Avoiding the Drop

Fuse started this yesterday, but I’ve got some gear to brag about too. See, I lost my cleats last weekend. I’m not 100% sure how it happened; I play on an indoor team on Friday nights and another one on Sundays, and when I went to my Friday night game I had no shoes or guards in my bag. Since my bag, shinguards, and shoes all stay in my car, this really made no sense to me, and I blamed my wife at first (she’s not been cleared beyond all reasonable doubt in my mind, either; let’s just say that there’s a history of moving stuff that doesn’t need to be moved), but the lack of other cleaning in my car would tend to indicate that she’s not involved. I might’ve left them at the facility, but I checked lost and found with no luck…and this wasn’t exactly stuff that anyone would want to steal.

I do understand that desire’s not always a part of theft, of course; on the Fourth of July I left my car unlocked in my driveway, and some enterprising little cretin decided to celebrate Independence Day by stealing my iPod and my soccer bag. My bag, however, was open…and a shoe and a shinguard were left behind in my car. In retrospect, losing ONE shoe was worse than losing BOTH shoes; it was completely pointless. It would’ve been better if I could have the illusion that the theft benefited some poor kid’s burgeoning soccer career or something. Having just one shoe stolen means nobody benefits; at least the thief could potentially benefit if the pair was gone (the superfluous shoe was eventually painted gold and mounted as an alumni award when my brother moved to Carolina, lest you think I’m wasteful…and, yes, I realize that “Chrisopher Walken” is spelled wrong in the picture. I provided the shoe, not the plaque).

Regardless of all that, I now found myself without shoes for the second time in a calendar year. It’s very hard to remind your team that you’re the co-ed indoor version of Steven Gerrard when you are shoeless; a sympathetic Manchester United fan on my team was willing to loan me an old pair of his shoes for the night, but they were kind of too big, and the shinguards I was able to mooch were the kind without ankle guards that you wear when you’re like ten years old. I’m a defender; my legs are precious. I need more protection than that.

So it was with great regret that I had to make the trek out to Dick’s Sporting Goods. No sooner had I started than I realized that this is a crappy time of year to buy shoes. Soccer’s gaining in popularity, but it’s still a niche sport in baseball season at Dick’s; there were literally maybe five different adidas selections (and I only buy adidas; call me a label whore if you’d like, but it’s the only shoe I’ve ever had and I’m not planning on changing that), and three of them were $200. I mean, I’m a rec league player; I don’t need fancy shoes for my pro tape, I just need some decent quality shoes to kick around on indoor field turf. I was hoping to stay close to the $50 I’d paid for the original shoes.

So I left Dick’s to look at other venues…but nobody had any soccer shoes. I checked Foot Locker and Finish Line (the only two stores in my mall that I realistically thought might help me out), and there were plenty of basketball shoes, but no cleats. I started to worry that I’d have to buy some tacky-looking shiny shoe from Dick’s that would only bring comparisons to Nicolas Bendter (I’m actually probably about as good at him in front of a goal).

Fortunately, niche sports have niche stores. In Cleveland, the niche store of choice is Front Line Soccer in North Olmsted; this isn’t an ad or anything, but they’re the only Cleveland-area store I know of that exclusively sells soccer stuff. I trekked out there and found that they had the mid-tier Predators pictured above (the ones with the rubber swerve-control things that will probably screw up my passing more than help my scoring; they’ve also got some sort of Tungsten powder in the sole that shifts the shoe’s weight when shooting, but I’m mostly a defender and will probably not get much benefit from that) ON SALE! The guy said something about them being last season’s colors, and I thought two seconds, realized I’m not Carrie Bradshaw, and bought them for like $55. Score.

Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten to try them out yet; I had a 24-hour flu bug on Sunday and missed my game. So I’ll let you know after tonight how they work; I’m actually a little worried they they might be too much shoe for me.