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Varsity Blue
By Ben Falik
midst the most momentous moment
for Detroit sports in my lifetime, one
team emerged from the wake of the
October Yankee-yanking Tigers and unde-
feated Lions, Wolverines and Red Wings:
Andover High School Boys Soccer.
Indeed, I dusted off my varsity jacket (as
if it's had time to collect dust!) and grabbed
a seat (as if I sat!) to watch the Andover win
its first regional championship in school his-
tory. (Go Barons!)
Why the enthusiasm for Division II
high school sports with the current glut
of professional prowess and collegiate
contenders? True, I am on record as hav-
ing an unapologetic affinity for my alma
mater. True, Andover has historically had a
fan-to-athlete ratio virtually identical to its
parent-to-athlete ratio. But this fall's fit of
fandom goes beyond my showing up at my
old stomping ground — in the vain hope of
being mistaken for a student. (Moustache
doesn't help.)
My nephew, Jacob Rosenzweig, walked
onto the team this year as a senior, hav-
ing barely touched a soccer ball in his life.
Within 12 weeks, he has become a better
player than I was after 12 years in the sport.
Don't believe me? Ask his coach, who had
to deal with my hijinks his first years with
Andover JV and then varsity.
Watching the games, I was struck by Ja-
cob's courage, shedding the comfort of his
uncomfortable hockey gear, donning short
— albeit not as short as they were in my
day, but still pretty short — three-quarter
shorts. Doesn't hurt that he's lightning fast,
either.
It's no small task trying to learn a new
"language"with his feet that most of his
teammates have been speaking most of
their bipedal lives. Especially when your
mother tongue involves putting blades on
shoes and pushing a puck with a stick. At
least, I think that's how hockey works.
The best advice I've had for him — world-
ly wisdom we would want whereever — is
that the other team doesn't know he has no
idea what he's doing. Similarly sound: Be the
first one to the ball, and you can figure out
what to do with it once you're there.
I'm actually closer in age to Jacob than
I am to my soccer-illiterate brother-in-law.
This all makes for the kind of delightfully
disorienting dynamic you only get with
big families. When I married in to my wife's
family and inherited Jacob and six other off-
spring as nieces and nephews, he was a little
too old to be fooled into thinking I was cool.
He tried not to spoil "Fat Bob's Cooking
Show," my improvised sleepover sundae
bar, for his cousins. But he resented that my
casual interest in professional football did
not extend to the realm of fantasy.
So, when Jacob scored the winning goal
in the regional semifinals, I recognized his
celebratory hand gesture from Aaron Rodg-
ers in his State Farm commercial rather than
Aaron Rodgers in his Packers uniform. And
yet, I don't think Jacob was humoring me
when he said he could hear me cheering
from the top of the bleachers.
Jacob will be far from Andover this time
next year. The soccer team will graduate a
sizable swatch of seniors, and a new fount of
freshman will take the field where, on a crisp
autumn evening, Jacob and his teammates
held their regional medals and heads high.
If Jacob is anything like I was then, gradu-
ation won't come fast enough. And, if he's
anything like I was after, it could be more
than a decade before he realizes — watch-
ing his cousin Judah (my son), tearing
up the field — the way his character was
shaped by the competition, the cohesion,
the camaraderie. The short shorts.
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