Luck, memory & Leicester City.
When I was eight or nine years old I watched the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. Within the exposition the old guy (Spoiler!) who dies later gives his newest theory on the concept of marriage. He says something like: A couple comes together, gets along and then runs out of topics to talk about. So...", he remarks: "they marry. From now on they can always go back to that day whenever they have nothing else to share." As far as I remember that was my first encounter with the concept of memory. Later, in high school, I listened to awful sounding German Indie Bands that said smart things like "Knowing when you were happy is easy, knowing when you are happy is art."
When I was eight or nine years old I watched the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. Within the exposition the old guy (Spoiler!) who dies later gives his newest theory on the concept of marriage. He says something like: A couple comes together, gets along and then runs out of topics to talk about. So...", he remarks: "they marry. From now on they can always go back to that day whenever they have nothing else to share." As far as I remember that was my first encounter with the concept of memory. Later, in high school, I listened to awful sounding German Indie Bands that said smart things like "Knowing when you were happy is easy, knowing when you are happy is art."
A few years later I find myself in a youth camp trying to evangelize a smart Millennial Kid about my idea of football. A lot of decisions brought me here in which I usually choose time over money, in which I (maybe too) often favored the naive ideal over the effective compromise. And still, I can't help it. Bernie Sanders intrigues me more than Hillary Clinton does.
My monologue was way to long, way to serious, earned the eye rolling of a co-worker and ended with something in the area of: "Football is about fathers showing their sons the world, so they can show it to their sons". The French kid nodded and replied something polite and than we watched a friendly match of Red Bull Leipzig. Two weeks later we went our ways.
My monologue was way to long, way to serious, earned the eye rolling of a co-worker and ended with something in the area of: "Football is about fathers showing their sons the world, so they can show it to their sons". The French kid nodded and replied something polite and than we watched a friendly match of Red Bull Leipzig. Two weeks later we went our ways.
At the same time I developed a habit of ending phone calls with my dad with: "We are not cursed". I say that since our club was traumatized by a reflected shot in the 121st minute of the relegation-playoffs. We are not cursed, after a late winner in the season opener one year later, one league lower. We are not cursed, after a few fine games before Christmas. We are not cursed, after great nights in the cup competition. We are not cursed, right after Germany beat Brazil in this bizarre semifinal. But countries are overrated and cities are underrated. And therefore something stuck. Yes, a trauma, we called by the name of the city that scored in the 121st minute: Darmstadt. I bragged with it. I still do. Failure can become a weird kind of pride. And now this Leicester City thing came along. My American friends call it a Cinderella Story. But this is not a genre flick of an outsider doing well till the big boys take over in the Elite Eight. This is a once in a lifetime indie. There shouldn't be a definition for this - by definition. What did Coach Claudio Ranieri say: "It’s this year or never. In an era when money counts for everything, we give hope to everybody". Yes, this is an English story, about this 21st century capitalism, nobody likes and yet nobody rejects because everybody just tries to survive. It's a story about ticket prices that only Russian oil tycoons and sheikhs can pay - just like the teams they put passion- and creative less together. It's a story about craft and talent, about players and their fans who act like they are entitled to titles and and the rest who still celebrates when they score. It's a story about education, about players who didn't find success in the fast lane, outside of the football-boarding-schools, not robed of their childhood by their helicopter parents, with different haircuts. It's a story about these players giving interviews in which they don't know what they will say, because they actually listen to the question before they answer. Sometimes they even make a joke. And sometimes it's even funny.
It's a story about cities. The ones nobody makes movies about, no tourist visits and where - if they are lucky - its residents embrace that with a smile or at least a shrug. These average cities full of fathers and sons. In Bastia, Heerenveen, Vigo, Cleveland, Winnipeg, Ufa, Uppsala or Guimaraes, everywhere fathers saying to their sons, it will be ok. But you know what? That is not exactly true. Most cities are average, painfully solid. And most players who play in the fifth league, unlike Jamie Vardy, will never become National Champion. Yes, Robert Huth isn't someone with a picture in the dictionary next to 'talent' and still, even he, this hardworking giant, needed luck. Lots of luck. And still: Hope is real. Ranieri is right. But hope is something else but the idea of becoming king. Hope - is a good memory. Hope is what they call a Happy Place in bad Sit- and Rom-Coms. Ask everyone, ask yourself: Do you remember your wins or your loses more? I know my answer. It's called Darmstadt. And hope is this one moment, so powerful it's enough for a hole lifetime. Hope is what marriage pretends to be. Next year the big boys from abroad will take over again. And at the end of that year someone in Manchester or London will take a bath in champagne and will call it a party. He will earn so much money he could buy every bar in his town. While someone in Leicester will never have to buy his own beer again. In one of these average cities, where they brag with their high rainfall statistics, where from now on the dads will take theirs sons to the stadium and will say: "Kid, even if from now on we won't win a single game in this life, that one year in which Jamie Vardy scored 11 games in a row, in which we had this insurmountable defense full of clumsy leviathans, this eager Japanese with a horrible haircut, this French Roadrunner, playing football like the strongest vacuum cleaner imaginable, this stylish coach who wasn't in town when we won the title because he wanted to have dinner with his 96 year-old mum, that year is infinite. Hope is not about what will be. But the conviction that whatever will happen you always have that moment when we were the center of the world. When they all learned to spell our name. We will always share this. We will always know: In that moment we knew, it was art!" And the son won't understand but will nod politely.
