You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
Bunking with your kid’s soccer coach during the big regional tournament.
“There’s 2 queen beds,” he says with a friendly smile over the phone.
“The boys can sleep on the pull out couch. A couple of dads, a couple of kids. It will be great.”
OK I say, not giving it another thought.
Why would I? The coach is cool. Our boys are best friends. Might save a few bucks. What’s not to like?
Famous last words!
The Vulcan Cup bills itself as a prestigious tournament for soccer teams of all ages.
It is situated in the bustling arm pit of Birmingham Alabama. One long strip center of fast food restaurants and check cashing establishments.
Despite this under belly of a venue, teams from all over the country come to compete. It’s here, in a little excavation pit of a soccer “pitch” that 12 year old soccer hot shots come to test their skills and “futbol” acumen against the best of the best in the South East Region.
My son is one of these kids.
So the Friday before the tournament arrives. Suddenly, I need to figure out who is driving and where we are staying.
I call the coach and he laughs into the receiver.
“A.C., I have a little screw ball to throw at you” .
“Screwball,” I say to myself. “Screwball is never good”
That’s when he begins to tell me that we have added three more 12 year olds and a Russian Bear to our room.
Five 12 years olds in one room is bad. Five 12 years and two adult men is horrible.
Adding a Russian bear to this mix is borderline criminal.
“What!” I exclaim. “Five kids and three grown men in one room. Really?”
“Really.”
“Victor the Russian Bear is also coming and I told him he could room with us.”
Victor is the father of one of the boys playing in the tournament. He is from Russia and moved to Tennessee several years ago. He is passionate and soccer crazy. He is a good man and I like him a lot.
“How’s your sense of humor?,” the coach asks.
Good question. Is it Johnny Carson or Andrew Dice Clay? How is my humor right now?
“Why?” I say pausing for more last minute details.
“The Russian Bear snores like a bear in heat,” Coach says.
Great I think to myself. Nothing says weekend of bliss like a snoring Russian Bear.
“You OK with this?,” the coach asks earnestly.
I like challenges and I love a good story and this promises to make for a good story. It certainly is going to be challenging.
“Let’s roll,” I say.
To add insult to injury, the forecast is for rain. Not gentle spring rain, we’re talking weather caster breaking into normal programming type rain.
The Vulcan Cup has all ready stated on its web site that it doesn’t postpone a tournament for anything. Not rain, not snow, not dive bombing sea gulls from the local land fill.
I check the weather channel and I see storm tracking over Alabama where dark blues and purples fill the five day forecast.
This is going to be interesting I think to myself.
And so it begins. Friday night. It’s a back seat full of kids and a trunk loaded as if I’m the road crew for the Harlem Globetrotters.
Birmingham is a straight shot from Nashville, down I-65. Problem is, the rain is coming down like a typhoon.
It’s dark like black velvet. The water is splashing across the windshield like Shamu’s tank at Sea World. The windshield wipers are new and they scrape the glass, over matched like a mime fighting Mike Tyson after a Barbara Walters Interview.
The road is coated in a sheet of water. Trucks are splashing us. High beams are blinding us. Some motorists are driving in fear. Others are driving with reckless abandon, swirving in and out of traffic. It is harrowing and surreal and dangerous.
3 hours of white knuckle gripping the steering wheel ensue. I have three boys in the back and they are screaming and laughing and singing songs. They have no idea how intense this drive is. They don’t care. They are sharing an ipod ear bud and making 6th grade jokes and all at the decibel level of a mine cave in Argentina.
Beside me is the Russian Bear. He is talking to me, but I can barely hear him because of the screaming kids, the driving rain and his pronounced Russian accent.
The drive is draining, like juggling chain saws on a sea saw. One false move, one mistake and you could lose an appendage and silence three little lives forever. I am aware of this, and I drive like the lives I save are more important than my own, because they are.
The drive is so intense that by the time I get to the hotel, I am spent. I’m moist, as if I have run a marathon sitting on my ass.
No noise, no rain shower, no surprise can phase me now. As long as a truck doesn’t cross the center line in the hotel lobby I no longer care. Caring is for other parents, for the Coach, who pulls in right behind me.
