The boys of summer
By EZEADIKWA MICHAEL.C(ezeadikwamc@yahoo.co.uk)
Saturday,May 20,2006
Look out your window and feel that soft, early evening breeze blowing lazily outside. Most times, it’s soft on your skin like a feather. That’s the breeze of
summer blowing towards the ocean. In a few weeks, it would be time to say goodbye to summer.
The end of summer is always a bitter-sweet period. You love summer but you love to see it go away for another year. Summer is the season of lust. You heart yearns for so much and the lazy winds of summer often give wings to your fantasy.
I love summers. It’s that time of the year that man takes it easy and cools his heels, especially in these parts of the world. The days seems to drag on forever and, if you’ve ever been in Latin America, the nights are filled with the romance of life as you sit on the balcony, sipping from a glass of margarita and watching the sun set.
If you love adventure like I do, you will also love summer. It’s that time of the year when you tempt fate. It’s that time of the year you make another dive out of a plane at 15,000 feet. It’s that time of the year you set sail for land from the middle of the ocean on a kayak boat, smiling at tribes of fishes as they swim by. It’s that time of the year for boys to be boys.
If summer is so full of fun, why do I like it when it strolls away? I like to lust but I love to love. Summer is not made for love, it’s made for flings. And, you can only have so many flings before you find true love. I love it when summer rolls away because with the end of summer comes the beginning of another season of one of man’s greatest invention.
Football.
Football is life in its purest form. It is a love that never ends. If they had it in the Garden of Eden, the snake may have stayed away or watch man at his athletic best. With football, sin takes a vacation. The world may be round but football makes the world go round. And, it’s the same everywhere. Even in America where they play a different kind of football, the fever is the same and the love of the game remains the one legacy most fathers pass to their sons, free of charge.
They call it soccer in these parts but no one can say the game sucks anymore. Not when the growing Latino population is doing for soccer what Pele couldn’t do more than two decades ago. Not when some Americans have seen the magic of Zidane and Ronaldo, the glitz of Beckam and, just last month, a glimpse of the boy who may one day be king, Mikel Obi.
Football in Nigeria is not the same as it was only two decades ago. Then, when Rangers rolled into the Liberty stadium for a clash with Shooting Stars, the city stops for a couple of hours. When the giant-killers Leventis United tackled the prodigies of New Nigerian Bank of Benin, you knew you were watching the future of Nigerian football. The national stadium in Lagos was the graveyard for the football ambitions of foreign nations. Today, that same stadium is a graveyard.
Those days of magic are gone. They may come around again but the odds don’t look too good. It doesn’t look too good when the new sports minister comes into town, screaming he’s going to heave the game into the skies. But, instead he is the only sports minister in the world who attended an away friendly game with his country’s national team this past Wednesday. He called it a psychological visit but, someone needs to tell him they have people with PhD’s who do that very well. And, if he must talk to the players, someone should introduce him to a telephone.
In Europe, the boys of winter play the game and thrill the billions who love it. If you caught the beginning of the English premiership last weekend, you’ll know that manna still falls from heaven. But in this age, they are called top-flight professional footballers and they feed the eyes. And, just to let you know that God also loves the game, my dear team, Tottenham Hotspurs thumped Portsmouth to begin the season. This may well be the year we take back north London from Arsenal. A man can dream, can’t he?
You gotta love the end of summer and the beginning of the football season. And, as an icing on the cake, Diego Maradona, the Argentine pint-sized genius is back in the news. This time, he’s not an addict or an overweight nuisance. He’s now a talk show host. I was fortunate to see clips of his first show earlier this week. It doesn’t compare to his wizardry on the field but then, what can?
Wanna guess who his first guest was? Pele. How cool is that? Pele and Maradona, the greatest feet to have ever kicked a football in the same room, trading their famous number 10 jerseys, heading the ball back and forth and talking shop across the table. That was something. And, it comes at the end of summer when football is in the air.