In one of my first soccer tournaments ever, in one of the biggest ones at least, our coach told me before a game against a Swedish team that he’d make another boy the captain of the team for that game.

“It’s just because he speaks Swedish, you know,” the coach told me.

I took off the captain’s armband and handed it over to the coach who told me I’d be the captain in the next game again.

I was about ten years old, and I knew the coach was right. I didn’t speak Swedish. I only knew how to count to ten, and then fake it to thirteen. I knew just one other word in Swedish: Kött. “Meat”.

Continue reading →

Jim Hines. I never saw Jim Hines run, but when I was a kid, he was one of the sprinters I knew by name because that Jim Hines held the 100 meter world record. His 9.95 was the ultimate goal the others were chasing. One of them was my favorite sprinter, Valeri Borzov, of Soviet Union. He was also the great, white hope of the sport at the time, especially after he won the Olympic gold in 1972.

He must have become the Pakarinen household favorite a year earlier, though, in 1971, when he won both the 100 meter race and the 200 meter race at the European Championships held in Helsinki. I remember watching Borzov at the 1976 Olympics, in Montreal, and my father admiring the thighs on the Ukrainian.

Continue reading →

“Becky’s dinah, nothing finah.”

For somebody coming from a country that has “our land is poor, so it remains, if you long for gold, a stranger sure abandons it, but to us, the most precious land is this” written in the national anthem, having too many options isn’t always a good thing.

After all, life is so much easier when there are just two TV channels, like in the Finland of my youth, or when the breakfast choice was simply porridge with strawberry dessert creme, which I had when Dad took me to the diner around the corner from our apartment in the Helsinki of my youth.

Continue reading →

“Are we really going to do this,” Wife asked me. She was half-sitting and half-sleeping on the couch as the athletes were marching into the London Olympic Stadium. About an hour earlier, she had been sitting, and fully awake, admiring the Opening ceremony, amazed by the production and delighted by the appearance by the Queen.

“I mean, they’re just at H, and we’ve seen Finland, this is going to take hours,” she said.

“Oh, it’s only once every four years. Besides, I really think they’ll have a big surprise in the end. It’s not going to be just Paul McCartney singing Hey Jude, I think it’s going to be a Beatles reunion. It’ll be Paul and Ringo and holograms of John and George,” I said.

“You want something to eat? A sandwich?” I then asked her on my way to the kitchen. I didn’t have to see Honduras marching in. But I did want to see the Beatles.

Continue reading →

I had only been back to Vierumäki a couple of times in the last few decades, mostly just for an interview or two, and never for more than a couple of hours, but that didn’t stop me from acting as if I knew my way around the place as I showed the family how to get from the hotel to the rink and the track.

As usual, things had changed in my absence, and as usual, I told Wife all about it. I told her that the hotel must have been brand new, and how where the new rink was now, there used to be an outdoor rink. Then I also pointed out all the things that seemed to be exactly the way I remembered them from my camp.

In 1982.

Continue reading →

The first one was an accident, really. I was just sitting there on the swing with Son and Daughter when I happened to drop my sandal. I picked it up, sat down again, got some more speed, and then kicked the sandal off my foot so that it landed a few meters from the swings.

And then the other one.

And then I stopped the swing and walked barefoot to get my sandals. Just as I was about to slip one of them back on, I saw a blue plastic sandal in the air. Son had kicked off his new pair of Crocs.

I rushed back to the swings, and this time, I made the swing go higher, and really fast, so that I could make my sandal fly far, so far. One, two, three, I swung back and forth four times, and on the fifth, I kicked off my left sandal.

Continue reading →