I was a child in 1985 when I realized there was a connection between kicking the soccer ball down the street and the bombs that were falling on our heads.
The Iran-Iraq War was in full swing. My hometown, Ahvaz, was in the war zone, some fifty miles east of the Iraqi border. For my generation in Khuzestan, soccer was more or less the only pastime available.
This was long before personal computers and the internet. Back then, during the War, television broadcasted war propaganda round the clock, extolling the holiness of Ayatollah Khomeini, glorifying the young men rushing to the frontlines to lay down their lives for their Imam and their country. This didn’t change much after the war ended. The state TV channels, which was all we had, offered very few programs aimed at children. Our days revolved around a simple routine: school, homework, and soccer. We often stayed after school until the buses left, setting up makeshift goals in the parking lot and playing for a couple of hours. Then we would go home, eat something, finish our homework, and head back outside, playing well into the evening. No amount of playing could ever satiate our appetite for soccer.
During the summer, when Ahvaz became too hot for daytime play, we shifted our games to the night. Near our house was a swimming pool with a large, smoothly paved parking lot. After the pool closed and the cars disappeared, fifteen or twenty of us would gather there and divide ourselves into three teams. We played deep into the night on a round robin. On particularly hot evenings, the losing team would climb the pool walls, sneak into the shower area, take cold showers (fully clothed), and return refreshed to wait for the next game. We at least had the decency not to jump into the pool in our sweaty clothes. This went on year after year, without the slightest change.
At school, I had a classmate with penetrating brown eyes, a square face, and a gift for football. His name was Reza. Fast and fearless, he used his short stature to make sharp turns and dart through defenders. We won easily when we were on the same team.
One day, in the middle of a game, the principal appeared and stood on the sideline, watching us play. His presence distracted us. He never came to the yard during recess, let alone to observe a soccer match. We kept playing, keeping an eye on him. We knew it couldn't be good news.
He called over Reza, who sprinted to the sideline. The principal placed both hands on his shoulders and said something. We stopped playing. Our curious eyes followed the exchange, desperate to know what was being said. Reza stood motionless beneath the weight of the principal's hands, his eyes fastened to the ground, oblivious to us and everything around him. The principal lifted his chin, looked him in the face, and spoke some more. Reza nodded and returned to the game.
For the few minutes left before the bell, he played with extraordinary intensity. He was everywhere on our little asphalt pitch, running and tackling, threading surgical passes, shouting instructions, scoring goals. The bell rang. We gathered our bags and headed for class. Reza threw his backpack over his shoulder and ran in the opposite direction, toward the gate.
The next day, we learned that hours before we started playing, Reza's father had been killed at the front. The principal had come to the sideline to inform him.
The news seemed to energize him. It made him play harder, deepened his hunger to win. Perhaps some survival instinct kicked in immediately, and he understood, on some subconscious level, that for a boy his age, in circumstances like his, losing a father could be a kind of death sentence, unless he fought harder, ran faster, and won more decisively than everyone else. Or perhaps he saw that schoolyard game as a crucible, a place where he could set the tone for the rest of his life.
We were living through air raids and bombardments, spending hours in bunkers and basements, wondering whether the next bomb might fall on our heads. The war stored poison in our muscles and bones. It frayed our nerves and distorted our minds. For many of us, soccer was a survival mechanism, something that enabled us to keep going despite the war. Perhaps, Reza was running to expel that terrible poison that the news was spreading through his soul.
*
Among teenage boys in Ahvaz, soccer was also the most valuable form of social capital. I was an awkward, lanky teenager burdened with social anxieties. Around other people I was distracted, self-conscious, and easily overwhelmed. I avoided physical confrontations, kept mostly to myself and immersed myself in thick novels. There was only one silver-lining in my social life: I happened to be quite good at soccer. My peers might otherwise have mocked mercilessly, but they didn't because, on the field, they needed me on their side.
In high school, our biology teacher was so obsessed with soccer that he spent his precious recess breaks watching us play in the yard. One day, after a game, he called me over and asked whether I had ever considered pursuing soccer more seriously.
The idea had never occurred to me. The uniformed men playing on proper pitches in front of paying crowds seemed like beings from another planet, inhabitants of a world I would never have access to. I had spent a decade playing on asphalt, usually with layered plastic balls and sneakers. Suddenly, I was being offered a chance. My teacher knew people who knew people, and he promised to introduce me to a coach.
