I say "oddly" because Electric Football may well have been the single worst game ever created. All that I complain of in regard to it is in relation to the species of madness it engenders in a numerous body of otherwise rational beings, who refuse to discuss any other subject whatever. The "every other year" was a necessary interval to help us forget just how bad the game really was. After the war, SCIRI, Da’awa and other religious parties instantly opened up bureaus in the area. And not just in sports but across the whole society. And just when America was pulling out of the Depression, just when my father could begin to dream just a little, Uncle Sam called and employed his vo-tech skills deep in the belly of a Pacific-bound LST. The local Houston radio guys instantly gave him a nickname: Deep Blue. If there be, let him by all means communicate with me, for I shall greedily take him to my bosom.

To pull off a single play, each of us "coaches" would have to line up all 11 of his players one at a time--initially at least in a standard football configuration--flick the switch, and watch helplessly as chaos ensued. The vibrations excited the 22 little molded plastic players and goosed them brainlessly forward. A friend who owns a shop in Karrada had a little problem with a certain flag last week. The men, such as they were, could only move in one direction--unless of course their little Scotch-tape like gliders were bent, in which case they would wander aimlessly in circles. It was the area you went to when you had a list of unrelated necessities- like shoes, a potato peeler, pink nail polish and a dozen blank CDs. Like most parents, he had grown up in the Depression, but his depression started years before everyone else’s when, as an eight-year old, his dipsomaniac old man headed for work one day and never returned, never to be heard from again, not one word. Worse, he had no one to throw to.

When he wanted to play football as a boy, he would construct one out of a number 10 can that he wrapped in newspapers-or so he told us, often--and could never understand why we were not content to do the same. Of course, I had to do the same. Some Iraqis were taking old televisions and connecting them to an ordinary car battery which is what they did back in 1991. E. and the cousin managed to dig up a small, nova88 online casino old, black and white television my aunt had managed to overlook during last years spring cleaning. He would start by merely nudging his guys in the right direction, but soon enough he would be picking up confused players and putting them down in the open field, knocking my guys over, and even throwing his own lint-ball passes. The game was simple enough. Every year there were great players the scouts missed, and every year highly regarded players went bust. The "us" in question were my brother Bob and I, "Irish twins," born less than a year apart (see picture below).

Typically, it would take us only a play or two before Bob got impatient. No longer having age to confirm his status a priori, Bob would have to prove it at every opportunity, electric football chief among them. Then she collected all the papers and showed them that the peo­ple whose cell phone numbers were higher offered systematically higher estimates of African countries in the United Nations. There were complications, however, severe ones. We were gods--rival, irate, interventionist ones in the Greek tradition. We were no longer coaches. But in the winter of 2015, even they were shocked by the sight of the Indian who walked into their interview room. For my old man, a lover of football and things technical, Electric Football captured the essence of the age. Always kind and self-sacrificing, he spent every Saturday doing chores for his crippled mom. Left alone with his carping, arthritic mother, my father lived an early life straight out of Dickens. Even as a 12 year-old, I knew my father had no more hope of going to Georgia Tech than I had of going on the Mercury’s mission first sub-orbital flight. My father would not live to see the day when an electronic player could juke a defender out of his drawers.