Coach looks frazzled, as if he has just driven the Vegas 400 with a socket wrench stuck on his wheel. He realizes that we drove through a monsoon – safely – with a bunch of kids and a crazy Russian. This is the same storm system that will ultimately spawn two Louisiana tornadoes and injure fifty people.
We both burst out laughing wondering how the hell they can hold a soccer tournament in this quagmire of death.
We pile into the hotel pushing two luggage carts piled high with soccer back packs and suitcases and a cooler full of beer.
We pile into room 426, a 10 by 10 foot squae that will be our home away from home for the next 72 hours.
As the green light clicks on the door lock and Coach pushes open the portal, I hear my first burst of laughter.
It’s the Coach as he turns on the lights.
I enter. My eyes lock on a king sized bed in the middle of the room and a small couch.
“Dude we can’t both sleep in the same bed,” Coach says.
8 of us pile into the room and the door shuts.
It feels claustrophobic like a coffin. Kids are touching stuff and jumping on the bed. Someone goes in the bathroom and another kid turns on the tv. My mind is racking like a merry go round with crazy horse heads, rolling off a cliff with insane arcade music blaring along the way.
“Dude, if you touch me while we sleep I’m going to put you in the hall,” Coach says throwing his bag on the bed.
“If I touch you while we sleep, I’ll put myself in the hall,” I say half way kidding.
The kids move to the couch and open it up. There are suddenly backpacks and soccer balls and plastic bags and suit cases everywhere.
“I will sleep here,” the Russian says pulling a rolling swivel desk chair near the foot of the king sized bed.
“You brought a sleeping bag?” I say curiously.
“Yes,” He says his accent thick like refrigerated honey. “But when I sleep seated up I do not snore as much.”
Coach looks at me and bursts out laughing.
“This guy snores like a thunder storm,” He says.
The kids begin unrolling sleeping bags and suddely there is no floor. There is only debris and chaos.
“Are you ready for a screw ball Cordan?” The words swirl across my memory as I reach into the cooler and pull out 3 Coors Lights.
I toss one to the Bear and one to Coach.
“I think we’re going to need this.”
The men smile and silently toast me knowing that this is going to be a memorable stay.
“This room is gonna smell like ass,” one of the soccer kids says.
I laugh out loud. The kid’s right.
5 farting 12 year olds, 2 soccer dads and 1 Russian Bear all in one room with one bed and one toilet.
Oh yeah, this is going to be crazy.
After a 3 hour drive, the boys are wound up tighter than golf balls bouncing off the cart path. They are ping ponging all over the halls.
The door begins opening and closing and opening and closing like it’s a WalMart on Black Friday. Teammates, 20 and 30 teammates come and go. The boys, dozens of them at once, are ready to all go crazy.
It’s 10:30pm and the kids decide now is the time to use the hallway as a drag strip, as a place to hold a cock fight and put on a monster truck demolition derby. Now is the time for adrenaline crazy 12 year olds to scream and yelp and laugh so loud the police will be called and what started out as a soccer scrum will be transformed into a crime scene.
If you are a soccer parent, you know the weekend at the hotel is going to be filled with boys being boys. 5 floors with hundreds of kids all running down hallways and pushing every button in two elevators and throwing ice from the ice machine and running up and down the stairwell. If you are a soccer parent, you all ready know this insanity is going to occur. It doesn’t say it in the check in brochure, but it should. In fact, if you are the Hampton Inn, you all ready know this stupidity is going to happen. You took the money and filled your hotel coffers knowing it was going to be a full house. This is not Hampton Inn’s first soccer rodeo.
But if you are the church group looking for quiet reflection, you are going to have your patience tested early and often on this weekend.
If you are a normal family stopping from Indiana on your way to the beach, you might just find yourself getting angry and wanting to call hotel management.
As I take a swig of my beer and lay down on my half of the king sized bed, I hear a yell in the hallway beyond.
“let’s push all the buttons in the elevator.”
Then a trample of feet and the squeal of crazy rushing down the hall.
