Soccer in the Weeds by Daniel Lilie

It was 1973 and while the world outside of Fairfield County, Connecticut, seemed determined to fall apart, young Daniel Lilie had bigger worries: high school. Academically ill-prepared by the parochial schools he’d previously attended, young Daniel’s adolescence was bedeviled by girls (“they could have put firecrackers under my fingernails as long as they flirted with me “), bad grades (“My mother took my first semester grades like a personal indictment of her parenting skills”), and possibly even bad hair (“I wore my hair ‘Jewfro, ‘ loopy ringlets reaching towards the sky. I would say that overall, I probably looked like a composite of Starsky, Ron Jeremy, and Art Garfunkel, which for the time might actually have been OK”). But unlike most young men coming of age in the American suburbs in the mid-1970s, Daniel’s imagination was consumed by a subject unique at that time: soccer. First introduced to the sport by his father one Saturday in the park, Daniel fell in love. “My dad got the ball out of the trunk of the VW, and we kicked it around. And that was it. I was hooked. Hooked at the wrong time and the wrong place by the wrong sport.” Daniel Lilie’s SOCCER IN THE WEEDS: BAD HAIR, JEWS, AND CHASING THE BEAUTIFUL GAME is many things: a coming of age story, an often hilarious memoir of a young man making his way in the rough and tumble world of commercial real estate in New York, and an acute analysis of the social and racial mores of suburban Connecticut in the 1970s. But SOCCER IN THE WEEDS is also a love story: how a boy found soccer, what it meant to him, and how and why, throughout his life, he chased after the beautiful game.