For the past three years I’ve been playing pickup soccer most Sundays and Thursdays at the park a block away from my apartment in Park Slope. I met the guys who run it at the corner bar The Gate after I ran the marathon in 2021. I’d seen them around but was finally full of enough post-marathon beers to approach them and ask if I could play. I got the organizer’s number, shot him a text, started playing, and I haven’t looked back since.

It’s a good group of guys (yeah, mostly guys, there are some women who play but not many). Because it’s New York and because it’s soccer, there are a lot of nationalities represented by the people who play. Egypt, Costa Rica, Ecuador, France, Ireland, England, Israel, Argentina, Spain, and even some jokers from Canada.

We split into four teams. The membership of each team – green, red, blue, and yellow – varies but if you show up consistently enough, you will get sorted like a Hogwarts house. (I’m blue.) We play three games over an hour and a half. We play rain or shine. We also play in the snow, sweltering heat, and, because of some portable lighting, in the dark.

Every year, there is an end of year holiday party called the Christmas Curry where we take over an Indian restaurant on 3rd Ave (don’t worry, they mostly rely on delivery) and gorge ourselves on samosas and vindaloo.

I’ve made great friends in this group and gone on ski trips with them. I’ve only been playing for three years but it’s been around for over a decade.

I’m telling you all of this to make one point clear: it’s an established group that shows up consistently week after week to play soccer.

Now, like I said, we play rain or shine. When it’s shine, we have significantly more competition for space. On Thursdays there are kids running drills. Some Sundays there is Zog sports softball. And this is in addition to ambient Park Slope families and annoying teenagers. Sometimes we wait for people to leave, other times we ask people to move. If pushed, we will mention that we actually have a permit to play. (I have never seen this permit and privately we question both its veracity and existence.)

But then one time we show up and a group of guys are playing flag football. It looked like they had been there a while. They had camping chairs and a cooler and everything. They even had a camera recording them. Pretty odd but, hey, you do you.

When we play, we set up two fields side by side, parallel to 4th avenue. These guys were playing one a field that was parallel to 3rd street and took up what would be two halves of our fields.

So, we send a representative over there. “Hey, how long are you guys going to be here?”

“We’re just wrapping up, this is our last game.”

That’s what we were told. That’s fine. We take our sweet ass time setting up anyway, people trickle in over the course of a half hour from the actual start time and then we start to play. So, we figure these guys will wrap up and be done and all will be well.

Their game ends, people head to the sidelines and start to pack up and then I hear one of them call out, “You want to play another game?”

And they do.

So, they start playing and we send over another person to ask when they’re leaving. Now things start getting contentious. We’ve asked quite a few times and someone brought up our ace: the permit.

At this point, I should probably mention that the football players were all people of color. Our group, while not one hundred percent white, is pretty white. It should also be mentioned that the football players were all pretty big athletic guys, many of whom were wearing sleeveless t-shirts because they have the arms for wearing sleeveless t-shirts. Our group, while not un-athletic, still contains several members, such as I, who prefer not taking their shirts off at the beach unless absolutely necessary.

Just for the sake of setting expectations, I want to mention now that there was no fight nor any real threat of one. But the tension keeps escalating. They feel us watching them and they just want to play. It turns out that they were gathering to play in remembrance of a friend of theirs who had passed away. On the one hand, that’s a nice thing to do as a group of friends. On the other hand, there are bars, restaurants, and far larger parks, not to mention the backyards of personal homes, in which to hold such a gathering.

Finally, the tension boils over and a few of them start yelling at us, the loudest of whom was pretty jacked.

“Yo, what the fuck? We’ve been coming to this park for thirty years!”

As I said, I’d been playing there once or twice a week for three years and had never seen these guys before. Neither had any of the people who had been playing there for ten.

“Why don’t y’all go back to Germany or some shit?!”

This I have to admit was a pretty good burn. A bunch of white soccer players? Throw out the name of a Western European country. It was made funnier still by the fact that no one there was from Germany.

“Yo, fuck your permit, yo! You’re a bunch of crackers, yeah, I’ll say it! I’ll be racist, I don’t give a fuck! Why didn’t you ask anyone else here to move?!”

I’d never been called a cracker before. I’ve got to be honest: not that big a deal. It just doesn’t have the centuries of oppression baked into it the way other slurs do.

“I bet you’re not even from New York!”

And that’s when it all clicked for me, what this was really about.

Neighborhoods change and grow but, in the twenty-five years that I’ve lived here, the change has been towards gentrification. My particular block in Park Slope was already pretty gentrified when I moved in, which, not gonna lie, helps me live with myself. But it’s still happening. 4th Avenue used to be mechanics, and a taxi depot. Now it’s full of luxury condos. Gowanus, the toxic neighborhood that no one wanted to touch much less live in, is also full of luxury condos. Downtown Brooklyn? Same. I could rattle off the names of other neighborhoods that have met a similar fate.

And who lives in these places? Without getting explicitly racial or socioeconomic about it, let’s just say, “people who didn’t grow up here.”

These guys are Buggin Out in Do the Right Thing and we’re the guy in the Celtics jersey running over his sneakers with our mountain bike. And the guy’s question rang in my ears, “Why didn’t you ask any of them to move?” Any of the other Park Slope families, the upper middle-class parents playing with their kids. The easy answer is that it would take many conversations to get all of them to move. Plus, we knew that this football game had an end and they would all be leaving.

Or did we think that we were entitled to the space, and they weren’t?

But also, did you catch the part where I said, “in my twenty-five years”? I said that because, you guessed it, I’ve lived in New York for twenty-five fucking years. Twenty-four of them in Brooklyn. At what point can I stop explaining that I live here? What proof of New Yorker authenticity do I need besides living here longer than I’ve ever lived anywhere else in my life?

The guys eventually packed up and headed home, pretty quietly. One of them said, “yo, they’re just ignorant, yo! And ignorance is bliss!” And I have to say, that one was pretty stupid.

We started our game and that confrontation just melted into the lore of Park Slope Footy and a Pint. It doesn’t even occupy a particularly memorable place, either. It wasn’t like the time a newcomer straight up punched a regular in the face after a challenge and was immediately banned. Or the time a guy fell wrong and broke his arm so badly part of his bone came out of the skin. And it doesn’t hold a candle to the time two random guys in black hoodies run up 3rd street, fired some gunshots and fled.

We still come back and play: rain, shine, snow, dark, punches, broken bones, or gun shots.

Funny enough, though, those football players? The ones who have been coming to the park for thirty years? We haven’t seen them since. Maybe they went back to Germany or some shit.