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The Legend Of Sami Amaretti
March 2, 2012
by Jude Ellery
They said, “You can’t pick that lad, he’s only fifteen.”
I said, “He’s Sami Amaretti.”
Golden locks fly in the wind as he dances down the wing, like a roaring lion’s mane or a shooting star’s flame. Defenders drop like ninepins when he casts his magic spell, then a dip of the hip to incite the trip, and he’s up to score it as well. Sami Amaretti’s in town.
Three penalties won and scored in his first three. Earned him some extra pocket money and more than a few sneaked beers from the boys, along with so many back slaps he’d go into the showers redder than a cherry, and come out redder still. Surprised he didn’t lose his hair, with all the ruffles his barnet received, too.
Game four he waved goodbye to the bench.
It’s swept out to the right, he’s dribbling infield now, the defender backing off as Amaretti’s on the prowl. Past one, past two, tip tap tip, that’s a lovely flick. Keeper’s out, the angle’s tight, only Amaretti might… golly gosh he was in full flight. What a goal, what a skill, what a player, what a thrill.
They called that move the Sami Amaretti, though no-one ever saw him do it again.
Jones four, Spencer five, Amaretti seven, the boy’s in heaven.
Two days shy of sixteen, two months into the season, league top scorer by two. Still, you’d have to be crazy to make a boy your club captain…
The papers called it and there it is, shining bright in the afternoon sun: armband loose ‘round the schoolboy’s shoulder, coin flip, handshake, wave to his mum. Peep peep, off we go. Sit back and enjoy the show.
I gave up coaching him after a while; he was the one doing the teaching. Got us up to third but saved his best for the cup. Six in one match! They called it Amaretti’s game.
He takes it on his chest, flicks it on with his head, look how Amaretti leaves defenders for dead. The away fans are off their seats, ten thousand hands poised, he has a pop no-one can stop, just listen to the noise!
Of course it was Amaretti who scored the winner in the final too, to secure our first silverware in fifty years. And I’d been told he was too small, he’d never make it. As he grew, he just got better.
Locked himself in the gym, and don’t it just show? New legs like trees, goodbye knobbly knees. The whizz kid’s come of age — and he’s still got more to grow.
Our defence was too leaky, but we won the cup again in his second season. Sami was never injured and his goals never threatened to dry up. Three player of the month awards, three goals of the month, and goal of the season for that 45-yarder.
He doesn’t strike it hard, just guides it on its way, like a mother eagle, on eaglet training day. A gentle nudge, off, off you go! God’s speed and good luck, son. A gauntlet laid down for the stopper: save that or lose one-none. Into the great expanse it flies and homes in on the net, there’s often late, late Sami strikes that ruin punters’ bets.
Of course, as his body and fame rapidly grew, so did his ego.
Superman wrote in, asking Sami boy for tips. Roy Race sued, said he’d copied half his tricks. God was on the phone, asking where to get the formula, and Amaretti answered, “You should know, ‘cause I’m a clone of ya.”
Again in the cup, in his third year, he scored the perfect three, right, left, head, then amazed us all by subbing himself off and driving away into the night in his little VW. Not a soul saw or heard from him till the following Saturday.
When he did turn up, it was five minutes before the game, and he was wearing a crop top and prancing about in a pair of high heels. Said his getup was a revolutionary thing, an ode to feminism. Feminism? As far as Sami Amaretti was concerned, feminism meant slipping ten bob notes down the girl’s pants without ripping them off. We all knew what he’d been up to the night before and where his clothes had ended up.
I saw young Sam out on the tiles, a real sight to behold! Said, “I’ll be here till 4am — and still I’ll score your goals.”
He could use both feet to devastating effect, but he’d now became even more proficient with the thing dangling between them. Started getting phone calls from mystery blondes, demanding a chunk of his pay check. I was half inclined to agree, just to stop the ringing in my ears.
Oooooooohh Sami Amaretti,
You screwed my sweetheart Betty,
But she said hey,
He made my day,
So come round for spaghetti!
The public adored him. My office was submerged with fan mail. Gate receipts were up a hundred percent and with the money from that we could buy a new ‘keeper. Brought in the best in the country, but even he couldn’t save an Amaretti arrow in training.
