At Least I Got to Say Goodbye

Harry Kane, Ken Griffey Jr., Fear of Change, A shameless plug

I’m not really a gambler. In the past I never made enough money to comfortably throw it away, and thankfully as betting apps make it absurdly easy to part with your money, I’ve managed to avoid them.

When I went to Las Vegas for the first time for work, I got about 80 bucks out of the ATM (for the small fee of about $8) and decided I’d play blackjack – one of the few games on the floor that I felt comfortable enough with the rules. It turns out blackjack in a casino has a lot more nuance than with your friends, so I stopped pretty much while I was even. It wasn’t fun.

The next night, after telling a coworker about this, he suggested that I play roulette. “Just play your family’s birthdays. There’s no real strategy.”

With about 70 bucks now, I hit the table. Ten dollar minimum, meaning I had to pick 10 numbers. 

There’s my birthday, 5 and 22. There’s Michele’s birthday, two more numbers. My parents were both born on the 10th, and my dad was born in May, so that only gives me two more numbers, leaving me four more to pick from. Without thinking, I put a chip on 18. That was the number of Harry Kane, the young striker who just made a real name for himself at Tottenham Hotspur after coming up through the academy, scoring for fun, covering in goal when needed one time and not doing the worst at it, generally thrilling the audiences and generating “one-season-wonder” snark from the opposition fans.

He went on to be a one-season-wonder about nine years in a row until he just left last week for Bayern Munich, leaving his boyhood club and the nation he captains.

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I’ve historically had a hard time with players leaving clubs. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the business side of it, and it felt insidious, whether that be from the evil team owners manipulating the players and their lives, or as a heel turn from a player choosing pastures perceived to be greener. I remember seeing my original sports hero, Ken Griffey Jr., wearing a Cincinnati Reds uniform in the sports page of the paper (this was 2000 after all), and it felt wrong.

I’m clearly not the only one who feels this way, as the movie BASEketball is based around the concept of sports being “ruined” when players could be traded or chase paychecks.

A lot of my own feelings here, though, have to do with a fear of change that I’ve dealt with my whole life that extends far beyond sports. Moves, new phases of life, different decoration in the home. It all fucks with me. But when a sports team you glom onto loses its talisman that felt like he’d be there forever, I think I’m justified in feeling a type of way about it.

I’d feel worse about Harry Kane leaving Spurs this past week for Bayern if I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye.

In April, I pitched an idea to Esquire about my connection to Tottenham Hotspur, a soccer team based more than 3,000 miles away from me. I wanted to get into how so much of sports fandom is inherited by geography and family, but sometimes you make a mostly-arbitrary decision to pick a team, and it not only clicks, but becomes such a huge part of your life. Of course, part of the story was about how Spurs played a role during my cancer treatment (because what’s a good sports story without some life-threatening illness?), in that Spurs games were something I could look forward to when some weeks there wasn’t a lot to look forward to, or how I used Spurs gear as sort of an armor for difficult treatments and meetings, whether I did that consciously or just chose comfortable sweatshirts and warm-up pants.

Anyway, thanks to Brady Langmann over at Esquire for not only accepting this pitch, but editing it really thoughtfully to make sure it really had my intended narrative. I wanted to include the tough times in with the fun sports fandom, but didn’t want this to be a “oh boo hoo cancer boy likes soccer and wants to still milk something that happened to him almost two years ago,” and I think he helped me achieve that (all while whittling down a hefty story to its lean final form).

So, sorry, no real original content for this week. My real job is demanding, and I have sort of enjoyed not giving myself more deadlines for my spare time these last two weeks.

So, please enjoy my Esquire story on how Tottenham Hotspur took over, ruined and saved my life all at once by clicking here.

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Today’s Snakes and Sparklers musical guest is Pkew Pkew Pkew.