MY LIFE, PART 40: Learning to be a goalkeeper again

When we were children, we used to track our growth on the kitchen door. It wasn’t a ritual or anything of the sort, but those marks on the doorframe tell a pretty interesting story.

You just push your back against the door, click your heels together, straighten up, puff out your chest… And don’t forget the ruler because you want to make the mark above your head nice and even.

I used to compare my height to my sister Šárka’s, to see if we’re really twins. For a long time we were keeping up with each other, but once I turned thirteen my marks on the doorframe jumped up. And one year and a half later this became painfully obvious on the pitch.

I felt sad, unhappy, desolate. My arms were suddenly different: longer and ungainly. So was my body. Everything that came automatically to me suddenly stopped working. I would often stretch my arms trying to catch a cross ball and my hands were fifteen centimetres higher than where the ball was passing.

I couldn’t estimate the distance for shit!

So many stupid goals that I conceded back then…

Luckily I knew how to clench my teeth and work hard to teach this “new guy” to be a goalkeeper too. I went to the gym and threw the ball against the wall thousands of times, catching it in my long arms and falling into the mats, time and time again. “Hold on! Just hold on, it’ll be alright,” I kept repeating to myself.

A couple of months later the feeling that I know how to be a goalkeeper returned. The most important thing was to get used to the new coordination. Looking back, I have to say I survived the crisis of my growth spurt relatively unscathed, intuiting that being this tall could come in handy one day. Suddenly I was filling the goal in a much more imposing way, I could reach higher and wider, I could run further out to block cross balls, and standing on the six-yard line I knew no ball could fly over my head and end up in the goal. These are just details, but they are paramount. In football, millimetres decide.

In the end I grew up to be 196 centimetres tall, that’s a little over six foot five. And I must say it’s a great advantage.

P.S. Next week? Suprise!