Custom made shirts he wears, with bigger holes instead. Those biceps grown unnatural big, and so too has his head.
Never saw him take anything, but then again, I never asked, either. It was true he’d bulked out even more in his fourth season. Now if he couldn’t run around you, he’d run through you. Another record-breaking season, another cup win; a lot more parties.
They say he’s skipping training, favouring the lash; a man who once enjoyed the game’s now doing it for cash. When that was threatened, things got nasty, he pissedly exclaimed, “Why practice when you can’t get better? Leave off, or feel the pain. Come on old man, give Sam his dues, or just a little money. After all I need that dosh to buy this drink a honey!”
He quit training all together, actually, but I hid that for the papers for as long as I could. Though he was still scoring, fit turned to fat, and we lost our grip on the cup as a result.
He’s lost it again, now a counter attack, long ball, good lay-off, there’s Black at the back! Amaretti at fault, two-nothing they’re down, this circus act’s fast becoming a clown.
That’s what happens when your priorities in life are flipped like a coin.
Asked what he did to relax, Sami Amaretti said, “Play football, silly journo man — it’s women who burst my head!”
He was appearing on the front pages more than the back these days. A tobacco company paid him handsomely to appear in their ad. By the end of the film shoot he’d gone through his wages in fags, got off with the director’s wife and set fire to a fish tank.
Hair uncombed, beard unkempt, nothing near to neat. I’d toss the bloke a thrupence if I saw him on the street.
The crowd asked Sami for a wave, so he got his piece out and gave it a good helicoptering. That was when we knew the end had come.
The Legend Of Sami Amaretti by Jude Ellery is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Futureball
February 29, 2012
by Roge Slater
The post-apocalyptic world is one of darkness and desolation on the surface.
There is little light. The sun’s rays diminish daily, too impotent to penetrate the fug and haze that envelopes what remains of this once thriving world. Now, the darkness only yields grudgingly at the poles. There, the unfiltered light and heat burn through the polar fragments of the Earth’s protective ozone layer preventing any form of life.
It is half a century since the meteor storm rained down. Expected to be a wondrous celestial shower, ranking alongside the Northern Lights or a Solar Eclipse in its beauty, no-one foresaw the trajectory, intensity, or level of destruction that would be wrought; no-one, that is, but the Mayans: December 2012 rightly pinpointed by that ancient race as the end of life as we knew it.
Yet their prediction was not entirely accurate. This was not quite the catastrophe that ended man’s existence: this was simply a new age; a new beginning; a new time. Like all of life’s cycles, our rebirth began with destruction. Experiences and technologies developed over hundreds of years lived on, adapting, like our bodies, to life underground.
The planet is once again stable, though not as it once was. No more do ice-caps melt and flood the remaining surfaces of our planet; the heat at the poles such that steam clouds billow from the exposed Phanerozoic lithosphere, the remaining surface water now super-heated and diminishing rapidly into the atmosphere.
The planet continues to rotate, but each circuit is out of balance with its predecessor as these geysers act like retro rockets, pulsing and pushing the tumbling mass to the extremes of axial control. The increased rotational speed jettisons both animate and inanimate objects from the surface, expelling them into space, though in the underworld we only see this in image form as we have no access to the surface. Gravity has all but given up its hopeless task as the world spins dizzily on in its orbit. The planet’s outer structure is unrecognisable, the landscape ever more desolate, an increasingly dark desert, replacing what once were green and fruitful plains.
We number but thousands — not even tens of thousands — where once there were millions, even billions. We are all young, second and third generation ‘lifers‘, our parents and grandparents those who, by whatever stroke of good fortune, survived the storm. Underground life is our mark of stubborn refusal to accept the inter-stellar Armageddon as the end. Lifespans shortened by unknown viruses, nature is our enemy now, yet, here in our darkness, technology reigns.
We have taken technology and science to our bosoms as never before, developing our under-world according to our own rules. We have learned to live in a new way.
No longer can we travel as freely as we did under an open sky. We are limited now to ultra-low frequency sound wave communication with other survivors existing in the sub strata of their own continents. There is no commerce, no cultural exchange, no physical contact; just ghostly voices murmuring in the distance.
