5'7", 147 pounds,
and somehow paid

Number 12. Five foot seven, a hundred and forty-seven pounds, and I can jump maybe seven inches off the ground.

Mississippi College, then Belhaven. Then Brazil, which is the part people should actually be asking about.

One of my teachers had been a soccer agent in a previous life. He was going to Brazil for the summer. That was the whole plan. Six months of bussing tables at night, class in the morning, training every afternoon, plus every graduation-gift check anybody handed me. Landed in Rio on May 14th, 2014, chasing a contract.

I had paid a man to sort out my visa. He took the money and vanished. So: living with a teammate, sharing a bed, bouncing club to club, learning Portuguese one inappropriate phrase at a time. For a stretch I stayed at the end of an unpaved road, trees dragged across the street by drug lords to keep the police out, newspaper stuffed in the tin roof to keep the bugs out. Three months, no hot shower. Duque de Caxias, where the local press wrote about the small American considerably more than the small American deserved.

And then there was the beach. Brazil–Chile, penalties, forty thousand people on Copacabana going silent at the same instant — no samba, no songs, nobody breathing. Brazil missed the first one. Grown men sobbed. Last kick got saved, the whole beach detonated, and five minutes later I was shirtless, had lost every object I was carrying, and had never been happier in my life.

The final was the other side of that coin. A hundred thousand Argentinians, twenty thousand Germans, a handful of Americans, one me. Germany scored in extra time and the sand turned into a brawl — chairs past my head, beer cans as ammunition — and there I was yelling "¡Tranquilo, tranquilo!" in an American accent, to no success whatsoever. Greatest game on earth. Also a mirror, and the world it reflects is flawed.

Philadelphia came after, on the way down. Lower-level American teams, one contract at a time. The stretch where you can still call it a career if you say it fast.

Small means you never win a header and you never out-muscle anybody. You learn to see it early or you don't play.

Then it ends, and nobody tells you which day it is.

The body stops recovering the way it used to. The money was never there to begin with. And the doors above you quietly stop opening.

Then, one day, out of nowhere really, you realize it's time for something new. I realized it when I burst into a monumental amount of tears watching Monsters University. Mike wasn't meant to be a Scarer. He was a better coach. Maybe I wasn't meant to be a player, but something else too?

And so a new exploration began. A new language, a newish love, and a very VERY loose life plan: learn ideas and see what happens. First I needed money. Adventures require capital and mine was on fumes from the last dream.