Coach tips the cool frosty down the back of his throat.
“You still got that sense of humor AC?”
I laugh letting the cool nectar of the hops and barley Gods deaden my senses. Yes sir coach. I’m feeling like Chris Rock right about now.
Suddenly a herd of kids blow into the room. The door smashes the wall. The cluster of kids seem a little panicked.
“She grabbed me by my hoodie and jerked me back,” one long haired kid says.
This soccer kid looks like one of the Beatles.
“Who?” Coach asks.
Before he can respond…
“Are the parents of the soccer children in this room?” the female voice booms from the entry way.
I sit on the king sized bed and listen.
“We have had complaints of running and shouting in the halls.”
I care, but I don’t. I’m exhausted. I heard screaming in the back of the car three feet away for 200 miles that seemed louder than this.
That noise coupled with engine roar and thundering down rain, and banter of a mad Russian, well this is freakin Shangri La, lady. Get the hell out of my door way.
I down another swig of Coors Light.
Coach gets up to deal with the issue. I listen as the woman lambasts us for lack of parental attention in a fine establishment like the Hampton Inn.
“Yes mam, we got it taken care of” the coach says diplomatically.
I laugh. Come on HAMPTON INN. You booked the rooms. You didn’t care about the fact that soccer nation was checking in when our credit cards were processing and dollar bills were filling your bank accounts. Now you wonder why a hotel full of 12 year old boys smell bad and makes a lot of noise? Give me a break.
We round up the kids and get them into their sleeping bags. They are talking a mile a minute. 5 boys all squawking.
Suddenly above the roar of children I hear a vacuum cleaner. No wait it’s a chain saw. No, it’s a log splitter. Wait, it sounds more like a concrete saw ripping apart a sidewalk.
I sit up and stare into the darkness. The Russian Bear is asleep in the chair. He is snoring and the paint in the room is peeling off the walls. It’s as if an F-16 is reving its after burners on the deck of an air craft carrier.
It is a cyclone of combustible noise that you can literally see.
The room is dark, but uncomfortably loud and condensed. I imagine air molecules being sucked into the Bear’s nostrils like a Dyson Vacum churning up a dust tornado of farts and stale boy musk.
From three feet away, with a pillow as a buffer between us, I hear the coach laughing.
“What did I tell you. It’s unbelievable.”
I take a pillow and throw it at the Bear’s head.
Whapp!
The Bear chortles and snuffles and the snoring stops for a moment or two.
“Yeah, he hardly snores sitting up,” I mutter to myself.
Within moments, the air raid siren of Russian breathing problems begins again. I summize that stopping the Bear from snoring might mean I have to stop him from breathing. The option of killing him or not sleeping weighs in my head for a moment.
I pull the pillow over my face and try and create my own isolation chamber.
Between snoring and farting and burping and squealing and tossing and turning, the night is a long one.
Finally, the sun comes up and someone yawns like a 12 year old rooster in a stinky chicken coop.
I feel like I have been to a crack party at Charlie Sheen’s house minus the Godesses. My brain hurts. My eyes are scratchy like barbed wire. I wonder how come my tongue hurts.
Then I inhale and the stench of cat litter box mixed with soiled under pants waifs into my sinus cavity.
It is a thick, mustard gas of a smell.
What the hell am I breathing in this shoe box of disgust?
Through out the night, every exhale apparently has spewed more ebola into the air. Are my eyes bleeding yet?
“This room smells like arm pit,” a kid yells out to the accompanying giggle of boys.
“Let’s go fellas,” the coach screams. “We’re on the field in two hours. Let’s get some breakfast.”
And like that the sleep ends and the dressing begins.
Suddenly five boys rip open their bags and the room becomes a homeless shelter of similar soccer uniforms, underpants and white socks.
“That’s mine.”
“No that’s mine!”
Two boys are holding up identical pairs of soccer socks fighting about whose white, size seven sock belongs to whom. Who cares?
We get to the soccer field and it is a quagmire of muck and mud. The rain is coming down in sheets and the grass is under a few inches of water.
