Daddy Has a F#%*!g Potty Mouth

During the course of a typical recreational football match, something will invariably not go your team’s way. You’ll give away possession in front of your own goal or a desperate back will catch both of your ankles from behind trying to tackle the ball away. This will leave you feeling angry, disappointed, frustrated, unlucky. Already awash in adrenaline and gasping for more oxygen, you will very likely respond to this unwelcome surge of emotion in the time-honored tradition of athletes everywhere: Swearing. There is a 94.3% chance that your cursing will not be politely restrained to some variant of “oh, fiddlesticks!” If my own experience is any barometer, than the atmosphere will suddenly become thick with “f-bombs”. Taboo words will be used as nouns, verbs, and adjectives.

However, if you are an American, you will never, EVER use the “c-word.”

For better or worse, profanity goes hand in hand with the sports entertainment culture. I have heard salty words come from the lips of frustrated seven year old girls after a poor play and I have heard it sung with deafening volume and effect in stadia both large and small. Last August my brother and I had the opportunity to see the Community Shield at Wembley Stadium between Manchester United and Portsmouth. As we enjoyed our $15 beers in the concourse before going to our seats, we started speaking with a gentlemen and his eight year old son about the match. When his father learned that the two Yanks he was talking to had flown half-way across the world to watch a football match, he was both excited and impressed. He started getting himself worked up about how United was going to win: “When you are old men, you can tell your grandchildren you were there at Wembley when United [bleep]ing beat those [bleep]ing Pompey [bleep]s all the way back to the [bleep]ing coast!” While I loved his enthusiasm, I was a little surprised by the profane litany he used in front of his little boy, who nodded fervently in agreement: “Yeah, we’re gonna stuff ‘em right good!”

In his book Bloody Confused, American sportswriter Chuck Culpepper also noted this cultural difference regarding profanity around children at football matches and had it explained to him thusly: “…two kindly lads who supported the wee Brentford club off the western edge of London would teach me that some English fathers teach their children that there’s stadium language and there’s language for everything else, but at this point I felt stunned.” However, just the slightest modicum of self-assessment would reveal that I was just as guilty of cursing and swearing in front of the young ‘uns as my English friend…only I do it when I’m on the pitch.

Daddy has a f#%*!g potty mouth.

The ironic thing is that I’m not a “get in your head” dirty player. I don’t taunt the opposition to try and get a psychological advantage. I don’t swear at the officials. Sure, as a manager, I may have employed some profanity on occasion to, er, motivate the squad, but I generally try to make sure the team’s kids and Junior Ranger Corps–which make up the bulk of our supporters–are not around. Notable exception: Last fall’s championship match, down 2-3 at half-time and getting beat to almost every ball. I can’t even remember what I said but the team talk was in front of the bleachers with everybody’s family and my imploring “win one for the Gipper”-esque rally involved many four-letter words. No, most of my on-field swearing is the direct result of a poor play of my own doing and it is pretty much involuntary. Miss a wide open shot on the Powell Street End of my home pitch and I guarantee that the row of rental houses behind the net will be carpet f-bombed. Fail to find the runner on the near side line with the defense totally playing him on? “Damn it! Sorry!” Part admission of guilt, part exclamation of disappointment, and part motivational battle cry, a decent raging curse is the crass salve on a gushing defect in my play and try as I might, I can’t stop it. I can’t stop it anymore than I can make myself breathe in when I submerge my head underwater. And face it, the “f-word” is the “f-word” for a reason. I love “Battlestar Galactica”–I mean, I really love “Battlestar Galactica”–but barking “frak!” when I whiff my shot just doesn’t do it for me. Which would be fine until I look over and see my daughter Kiki staring back at me from the sidelines. Thanks to Oregon public schools, she knows what all of these words mean and I can’t even trick her with the false logic that I didn’t yell “the s-word, I said ’ship’!”

In the end, I guess there is no neat and tidy way to wrap up the post. The altruistic ending would be to vow to never do it again and clean up my act, you know, for kids! I could try and mangle my swears into unintelligible roars of random noise. Perhaps I could just stop making terrible plays. Ha! I fear that any of those strategies will fail miserably…so maybe I can teach Kiki that “there’s stadium language and there’s language for everything else.” Hmm…

Category: Orange Slices and Aspirin