Excerpted: Playing Hard

Talking Softly

It is a convention not so much taught as intuited that we are to speak to the dying in soft voices, and that is how I spoke to my father, as if by speaking loudly I would hasten his death. The light fell into the room in Juravinksi Hospital on the lip of the Hamilton escarpment in some shade of amber: a clean room, modern, no pictures on the wall, no soccer match on the television, only bleeps and electronic ticks that formed the soundtrack to a movie made of phosphorescent green symbols, all indicating death as it is conducted now, a theatre of science and technology playing on mounted screens. The two other patients in the room lay behind curtains, quietly, without protest.

On the drive from Toronto to Hamilton, a voice on the car radio gave the good news that survival rates for all forms of cancer were on the rise. There was one exception, the voice said: cancer of the esophagus, for which the survival rate remained at 11 percent. Aside from a stint in a weekly low-stakes poker game, my father was not a gambling man, but he would have taken 11 percent. Of course, that percentage did not include men in their mid-eighties who had previously suffered a serious stroke.

My father was already a goner. I suspect he would have known this. But maybe not. He would have known the impossibility of knowing it, and he would have wanted more. Four more years would do it. A simple four years for another World Cup to roll around, for England to find another way to lose, for another gathering with the lads, for a tremendous pint of beer pulled from an authentic hand-pumped tap, for the narrative of get-togethers that had gone on for decades and was never meant to end. He would have time to read more books, indiscriminately – biographies often, or novels of the kind that he didn’t have the confidence to know were inferior, and so he finished them, cold and unsatisfied, thinking that the fault lay with him. Books were sacred; he did not understand that some were less sacred than others. Four more years in the genial presence of his wife, Mary. Visits from his granddaughters. Against all odds, he had four of them now. Two of them grown, accomplished. Two more adoring, troublesome, bickering, frolicking – my daughters, who climbed into his lap as though they were born to it. They were born to it. Four more years. That’s all.

Four more bleeding years.

In the soft voice by which we dignify the dying, I asked him questions about soccer, about the war, about life aboard warships. “Did you play any sports onboard ship?” I asked stupidly.

“No,” he said at once, but with patience, waiting for the next question. He had been asked so many questions lately by doctors and nurses with lanyards draped around their necks. Do you drink? How much? Do you smoke now or have you ever smoked before? How much did you smoke? He was flattered by the attention.

“Were you good?” I asked suddenly.

“Yes,” he said. “I was.” This was not bragging. It’s not clear to me that men such as my father from south Sheffield knew how to brag; maybe they were not quite sure how it was done. “I was nimble-footed,” he said. “Very quick-footed, very crafty.” Admitting this took him close to the horrible class crime of putting on airs. He was quick to deflate himself. “In England,” he began vaguely, “with the rain, the ball, back then, the ball, you see, was pigskin. In the grass, with the rain, it got heavy. I was quick-footed, but I was slight. For me, it was like kicking around a cannonball, you see.”

It seemed to me that I could see on his face the disappointment of trying to navigate a sodden soccer ball between the legs of heavier opponents. I watched him watch himself as he made a cross-field pass to a surging striker only to see the ball die short in the sopping grass, where in opponent scooped it up and turned around the attack. My father, in a quiet way, was rehearsing for me the reasons he had not become a professional footballer.

He also explained that immediately following the war, his ship, the HMS Dido, was tasked, as he put it, with showing the flag. “We were there to show the flag,” he said. “When the war was over.” And that is what they did. These gleaming ships staffed with ruddy, sports-loving lads sailed into various ports around the world, flags snapping, showing up in places like Marrakech, Halifax, the ports of India and Norway. They came to show the world that the war was over. Britain had won the war. They also came to play.

It turns out that the entire crew of the HMS Dido had been selected for their ability to play football.

“You’re kidding,” I said.

“No, oh no. They did it all the time.” My father was adamant on this point.

Since then, I have entertained a vision of fleet admirals and senior naval officials, perhaps Winston Churchill himself, over cigars and brandy, sitting around with files in front of them, selecting the roster of the British Navy’s post-war warships. “Al Unwin, radio operator, has nimble feet,” says one vice admiral, looking up from his dossier. “A fondness for pints, though, and a hot temper.”

“But he does have nimble feet,” says another.

“Ideal for the desert,” says someone else. “Where it doesn’t rain and the ball never gets heavy.” So my father was assigned to the HMS Dido, and in the desert outside of Marrakech, he played a memorable game against the French Foreign Legion.

“Dad,” I said softly. “Do you remember the score?” He leaned back into his pillows and thought. He closed his eyes. From that semi-upright position, he soared back sixty-four years of his life.

“Two to one,” he said decisively.

“Did you win?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

Then he added, uncomfortably, “But we cheated.”