US comes kicking and screening to beautiful game
It was 1997, and he had been joined at the MLS team, the New England Revolution, by his world-famous brother, Alexi.
He had played a total of just 100 minutes of football, all off the bench, and suddenly he’d had enough. He was going to turn his attention to writing and this passage written a few years later showed why.
“We, the reserves — the group of guys on the sidelines who had watched and cheered and secretly prayed for an injury, even to my brother — were running the footpath along the Charles River. It was a Friday morning; my legs felt good, strong, durable. When my teammates stopped at the end of the run, I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep going, to run for miles and miles, until I knew no one and no one knew me or my last name.”
Lalas may not have reached the heights of his older brother but he has channelled his post-career energies into some notable projects. He is editor-in-chief at MLSSoccer.com, the league’s official website and he serves on the board of the charity Soccer Without Borders.
But what is most intriguing is the now annual festival he first concocted on a blind date with Rachel Markus, Kicking and Screening, an international film festival dedicated to the beautiful game.
Long Island native Markus told me on Monday that her time spent in London helped begin to really embrace the culture surrounding football.
“Fulham was my closest team but I’ve abandoned them now,” she admitted. “I don’t mind saying that publicly — they were supposed to partner with me for the first Kicking and Screening Festival but they withdrew, so I still haven’t forgiven them. But I was going around to all these London book stores and reading book after book, Simon Kuper’s stuff; The Miracle of Castel di Sangro by Joe McGinniss. I was also fascinated by the loyalty people have for their clubs. You never switch allegiance — unlike in the US.”
As predicted by Markus, Lalas was quick to mention the origins of their story when I called him later on Monday.
“Someone set us up on a blind date,” he said. “It didn’t quite work out in that way but we spoke a lot over dinner about this idea. She had just moved back from London to New York and didn’t really know the soccer community over here so I was able to connect her. Three months later we had the first festival taking place in New York. The whole concept hit a sweet spot for me in that I’ve always seen the game as a cultural thing.”
According to Markus, they have yet to receive a submission from Ireland and are keen to do so. But although there will be four feature length films chosen to screen at New York and then Austin, Texas and Portland, Oregon, there’s more to it than just the big screen. The June schedule in Manhattan fills out with literary events, social gatherings and football art. For lovers of those World Cup posters of yore, a competition is being run for creative football fans to create the festival’s poster in the style of those iconic images.
“This is the fifth festival,” explains Lalas, “and in that time, the explosion we’ve seen in fashion, art, magazines like Howler and XI Quarterly, the growth of Major League Soccer and the national team, all of these things have created a strange movement or zeitgeist. Kicking and Screaming ended up right in that channel. And it was pure luck, by the way. We were the first ones to do it. There was nothing like it.
“When we came along, we pushed it a lot on the web. So we got it out there quickly and people were shocked they hadn’t thought of it. People in Amsterdam and Rome got in touch with us and of course they had the cliched view about how they would never have believed it started in America, where apparently we hate football. But then I explain to them that the Seattle Sounders are getting 35,000 supporters to their games and that 25 million Americans watched the 2010 World Cup final, about five million more than the population of the Netherlands who were in the final. People often say that soccer is the next big thing in the US and I always answer that the United States is the next big thing in soccer.”
*contact: john.w.riordan@gmail.com Twitter: @JohnWRiordan
