Greg Bruce: I missed my son’s first goal. Why that matters

How the author imagines his son scoring his first goal. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

Until last week, I had missed not a single second of my 6-year-old son’s two-season soccer career. I estimate he’s played approximately 50 games of soccer, at 20 minutes each, meaning I’ve watched him play exactly 1000 minutes of soccer. In that time, he has not only never scored a goal, but has never even come close to scoring a goal. In most games, he hardly touches the ball.

What happened next will shock you.

One of my other kids asked me to go get a soccer ball to kick around with her and when I told her I couldn’t do that until her brother’s game was over, she disagreed and, because I hate seeing my children cry, I acquiesced. When I returned with the ball two minutes later, my wife told me our son had scored his first goal.

What are the odds? I’ve run the numbers, so I can tell you exactly. I had missed two minutes of soccer out of 1000. That equates to one in 500, or one-fifth of 1 per cent.

And yet, not only did it happen, but, as described by my wife and later corroborated by the father of one of the team’s star players, it was one of the goals of the season. I’m paraphrasing here, but roughly: my son got the ball on halfway, dribbled it (something he had never done before), then lashed home a spectacular finish from a great distance, in the style of early 2000s England superstar Wayne Rooney.

On one hand (the one on which I had carefully calculated the likelihood of missing such an event), I couldn’t believe it, but on another (the one on which I have long been aware that if life has a genre, it is the comedy of cruelty) it made perfect sense.

On hearing the news, I experienced an immediate flood of negative emotions. I berated myself. My son’s moment of brilliance had lit up the park and had made him for a moment the centre of the universe and I had not been there to share it with him.

I ran the movie of the moment in my mind: He struck the ball with skill and power he never knew he possessed and watched, astonished, as it flew through the posts. As his teammates celebrated him, he turned to the sideline, full of joy and pride, looking for me, wanting to share the moment with me but, of course, I was not there.

His smile fading, he turned to the other sideline. Not there either. “Where is my daddy?” he thought, emotively. His daddy was nowhere, didn’t care enough – didn’t love him enough! – to be there. All the positive emotion of the goal was gone, replaced by a core memory of parental abandonment. The cold and awful truth of life settled too soon on his adorable, tiny frame: We are all alone in this cruel world.

But maybe this response is too much. Maybe I care too much, am too overbearing, too overweening. I imagined hypothetical talkback caller Pete from Birkenhead drawing a direct line from such parental mollycoddling to the cost of living crisis, climate change hoax, rise of Jacinda Ardern and ram-raid epidemic. And who was I to say he was wrong? After all, his father had never once hugged him or told him he’d loved him and he’d turned out all right.

I acknowledge that it’s entirely possible my parenting style will turn my kids into avocado toast-eating lifetime renters whose only monetisable skill is the taking of selfies. My hope, though, is that, whatever my parenting style does to them, and wherever they end up, they will remember me as someone who was there for them when it mattered. At least, that’s my hope for my daughters. For my son, I assume all hope is gone.