“How can we play in this?” says one angry father.
“They cashed the checks, they aren’t going to cancel this tournament,” says another.
And so it goes.
Children take the field and play a soccer version of water polo. The ball will only roll a few feet in the water, and soccer is replaced by something less choreographed, something more primal.
Kids slide in the muck, their white uniforms stained as if drunken frat boys vomited chocolate milk all over the kids.
The games end. Some teams win, some teams lose, but every uniform is a disaster.
We go back to the hotel and the real craziness begins.
What to do with sopping wet socks and underwear and shorts and jerseys?
Where do you put 25 pieces of uniform to dry?
On the only heater / air conditioner in the room of course.
And that is what happened in room 426 next. The heater is turned into a make shift laundromat. The knob is jerked to high and the heat to hot and every soggy sock and saturated shirt is placed over the vent.
The room quickly heats up to tropical levels only sampled at the equator. I half way expect to see a howler monkey throwing rotten plantains from the ceiling.
The stench is overwhelming, fueled by forced heat pushing nauseating sweat and dirt through daycron jersey. It feels like a green house of chlorinated horror that burns the eyes and makes you want to vomit in your own mouth. I think about sitting in the hall for a few minutes to cleanse my pallet like a berry flavored sorbet.
We open the door and allow smells in the room to mingle with smells from the hallway. The hallway has seen its share of disgust over the years so adding hallway stink to room stink is like adding nitro stink to glycerin stink.
During the team dinner in the lobby, the hotel manager steps into the fray.
“I’m sorry to say, but other hotel guests have been complaining non stop. If there is any more noise tonight after 9 O’Clock we will have to call the police and someone will be arrested. I’m sorry she says, but the police will be called.” She walks away.
Many soccer parents are drinking wine and beer. We giggle and wonder just how serious she is.
“Yeah whatever,” I smirk. “What are you gonna do, bust a 12 year old for running in the hall?”
Around 8:55, the parents gather their soccer hoodlums and close the doors.
The night seems quieter, except for the Russian Bear whose snores are certainly cause for calling 9 1 1.
As far as I know neither the Birmingham police arrest any 12-year-olds nor does the CDC come to our room to take air samples.
All in all, it was an exciting weekend full of stench and noise accentuated by some good kids playing some good soccer in some very bad conditions.
My hat goes off to sports parents everywhere who give so much of themselves for their children and their families. I salute you coaches who give of yourself to enrich the lives of young people. And I raise a toast to you referees who pour a canoe’s worth of water out of your cleats at the end of the day.
And most of all I toast the maids of the Hampton Inn who need combat pay to clean up room 426.
I personally handed one maid more than 15 dollars and said sheepishly “I am so sorry. I hope this helps.”
I didn’t want to tell her where I was from, but she knew. Everyone knew. She smiled. I suspect it is the last smile she will ever smile.
I re-enter room 426 for the last time to make sure we have all our bags. The place looked like the garbage scene from Slum Dog Millionaire.
I looked at the toilet and it was covered with mud and dirt where the Bear decided to clean his son’s cleats. Sure he could have banged them outside, but why?
“This is way we do it in Russia” I hear him saying.
And ff it’s good enough for Russian Bear then it’s good enough for the Hampton Inn. There was mud spilled on the toilet seat and on the floor which of course was covered by a swamp of water and white towels stained brown. The sink was filled with Coach beard, dried toothpaste and of course cleat mud.
The carpets in the room were covered with mud and the room had the stank of a CDC biological holocaust. I was looking for petri dishes wondering if this was all one big scientific experiment.
I thought about that poor maid as I pulled out of the parking lot and began the long jaunt back home.
It was hard to wreck that room like we did. I wonder how hard it was to clean? I wonder if the police did come and put crime tape up across the door. I wonder if the next guests will check in and inhale and wonder what kind of death died in room 426.
Give em a discount Hampton Inn. That’s about as good as it’s ever going to get.
5 kids. 2 Adults. One King Sized Bed. A monsoon. A hatchet wielding front desk lady. And one chain saw juggling Russian Bear.
Now that is postively Crazy.