their names right. He usually nails their first and last names but for some strange reason he always adds "is a cheater" onto the end. Kids say the darndest things.
It's not all dirty syringes and swollen heads, of course. Far from it - my son has a lot of fun with his sports knowledge. Last week he was sitting down for dinner and he did a little roll call as he got to the table. "This chair is for Mama, this chair is for Daddy, this chair is for me and this chair is for Carmelo Anthony." I didn't have the heart to tell him that dinner with the Knicks forward would not work - the food would never make it around the table because Carmelo never passes anything.
Congrats, by the way, to the handful of my readers who got that basketball joke. I know we're a hockey country but my son really did say that one chair was reserved for Melo.
So where does playing soccer like a girl come in? Last week we were kicking the ball around the house when my son fired a shot into the net. "Gooooaaaaal," we yelled, to which my son replied "Just like Christine Sinclair!"
Actually he calls her "Sixteen Sinclair." Close enough, and for a Canadian kid there really is no better proclamation. No offence to the men's national team, but no one is yelling the name "Tosaint Ricketts!" after scoring a goal, even though that does sound like kind of a badass thing to yell.
Pappa Google seems to agree. If you search for "canada soccer international goals," 23 of the first 25 hits are about Christine Sinclair. My son watched some of her amazing Olympic highlights, saw her plastered all over Sportsnet Magazine and correctly deduced that she was awesome. I think that's pretty cool.
In an age where heroes can turn to villains like a glossy magazine disintegrating in a mud puddle, it's nice to know there are still folks like Sixteen that we can count on to teach our kids how to play the game right.