The air we purify and manufacture does not allow great physical exertion. The carbon content required to remove the toxins is too great, an unseen restriction of our respiration. The work is difficult and tiresome as we strive to maintain and develop our new lives.
Pioneers search for new ways to improve our lot, each drawing from their own specialised fields of science; each with their own small army of colleagues, guided, directed and controlled to achieve their vital daily tasks.
Over time, in our formative generations, we have developed The Machine to control the very function of our lives. Pioneers design and implement the programs, and build and maintain the equipment that preserve our environment and provide for our needs. Then our engineers program The Machine to manage those processes for us.
More than a super-computer, it has become our heart and soul of everything we have and do. Without it, we would soon be nothing There simply aren’t enough of us to run all the programs that now make our days possible.
It is also programmed to learn. Extrapolating from all our knowledge and every new input from our daily lives, simple functions are now executed without our intervention. Every situation is analysed and contextualised to our history in millionths of a second. Where conditions match, then so do the reactions and operations of The Machine.
I am one of the Pioneers.
Mine is considered a lesser task, but, as I tell the skeptics, our bleak new world needs entertainment to make our lives seem worthwhile. My father and grandfather had both been developers with Atari-Commodore, and thus the Gaming Group is all I have ever known, its history ingrained in me. The two relatively small companies merged in the Console Era and, by 2012, were about to revolutionize the home gaming industry with their interactive football simulator.
Their game was to be a next generation release that would have stood to suppress the greed that had taken over so much of the real sporting world. It was a game to replace Pro Evolution Soccer, FIFA and Football Manager; to replace the X-Box1020 and PS3D, even, the market leading three-dimensional consoles; it was a game that was to be the ultimate. It was the game that would destroy the very sport that had given it life and that it mimicked so well.
Now, in our new world, but for very different reasons, we play The Game.
The Machine’s speed of thought and ability to learn have been key components in the development of The Game. With extensive data recovered from prior to the meteor storm, we have been able to program the history of a host of professional football clubs. Whether European, South American or otherwise, every bit of data regarding each player, coach, and executive’s tactical and business acumen, physical strengths and weaknesses, personal and professional temperament, and ability to cope with intense pressure in crucial situations, has been fed to The Machine. As the game is for everyone, with some wishing to be players, others managers, and a few chairmen and technical directors, we have included every available piece of information regarding every personality, now matter how inconsequential or irrelevant it may seem, into The Game’s program. No kernel of knowledge, no grain of fact, is considered unimportant.
There now exists a new Premier League. Every lifer is registered to a team of their choice, every part controlled by The Machine through a system of interpretation, each player having their very thoughts and brain waves read through an electroencephalogram, and each thought assimilated by The Machine. Their thoughts are The Game. They exist in a fourth dimension, their minds linked to The Machine’s physical approximations of footballing greats, seeing through their eyes, running with their legs, breathing with their lungs. Registered Chairman and Technical Directors interact, competing to hire the best Registered Managers and Coaches, and recruit the best Registered Players. The templates include the best of the Final Generation: Rooney, Ronaldo, Messi, Xavi, Buffon, but also the Immortals of Generations Past: Marsh, Best, Eusebio, Puskas, Pele, Maradona, Cruyff, Charlton, Giles, Shilton, Zoff — the annals are endless. Once a template is taken up by a Registered Player, age is taken into account, and the historical player’s abilities are blended with those of his operator.
As we play, each single bit and byte of data is compressed, transmitted and calculated in millionths of a second by the massive computing power that is The Machine. The permutations of combined personalities are infinite, and The Game’s potential limitless.
No longer will fans have crave the atmosphere of the stadium; their game environment will create it for them. No longer shall they express anger at inabilities, decisions or tactics; they shall be the players and the managers. No longer need they pick and choose which games to attend due to astronomical cost; they can freely be part of every game.
Corporate greed and the Prawn Sandwich are the only losers. Playing, or even just watching, the game returns the sport to the masses. Subsequent to the inter-stellar Armageddon, the masses are less, it is true, but this is their game.
We know from our records that at the time of destruction, the tag line to Atari-Commodore’s advertising was to be:
Who needs real players when you can be part of a global challenge, using the best of each generation in a multi dimensional world?
They could have added:
…to create a sport played from the armchair, where most of life is spent.
Futureball by Roger Slater is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
