How to Get Your Kicks on Labor Day
When I think about Labor Day, I think less about barbecues or the beach than I do about soccer. I haven't played soccer on Labor Day weekend in a decade; in fact, I can count on one hand the number of times I've played soccer since I entered middle school. But, in the same way that Christmas will eternally be defined by a few years of childhood, Labor Day will, to me, forever be about the East Brunswick Labor Day Tournament, a soccer competition for children as young as eight and as old as seventeen, held annually in my hometown.
The tournament, as I remember it, marked the beginning of the fall season for many of New Jersey's travel teams, including mine, for which it always presaged a rocky journey through autumn. But, because the tournament came early, every team had hope, and the East Brunswick squads especially wanted to win, in part due to a notion so absurd that only our adult coaches could have invented it: To protect our town's reputation, we had to defend our home field, as if the quality of a municipality were typically judged by the soccer abilities of its grade-schoolers.
Still, most of my memories of Labor Day weekends are happy. Tournament soccer was the best kind of soccer. In addition to the usual pleasure of running around on fragrant, freshly cut grass, there was a festive atmosphere among the players. At the end of the first game of the day, it was exciting for me, still dizzy and flushed, to think that, in just a few hours, I'd begin another one. I remember playing the later games in damp, squishy socks and sticky shin guards. If you didn't play soccer as a kid, you probably don't know how much an eight-year-old's feet can sweat.
The first Labor Day Tournament I remember occurred in 1994. I wasn't old enough to participate, but my brother was, and I watched him. His team won on Saturday and Sunday, returned for the championship match on Monday, and won again. I don't recall being jealous. Nevertheless, a few weeks ago, while at a friend's house, I happened to notice her brother's trophy collection in the living room. Apparently, her brother, who was a little older than mine, had also won the 1994 Labor Day Tournament; fourteen years later, I still recognized the trophy immediately, which made me realize that I must have spent a great deal of time gazing at my brother's prize. I don't know what nearly any of my own trophies look like.
In 1996, at age eight, I became eligible to move up from my springtime tournament team to a full-time travel team. I attended the tryout and was selected: I was a good scorer and fast for my age. I, like each of my new teammates, soon owned a more expensive jersey, a gym bag with my number stitched onto the front, and a warm-up suit bearing my team's colors – rewards for outperforming the other eight-year-olds at the tryout, distinguishing us from them. It only just occurred to me now to feel humiliated about this. The merchandise did little to help us at our first Labor Day Tournament, where out-of-towners handily defeated us, just as they would the next year and the year after that. Occasionally we showed promise, but we were an undisciplined bunch, and nobody forced us to work very hard in practice. During games, our coach had only one piece of advice for us, which he used irrespective of the situation at hand: "Boot it!" As it turns out, blasting the ball downfield whenever you get a chance is not an especially effective strategy in soccer. For my team, Labor Day weekend ended before Labor Day: We never got to play on Monday.
I think that, if I were to visit the tournament now, I'd find much of the spectacle distasteful. I maintain that kids' soccer is better to watch than professional soccer, in which both teams often are so skilled that a kind of paralysis overtakes the contest; however, the mothers and fathers at soccer games are less palatable. In my memory, they border the field like slugs baking in the sun, rising from their lawn chairs only to shout unusable advice to their children and voice their misinterpretations of the game's rules to the beleaguered referee. I recall them emanating workday stress and bringing a competitive ugliness to the sport: We wanted to win, but they wanted us to beat our opponents. They were English soccer hooligans without the alcohol. As a kid, one can ignore them; as an adult, one must fear becoming them. When I played, only my own mom and dad seemed wholly exempt from the psychosis; common sense tells me that there were others whom I didn't notice. Yet it's undeniable that, in East Brunswick, grownups generally regard soccer far too seriously. Coaches assemble the first exclusive teams for the more gifted children when they are seven. When a boy is chosen, he's delighted; his parents grimly latch onto his newfound talent as if it were an asset to be protected. Among the parents of my brothers' teammates, who were more talented than mine and thus inspired even more fervent parental devotion, I'm not sure there was one who did not believe his child would one day play in the World Cup, as long as he received the proper, ear-splitting encouragement.
Of course, the parents were wrong. Only one soccer player from East Brunswick reached the international stage – Heather O'Reilly, a girl three years older than I, who has participated in one World Cup and two Olympics. I suppose that greater triumphs have eclipsed her memories of the East Brunswick Labor Day Tournament. Over the three-day weekend, she'll have only to think about her new gold medal.