A few weeks later, I walked onto a field in northern Ahvaz and entered the premises of the Sazman-Ab football team. The coach greeted me and invited me to join twenty or so footballers in uniforms and cleats, kicking sleek, standard leather balls around. I took part in the training session and did well enough to earn an invitation to join the team.
That was perhaps the greatest rite of passage of my life. Overnight, the game I had always played for fun became a job. I was part of a real team, with real responsibilities: I had to attend practice three or four times a week, follow a strict regimen of drills and routines, and perform the role assigned to me by the coaches with as little improvisation as possible. My days of dribbling past an entire team and scoring were over. It was also painfully clear that my place on the team was far from secure. If the coach disliked what I was doing, I would be benched, and if that continued, I would be cut altogether.
I traveled with the team on buses to matches in other cities across the province. I slept in bunk beds alongside teammates. An entirely new cast of people entered my life, most of them older than me. Unlike my classmates, they were not particularly impressed by my soccer skills, nor did they care about my awkwardness off the field.
Perhaps the most dramatic moment of those two years came when I played in front of a paying audience for the first time.
The match was held on Field No. 2 of Ahvaz's Takhti Stadium. We were playing another team from Ahvaz. I don’t remember which one. I stepped onto the grass and saw them: a couple of hundred spectators sitting on the concrete terraces, drinking Coca-Cola and eating potato chips. They had paid actual money to be there. They had paid to watch us, to watch me play a game.
In that instant, the field transformed into a stage. I, a teenage footballer, became a performer tasked with entertaining a captive audience.
That is the closest I have ever come to feeling like a star.
Years later, I gave lectures in Iran on literature to audiences much larger than that one, audiences whose attention was focused entirely on me. Yet I never felt as appreciated, as cared for, as I did during that first soccer match. Performing literature never came anywhere near performing soccer. Even though I was substituted early in the second half. Even though we lost.
Sazman-e Ab was a good team. Our coach, the late Jasim Ahlierof, would later manage several clubs in Iran's premier league, and eventually, Iran’s Deaf National Team. A number of my teammates went on to play professionally for major teams in Ahvaz and Tehran. Before long, I had begun to imagine that future for myself as well.
*
In the fall of 1998, I was admitted to the University of Tehran to study engineering and had to leave Ahvaz. My coach gave me a letter of introduction to an assistant coach at Paykan, a middling Premier League team based at the Iran Khodro factory complex on the outskirts of Tehran.
I went there soon after arriving in the capital, and they invited me to train with their B team. At the end of the session, the coach pulled me aside. He liked my game, he said, my technique, my vision, my understanding of the field. But I was far too thin. I needed to put on muscle and come back in a few months.
It sounded simple enough, but Tehran turned out to be too exciting for me to become a muscle-bound athlete. I fell in with a group of avant-garde poets, and over the following months the combined weight of the glasses and joints I lifted exceeded that of any dumbbells or barbells. Before long I was writing and publishing, and slowly finding my way toward a life in literature. I came to Tehran to become an engineer, harboring a dream of becoming a soccer player. I ended up becoming a writer.
I am now in my mid-forties, at the age people look back and indulge in the futile exercise of inventing alternative lives for themselves. In the one I imagine most often, and most passionately, I would go to the gym after that practice in Tehran, put on muscle, rejoin the team a few months later, and end up becoming a professional soccer player.
*
“The cure for anything,” Isak Denisen famously said, “is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.”
In Ahvaz, during the war and its aftermath, we did need a great deal of curing. The sea was too far away. Tears were strongly discouraged for men, even for boys as young as we were, so we learned to hold them back. That left only sweat, and soccer gave us plenty of it: long hours under the sweltering sun of southern Iran, year-round, all hours of the day. It helped us sweat the war out of our systems and reclaim from the war and the Islamic Republic, if not a normal body and mind, then at least something close to them. It continued to sustain me as I grew into adulthood, helping me endure both the suffocating oppression of life in Iran and, later, the vagaries of exile in Australia and the US.
Soccer is the only ritual I’ve practiced consistently throughout my life. On our small team in Ahvaz, I first learned discipline and sacrifice. For a long time the field was the only place where I walked with confidence and believed that I was capable of something meaningful. I played soccer seriously for only a few years, but I owe the game far more than I've ever been willing to admit — until now.
Amir Ahmadi Arian is the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction in Persian. His first novel in English, Then The Fish Swallowed Him, was published by HarperCollins in 2020. His new novel, The Season of Wild Poppies, is forthcoming from Henry Holt. He is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Binghamton University, and lives in Ithaca, New York.
This essay was published in collaboration with Golden Goal.
