"KICK THE BALLS: An Offensive Suburban Odyssey," by Alan Black. Hudson Street; 254 pages; $23.95.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — In Scotland, they wear kilts, eat haggis, drink copious amounts of fermented beverages, throw the caber and play soccer. The angry urban tribes that form soccer teams don't play to win; they play to devastate, to maim, to destroy the opposing team in mind, body and spirit until they hear the lamentations of their women.
In California, they wear shorts, eat salads, drink tea, throw Frisbees and play soccer, but it's less about destroying your enemy than it is building character and self-esteem. Everybody plays, otherwise their feelings might be hurt. They have prayer circles.
Alan Black is from Scotland, but he takes on the responsibility of coaching an under-9 youth soccer team in California. Kick the Balls — the title, needless to say, does not refer to the round rubber object needed for a soccer game — is his story of his single nightmarish season as a coach.
Just as there are high-concept movies, with ideas that can be expressed in a single sentence, so there are high-concept books. This is a high- concept book.
I care about as much about soccer as I do about hockey, which is to say not at all. (As George Carlin used to say, hockey is not a sport, but an amalgam of three activities: ice skating, playing with a puck and beating somebody up.) Hockey isn't boring — there's too much speed and violence for that — but soccer induces a numbing paralysis that replicates the result of an aneurysm.
That said, I enjoyed "Kick the Balls," because the yawning gap between ambition and accomplishment is always good for humor, and Black's team would defy the coaching skills of 49ers legend Bill Walsh.
It's not just that the Dragons lose; it's that they lose by double digits. They don't understand the concept of defense. They're scared of the ball. Not only do they not score a single goal, they don't even make any shots at the opposing teams goal.
Black gives the hapless kids nicknames: Potted Plant, Crybaby, Def Not Beckham, Two Left Feet, the Dolt in Need of a Volt and so forth.
What Black wants to do is talk honestly to the parents: "Here's the thing. Your son is fat — your fault — he's rubbish — his fault — and he has a stupid name. See point one. Don't bring him back." But he can't say that because he'd hurt someone's — well, everyone's — feelings.
"Just what was it with this whining, moaning generation of kids?" Black ask rhetorically. "Why did every moment have to be a fluffy, laundered, downy cushion of positive comfort? The American nation was in danger of masculine meltdown. John Wayne had been dead too long. It was time to dig him up."
Initially, the team is coached by Mahmoud, an Iranian. Black tells him "no fatwas against the referee." But fatwas are not Mahmoud's problem; showing up is. He suddenly disappears, leaving the team to the tender mercies of Black, a bartender by trade, who would just as soon strangle lousy soccer players as coach them.
For the parents of the Dragons, playing soccer is better than their children falling into addictions to Harry Potter or drug abuse. For Black, the caliber of play of his beloved game drives him to nightly doses of Ben & Jerry's with a beer chaser, and watching "The Shepherd's Chapel," a fundamentalist program his cable system helpfully delivers from the darkest reaches of Arkansas at 3 in the morning.
"On occasion, to make certain the the viewers understood the mystery of God, the audio and visual sync was off, making it appear that the reverend was speaking in tongues."
Eventually, he notices that Steven, the family cat has died. "I wondered why it hadn't moved in so long. Sadness hung over the family."
The Dragons' record becomes increasingly abysmal. "We had lost to the blind, been mauled by the dwarves, one of whom was deaf, and had been slaughtered by the Mexicans. Who would beat us next? The quadriplegics?"
Basically, "Kick the Balls" is one joke, but it's a good joke -— "The Bad News Bears" with a coach in need of anger management rather than an AA meeting. I think Black makes a mistake by not particularizing the kids — they're just a mass of adolescent incompetence, without individual personalities, and he never develops a relationship with any of them. The book is about Black's hairy, William Wallace-like fury at the sad estate to which his beloved game has fallen, and his impotent fury provokes a lot of smiles.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: seyman AT pbpost.com