My father’s soccer career never happened, and he tells that story beautifully.
My dad played for the youth team of Hapoel Be’er Sheva, itself the professional soccer team for the southern Israeli city where he grew up. He competed alongside boys who made the senior side. One of those teammates was Yaakov Cohen, who was there for the championship squads of the 1970s and then went to the storied English team Brighton & Hove Albion for 40,000 pounds. My father left for Canada in his mid-twenties and played semi-pro in a league that ran for a few seasons and then stopped existing. He still has the brochure.
I inherited my father’s Hapoel Be’er Sheva affiliation from him: when I watch Israeli soccer, that’s the team I root for. In practice, this meant sitting through two decades of losing. The club was broke. Games turned into three-hour cursing sessions led by grown men standing ankle-deep in sunflower seed shells (garinim), which are now banned from the stands. These were not fun family outings, but tense experiences where I felt tolerated rather than welcome. The only time in my life that anyone has stolen my phone was at a Hapoel Be’er Sheva match in the second division. It is also where I learned what ben zona means (if you don’t know, look it up).
Notes From Tel Aviv arrives every Thursday evening for paid subscribers — a slice of life from Israel before Shabbat.
