Boston College Athletics
The Life of Kyle
February 23, 2003 | Men's Soccer
Feb. 23, 2003
Before I arrived in Brazil, I had a pretty good idea of what the trip was going to entail: two-and-a-half weeks of practice at an isolated complex in the middle of nowhere, seeing very little of Brazil, eating the same thing over and over, and spending the entire week wishing I were back home.
And I wasn't far off.
We are at an amazing complex about three hours south of Sao Paulo, up in the mountains. The weather is either so hot that you feel your skin baking, or it is pouring down buckets of endless rain. Over the first week-and-a-half we have only been practicing, sometimes once, sometimes twice a day. In between practices we try to keep ourselves busy by watching soccer on TV (which is mostly only in Portuguese), catching up on sleep or just hanging out. Some people have portable DVD players or PlayStations that they brought to keep their sanity, but I have attempted to bury my head in my studies in hopes that I won't be too far behind when I return from my journeys.
The training sessions are going well, but I have begun to realize it will be a long, hard road to establish myself within the team. And one thing is for sure - there will be plenty of practical jokes along the way. My favorite one so far happened during the second day of practice. I went to put on my goalkeeper gloves, and I noticed the ever-so-appealing scent of Flexall rising from them. It seems the guys thought it would be funny to fill a few pairs of my gloves with pain-relieving gel to see how well I could play with my hands numb and tingling. Actually, it wasn?t so bad, other than the fact that for the next four days the Flexall continued to make my hands tingle while I was training.
It is also really difficult to once again find myself watching from the sidelines during practice. I knew from my experience redshirting as a freshman at Virginia what it was like to be the third-string goalkeeper, but I forgot how difficult it was until I got down here. I know it is a matter of paying my dues, but no one likes being on the sidelines shagging balls while almost everyone else is on the field.
I told my roommate that being on one of these trips makes you feel like your life has stopped while everyone else's keeps on moving. You feel like you are stuck in a time warp, like Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day," where each day you wake up and it's the same thing. It seems like the one thing you have plenty of down here is time. The worst thing that can possibly happen to you is that you have a bad phone conversation, a bad E-mail or a bad training session. Because there is nothing else happening in your world, the negative thoughts that these events bring out start to consume you. Sometimes it seems like the only positive thought is that each day that goes by here means you are one day closer to going home.
Before I came to Brazil, all my friends and family away from soccer had been telling me how great it is that I am a professional soccer player, but nobody realizes what it is really like until they have gone through it. The glamour and glitz of professional athletics might apply to the NFL or the NBA, but the life of a professional soccer player is definitely not about driving fancy cars and having huge homes. There is very little glamour in living paycheck to paycheck, knowing that you could be making far more money and have much more job security working almost anywhere else. I am lucky in that I don?t have a family to support or anywhere definite to call home right now, but I couldn?t imagine being married with kids, getting traded three times in one year, and not making much money at all.
When it comes down to it, the one reason that we all do it is that we love the game. We all dreamt of playing professional soccer when we were kids, and even though the reality of it appears to be nothing like the dream world we imagined, we do it because that dream is still alive within us. And no matter how irrational we know these dreams to be, it is our hearts that hold our dreams, not our heads.
