I couldn’t sleep. I sat in the big leather chair in our den in the dark, my brain buzzing with jet lag and worry, listening to the sounds that our beautiful, crumbling house made in the night. It was the manse for a long-fallen church, and I’d been taking it apart and putting it back together piece by piece. The spine of our house was a sixty-foot beam that ran the length of the basement ceiling, hand-carved from the trunk of an ancient Douglas fir. It was magnificent timber. For more than a hundred years, it had held the weight of however many families. Now it held the weight of mine, and it groaned like a wooden ship.
It was the summer of 2016, and I’d just come home from covering the European football championships in France for ESPNFC, a glorious assignment. I was based in Paris, and they’d put me up in a boutique hotel that lent its guests bicycles with baskets on the front for their trips to the boulangerie. When I had a game to cover farther afield, I’d take a fast train to Lyon or Toulouse and maybe stay a night or two and eat outdoors somewhere, and then I’d return to Paris for a few more days in the capital’s sun. I’d take long walks along the Seine and tell myself how lucky I was.
I did not feel lucky. When I had said goodbye to Amy—the crush of my teenage dreams, my wife of fourteen years—we cried and hugged and said we’d miss each other, the way we’d done when I’d left for work a thousand times before. But that goodbye felt different. Our marriage was in a bad place, snared in a tangle of resentments. We each had our share of grievances and believed our complaints were more valid than the other’s. Neither of us shifted from our positions, so nothing got fixed.
We had two young boys: Charley was ten at the time, and Sammy was eight. Amy thought I wasn’t spending enough time with them because I wasn’t. I had lost my job at
?” Amy said, slamming the door.
I snapped in a new fashion, physically, explosively, swinging my rake as hard as I could against our fence, breaking both, everything in splinters. I stood in my yard, still surrounded by leaves, and now with a fence to repair and half a rake in my fist. I flung it away and got into my battered little pickup to drive to the hardware store. Two blocks from home, I made up my mind that I didn’t like Amy very much anymore. Another couple of blocks, and I realized that she must have come to the same conclusion about me, a little sooner than I’d arrived at mine.
After that, our marriage limped along, somehow surviving another Canadian winter and then an up-and-down spring, and then I left for France after we’d gone through the motions of our formerly heartfelt farewells. During those long, lonely walks beside the Seine, I had conversations with myself about my state of mind, trying to reason myself into a better place. One afternoon, I stood beside the river and looked up at the Eiffel Tower. It was a perfect day, cloudless and warm. The tower looked almost black against the sky.
Amy and I had fallen in love in Paris. In the summer of 2000, I covered the Tour de France, chasing cyclists through the Pyrenees in a motor home. A few months into our late-blooming romance—we were friends for years before I first kissed her in my apartment kitchen, where my roommates had drawn dead mice on the fridge the way flying aces used to keep track of kills on the sides of their planes—and a few legs into the tour, Amy decided to join me in Paris. I went to the airport to pick her up, excited as a little boy.
I hadn’t been there long when a wildcat strike closed the airport and Amy’s flight was diverted to Brussels. I waited in Arrivals for news, and when it came, it was delivered over loudspeakers in French, which I understand the way dogs understand English. From what I could gather, the plane had already deboarded in Brussels when suddenly there had been a window to sneak into Paris after all, and the pilots had called for everyone to scramble back on and then made a break for it, meaning that about half the passengers would arrive shortly in Paris and the other half were stranded in Brussels. I had no way of knowing which half Amy had found herself in.
The passengers were released through sliding glass doors, and the sun filled the terminal with so much light, it was impossible to see the faces of the arriving. They were shapes before they became human beings, ideas of people before they came rushing into the arms of their loved ones. I was struck by how joyous that little pocket in Arrivals felt. I watched dozens of beautiful reunions. And then, just when I feared that I might have to make a quick scoot to Belgium, Amy walked through the sliding doors and into the light. I ran to her and picked her up off the floor, and any stranger watching us would have thought we were the people most in love in the world.
I looked across the river at the Eiffel Tower and tried to conjure that long-ago moment of celebration, the certainty of it. It was gone, I feared, for good. My love for Amy, and hers for me, felt like a lie I had told myself, as mythical as werewolves.
Fiending for anything that resembled hope, I turned to the soccer in front of me. I had loved the game since I was a child, but I was a peculiar kind of fan. I loved soccer the entity, the universe; I was a casual, a neutral, an admirer of the game itself rather than any club or country. I watched soccer the way other people might spend the day train spotting, finding comfort in its clockwork, in its familiar sounds and rhythms, carried along by the little spark of anticipation that comes with the chance of seeing something I’d never seen before.
That began to change that lonely summer in Paris. Wales, my dad’s country, had made it to Euro, their first appearance at a major tournament since the World Cup in 1958. I’d covered their group-stage loss against England, my mum’s country, and engaged in a minor skirmish with some yellow-toothed English fans over a banner and its obstruction of my view, cementing my allegiance.
Game after game, my investment in Wales became increasingly outsized, defying anything like reason. The Welsh were an easy side even for neutrals to like: Their manager Gary Speed had killed himself five years earlier, in 2011, at forty-two, and his former players brought a lashing intensity to everything they did. Lost in my own sad haze in Paris, I began to imagine an almost cosmic connection between those players and their search for solace, their heroic efforts to honor someone they had loved and who had loved them. The Manic Street Preachers had released a team anthem that summer, “Together Stronger,” and by the round of sixteen, when Wales narrowly beat Northern Ireland, I nursed a crazy notion that the players and I were united in our fight. Heading to their shock quarterfinal against Belgium in Lille, I stared out my train window and acknowledged the insanity that had taken hold of me, manifested as either depression or mania depending on the football schedule. I
wasn’t a fan; I was a
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