Commentary: My father’s curse
March 8 — My father put a curse on me when I was 5 years old. Today I was hoping to lift it.
He meant to be benign, but it has led to a lifetime of pain.
Let me explain: living in Manchester, England, you could live your life one of two ways: Manchester City or Manchester United. My father was already a City supporter and that year they won the biggest prize, the Football Assn. Cup. So that’s where I went.
Soon — it could have been predicted though not by a small boy who believed in goodness — their fortunes turned. But worse, much worse, United’s soared. They triumphed everywhere, even reaching the FA Cup final in the year their chartered airplane crashed, killing eight of their players.
They were not only one of soccer’s most glittering franchises, they were one of the most successful franchises of any kind the world had ever known, fit to be talked of in the same breath as McDonald’s and Apple.
Every week I suffered acute humiliation. Boys who came to soccer later than I did went naturally into United’s orbit and I, thanks to my precociousness, was a yesterday’s man. For a child with his whole life ahead of him, that was hard to take.
But Fate had an even more vicious blow up its sleeve. A boy in my high school class, Roland Smith, whom I bested in every examination we took and every sport we played, went on to acquire a PhD in economics, become chairman of a slew of companies and chancellor of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology.
Worse (can you imagine how I felt?) he was knighted for his services to the kingdom. It’s a miracle that I survived at all.
But there was yet another turn of the screw to come. Sir Roland, already so far ahead in life’s race, disappeared over the horizon by becoming chairman of Manchester United! How I escaped suicide I’ll never know.
Throughout all these decades Manchester City continued to drift along, “a small club with small ideas” as a United spokesman cold-bloodedly but accurately said.
However, money can buy anything (except Mike Bloomberg’s remake as president) and thanks to huge amounts lavished on some of the world’s best soccer players, City have had a comeback rivaling Joe Biden’s. And so we come to today when City in second place in the Premier League met United in fifth and every chance for a curse that has lain on me since 1934 to be lifted at last.
You don’t have to ask how it went: it was written in the stars that luckless City were bound to lose, the clinching goal coming when their goalkeeper with the kind of ill-fated act only the woebegone know threw out the ball straight to the feet of one of United’s deadliest strikers.
Is it any wonder that I have an Oedipus complex?