It's packed in there, in the second oldest gym in Los Angeles. We're sitting next to Ray who owns the girls who are always at my house, he's like 39 and has two teenagers who are the stars of the team, he just put basketballs in their hands and kept putting basketballs in their hands and now they do everything by instinct. He's the coach we wish the whole team had, he is the real coach, the sideline dad coach who says the right things as they pass by, fuels the girls with a quiet stream of the right words, steady and true. They hear him in passing, like music.
His girls and the rest of these girls, they play like they're in the Amazon jungle and barechested, fighting gorillas and bigfoot and lochness monsters. They lock eyes with their prey and they battle for that little ball, there's something they need and right now it is that ball, you can't have the ball it's ours, give it
They play like it matters and they play like they have the chance to be good at what they do
They got all the way here. Show us what you got, this is the time to unload all the baggage and use every piece
All us parents just watch with the deafening crowd and the buzzers louder than fuck and the screaming
We pin our eyes on those legs we know, the ones we raised, and the ones we just feed occasional sandwiches to or braid their hair for games. Those legs are working in a tangle of other bodies, they are somehow somehow after four years of this, this is Bess's senior year, this is the end, this is where we've gotten to, this moment
Why is everything a battle
This is actually a staged one, like on purpose, a battle. These last two months, everything is a battle. Car accidents, Nandy in the hospital, wildfires wiping out villages, tooth surgeries. Everything in your face, everything violently in our face, you think that hurt? well guess what
And then they win
Not laughing like it's easy, they win by stomping unstoppably against rogue opponents, taking ownership of their fight, they win by fighting
by working by rising bigger than themselves bigger than us parents than the second oldest gym bigger than the national parks bigger than earth
I see Bess and Kayla not the happiest with their game, and some having a great game and some having surprise shots, and this seems how it goes it's never a wide river of joy it's always a turbulent whitewater depending on how it's flowing there's so many rocks always but that's why there's a league so it's not just one time you get more times so maybe one of those times you get a moment of power or divine good you'll always remember
We win the game and the girls jostle into the locker room and the parents are a huge clump on the stands so many of us and then there's suddenly a wall of people next to us, a few people down, there's a jumble of a bad feeling, tons of people spilling down like the blob onto the court and we stand up and there's a massive fight going on, 20 huge men are piled on top of each other and some old lady next to me falls off the stands flat on the ground and she's knocked out
and the 20 guys on the floor in front of us are a swarming blob trying to get the guys under them apart and it's taking a HUNDRED LONG MINUTES are they going to choke someone? Is someone going to die under there?
It is not art like in the movies when pain it's happening in front of you, it is just a jumble of bodies, burly men and why are people fighting and why is it taking so long to stop the people at the bottom
We have long enough to be constantly moving farther away and hearing sirens and then the pile is wrestling a bit up and out is yanked/coughed a girl with black and red dyed hair I thought she was a mad mom fan but no later I find out she is a kid, a senior who now won't graduate, a soccer player who got in a fight with another soccer player in the stands, two girls, they decided to tear each other's heads off because winning feels bad to them and someone's boyfriend punched a girl and then all these men leaped to try and stop it and that's how we ended up with an octopus of men on the floor of our gym, trying to stop two girls from a hockey level of conflict resolution
We wait a very very long time because an ambulance comes for the old lady who fell and our kids are still locked behind the locker room doors but finally they're allowed out and the game has been forgotten because the sidebar freakshow was real and we're scared to go outside but then we're out by the red flashing lights of the ambulance and everyone's looking around to make sure they're not about to get jumped because now we live in a gun nation, but the girls are then having a glimmer of moments to feel proud of the game, remember the game? to know they did well and to forget that soccer girls didn't need to hijack their game
on our old gym floors
under a hundred men
The flashing red lights and Bess is okay. She says soccer is ghetto. She says the whole school is really ghetto, it's only the basketball team that is okay. I feel bad for her that this is her high school experience, I had the drama club there was never any life or death in the drama club unless you count the amount of times you fell in love with people
Fighting hard for a win raises people to a hot air balloon level of immense energy and sometimes I guess it makes people with empty hands want to murder another soccer player
they weren't even playing
it wasn't even their game
that's the level of commitment
So yeah guys, come Tuesday. We're playing Kennedy. Historically, maybe not the name with the best endings.
but
Hoping it will just be a game with a happy ending. Do we dare hope for happiness? In this tiny world we live in? I don't even like sports with all the chances of losing weaved in always, it hurts too much. But I'm a mom and I'm still learning, I wanna learn. I'd rather learn from a skilled team battle on the court than from the aftermath of a terrible fistfight. At least our warriors are trained to fight fairly with a very clear goal. To be the best at what they do, while relying on each other.
So we'll fight, right Verdugo.
You're not gonna take our game, you hear me? As the girls would say, that's OUR BALL
it's ours, give it
