The World Cup Keeps Reminding Me My Father’s Gone

It’s hard for me not to get choked up when I hear the Daddy stories of this World Cup. If you are new to writing memoirs, there are terrific father-themed ones. Abusive daddies. Absentee daddies. Delusional daddies. I have the blessing of maybe covering all three in the book I’m working on about my own father.

Erling Haaland, I learned, is a player for Norway who’s built like a machine. But like me, he has a traceable human father. Unlike me, he has a father who raised him and passed along his sport. I so wish I had become a fan of The Beautiful Game when I was young, especially under the guidance of my dad, who truly loved footie. They called him “Skip” in Jamaica and I imagine his modest, lithe body, with shoulders swinging and legs crossing over, skipping to a dub beat as he struck the ball over and around opponents.

I can’t tell you much about soccer, but I know there are standout strikers like Haaland. His combination of power, stature, speed, and cunning betray his boyishness, his elation at tossing rivals down like rag dolls, at chewing up patches of grass in his cleats, at mauling the net with goal after goal. When I see him, I know there must’ve been Norse boatmen who had bones like steel and crashed the shores ready to take your land and your women. A bunch of beasts.

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