Footy has always been part of my life. Growing up in an American schooling system, where homecoming and Friday night lights were somewhat limited to American Football, I grew up loving the game of footy. As it turns out, my community had loads of people that loved footy; Mostly Italians or Hispanics. But you bond with them. You get excited with them.
As I played competitively throughout high school and one year of college (hung my boots once due to an injury), I got distanced with the sport when I moved to Tokyo for college. This step, of coming to Japan for higher education, was definitely not my plan.
As most of you know, Tokyo is a huge city. (20x the size of NYC. Don’t quote me on that. I call BS). But the whole city is covered in high tall buildings and 15+ subway and JR lines going across the city.
My university was in the middle of that. My school had a footy team, but I never played. Never got along with Japanese kids that much. But also, I enjoyed partying and come on….. ITS TOKYO.
But what really struct me was the energy at J-League. Wow Japan pro soccer is quite exciting. I must say, I make the trip all the way to Urawa to root for my BOIZ. The crowd’s energy as you walk into a stadium feels like an echoed crowd at a QUEEN concert at LIVE AID. ( +1 points for exaggeration). The level is getting there. With David Villa, Iniesta, Torres, Podolski, Samper, Jo and Chanathip Songkrasin (Searched J-League foreign players and picked the coolest one), J-League is coming in HOT!
And Scene.
College went by so fast, and I keep in touch with a few of them. We all wanted different careers so we all went our separate ways pursuing a different corporate slavery. I see them at least once a year for a Bonenkai (year end party). Every time I see them, they become at least x1.75 fatter. Unbelievable.
I couldn’t really say too much to be honest. I had some people calling me Kuri 栗 (chestnut) or even fat Ronaldo. So while we all become corporate slaves, we got fat. We didn’t really work out much. And we really hated it. We really didn’t want to be fat mid-aged people… Like….really didn’t…
Thats when our light bulb went up, and we decided to start this team. This Family. We all come from different parts of the world, play different type of footy. But we share the same interest and thats FOOTY. That’s why this teams means so much to us, and we want to be more than about footy. YeBoiz FC is a community. Brotherhood.
….Thats why it feels amazing to be playing again in Tokyo.
Love,
Boiz your opinion
Term Bank:
- Footy- Soccer, Football, Futsal, Futbol …etc
- BOIZ- Brothas (Sistas too. For those feminist
- out there #genderequality).
- In this blog it just means URAWA REDS