Good exercise, good friends, good fun. Edenic.
There'd be little need for "adult supervision." Few equipment needs. Even the concept was simple: "You guys kick it that way, into that goal, and you guys go the other way." Only one rule to remember: "Don't use your hands."
That one commandment was perfect. It made the game even more egalitarian; anyone, of almost any skill level, could join in this loosely organized free-for-all.
That was about 15 years ago.
Since then the new game has become a lot like other sports. Complicated. And serious. Parents complain about playing time and ball hogs and cutthroat competition. They complain about other parents and about coaches who stack teams and yell too much and put too much emphasis on winning. They have to contend with more than games: mandatory clinics and travel teams and winter indoor leagues that sharpen the skills of more advanced athletes while leaving other kids behind.
It started as a game. It always does. Games are what kids do best. It comes naturally. So how does it come to be that games become sports, that kids become athletes, that parents and coaches promote athletics as the crucible for molding miniature grown-ups? When does it stop being fun? When does play become work?
There is probably no force in American society with the effect on our culture that sports have. Children play, participate, watch games on TV, dream of turning childhood avocations into adult careers. Parents serve as coaches and agents, chauffeurs and psychologists, mentors and fans while shepherding their offspring through the painfully Darwinian world of sports, while kibitzing with others on the uplifting values and necessary evils of competitive recreation.
Sports give us our heroes and our icons, the metaphors for our books, movies and speech, and something to talk about with in-laws and acquaintances. They shape our national consciousness. They dictate fashion, dominate the airwaves, often overwhelm our schools. The excesses in Little League, the stresses in high school, the abuses in college, the absolutely staggering, phenomenally lucrative fantasy world of professional sports (in which 20-year-olds are paid millions of dollars by shoe companies) sometimes stop and make us wonder about our ethics, our priorities, our judgments, our national health.
It is no exaggeration to say that these games, these sports have become a national obsession. In many ways they reflect the best and the worst of America's essential nature -- the value, for example, of competition, individuality, free enterprise, teamwork, physical competence, the triumphant underdog.
Unfortunately, sometimes tragically, we have forgotten these are just games, that they're meant to uphold the pursuit of happiness, that play is the thing.