Nicholas Gerard-Larson, a senior on the 2009 Milwaukee men's soccer team, will be blogging all season long on the UWM website. Today is his seventh blog entry.
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I notice myself constantly commenting on the weather and nearby surroundings, no matter what time of day it is or where I’m located. I tend to include some of these discussions in my blog, simply because I feel they are relatively important talking points when trying to describe our team’s activity. I wonder if I’m merely articulating an inherent aspect of human nature, an evolutionary impulse to absorb and respond to one’s immediate environment. On the other hand, I’m also responsible for narrating our team’s movements and general outlook, and descriptions like these are necessary for creating the proper setting.
Take for example a recent practice that was conducted in a complete downpour. The field was saturated, and with field turf this often results in standing water on the pitch, about an inch of it in our case. Every step was greeted with an oozing gush of water, both out of the inside of one’s cleats and from the ground itself. Sliding for a loose ball resulted in an uncomfortable flood of liquid up one’s shorts, reaching the only places that had formerly kept dry from the torrential onslaught. While our basic reasoning for being out in such weather was to practice, I found myself dwelling on the altered, irregular surroundings. These moments of seemingly sudden enlightenment or creative conceptualization don’t happen on a regular basis. They arise only through scenes of abnormality, and the weather tends to succeed in offering the most significant examples of such variation and tumult. So you’ll have to forgive me if I seem to have a superfluous preoccupation with the weather. It’s not because I’m overly intrigued by cloud patterns or temperature variants. I’m simply depicting what’s pertinent.
The drive to Indianapolis was fairly mundane, with Chicago’s skyline offering the only slight bit of scenic attraction on the five-hour route south. Mile after mile we passed old, forlorn industrial yards, endless corn fields, and intermittently placed freeway “villages,” full of all the fine amenities a 300 pound trucker could desire. I imagine before the highway system was put in place these sort of drives were far more charming and entertaining. But we’ve sacrificed picturesque views for efficiency and speed, a trend that pertains to numerous other facets of modern life.
Butler is situated in a very arboreal part of Indianapolis; lush, deciduous green encroaches on the nearby campus buildings and roads, making you feel like you’re in a dense, rural forest rather than a budding metropolis. The sense of being on the fringe of the wilderness and in an old frontier community is reinforced by the neighborhood next to the campus. Antebellum manors with bleached white Roman columns adorning their facades border enormous French-style estates, complete with built-in turrets and lavish fountains. Hedges trimmed to perfection reach high enough to keep unwanted pedestrians from peeping into the grounds, while simultaneously allowing people in passing vehicles to admire the pretentious opulence. It feels like an old colonial village, accessible only by horse and covered wagon, and these houses represent the land, wealth, and privilege of the aristocracy. I half-expected to see women in homespun bonnets and whalebone corsets, laughing with each other as they drink earl grey tea and read Emile BrontÎ.
The trend of overcast clouds and rain didn’t fail to change as we began our game Friday night in the Butler Bowl. This stadium is built into a slight depression in the middle of the campus, bordered by student housing on one side and the renowned Hinkle Fieldhouse, featured in the movie “Hoosiers,” on the other. In the first few minutes it appeared we would face an uphill battle as one of the Butler players was taken down in the box and awarded a penalty kick. But John Shakon, in a trend that would define him for the entire game, stepped up and made a huge save, deflecting the spot kick over the bar for a corner. We battled hard the rest of the first half, getting a few strong chances on goal without seriously challenging the opposing keeper. With about thirty seconds left in the half we were caught on a breakaway on the left side and the Butler forward slotted the ball into the right corner for the game’s only goal.
The second half saw a renewed push from both teams and Shakon truly showed his stellar abilities, coming up big with numerous acrobatic saves. Shots from close quarters, set pieces, crosses and blasts from outside of the box were all turned away from our goal due to Shakon’s brilliance. We fought hard for our few chances on goal, but were unable to finish, and the game ended in an unsatisfying 1-0 loss.
Unsatisfying ended up being the word of the day, as our post game meal featured the chemically altered, MSG saturated swill of McDonalds. No virulent strain of criticism is comprehensive or accurate enough to brand food of this quality. A double cheeseburger value meal, including fries and a drink, is now being advertised at $2.99, the recession special so it seems. I can’t imagine the quality of a product that is offered at this price, since undoubtedly it must cost around twenty-five or thirty cents to produce. My gourmet chicken BLT sandwich, one of the company’s scaled-up feature meals, had a large, conspicuous piece of clear, rubbery fat across the middle of the breast, giving me the added pleasure of chewing it multiple times before allowing the condensed, slippery morsel to slide down my gagging throat.
We awoke the next morning to find out about a third of our team was sick, either with a stomach virus or some other flu or throat issue. I fought back the urge to blame it on McDonalds, reminding myself that these symptoms have been circulating both the school and our team. I’m certainly not one to buy into the current hysteria on swine flu, but it seems like we may have an endemic within our squad.
We drove through downtown Indianapolis on our way to Dayton and I was pleasantly surprised by the aesthetics of the area. Several large parks run through the business district and provide a welcomed relief from the steel and glass of the numerous financial skyscrapers. Several large monuments, most of them war memorials, offer beautiful sculptures of stone and iron, depicting soldiers comforting children and the personified female figure of “justice,” brandishing the symbolic scales, sword, and blindfold. We passed an enormous obelisk, fittingly marking the center of the downtown area and merged onto the freeway just below the Colts stadium to head eastward.
I succumbed to the trend of an upset stomach Saturday night, spending much of the late evening huddled over a toilet watching each distinct course from our earlier dinner resurface in a far more liquid form. The next morning I felt drained, emptied of nutrients and extremely fatigued. I ate some yogurt and fruit for breakfast, allowing the light meal to settle my stomach enough to play by early afternoon.
Wright State’s field was in exceedingly poor shape due to steady rainfall the previous week. The six-yard boxes and corners of the field resembled well-trodden cart paths from the olden days with large swaths of loose grass poking up from the muddy soil. The sloppy conditions carried over to the style of play on the rest of the field and we found ourselves down 2-0 at the end of the first half. We rallied during the second half and converted two well built-up plays to even the scoreboard and push the game into overtime. Goal line heroics towards the end of the second half salvaged the chance at an overtime victory as several of our players threw themselves into a scrum in the six-yard box to stop a Wright State go-ahead goal inches from the line. Overtime proved fairly uneventful and we ended the game in a 2-2 tie, giving us a much needed point in the conference standings. I spent most of the ride home doing homework and attempting to sleep, hoping to avoid another flu-related “outburst.”
