Her Cleats in My Car
On the genesis of my marriage to the girl from my soccer team.
Above is a photo of Haley’s cleats taken on October 3, 2017. It was a Tuesday, and I know that because in that season of our lives, we played soccer every Monday night on the outdoor fields at Emerald’s Sansom Complex with a ragtag group of mostly acquaintances who I’d occasionally end up trying to fight for not passing the ball or substituting.
Haley had invited me to join that team five months earlier when we still didn’t really know much about each other except that we sometimes wound up on the same teams in the weeknight leagues at Fuse off Papermill Road. The first time I really noticed the skinny girl with the bouncing ponytail and resting game face was on a Friday night there. I asked Kelly, a friend who organized that team, about her. She looks like I kid, I thought. And for all the murmuring and smack-talking she did on the field, she was quiet as a church mouse once we were on the sideline after the final whistle pulling off our socks, complaining about the refereeing, and making plans to grab food and beer. In fact, she was usually the first one out the door. I thought she was some college girl on her way back to grab a shower and head out to a party or whatever kids do.
I didn’t feel like a kid because I was divorced and pouring everything I could into a Crazy, Stupid, Love-esque personal transformation. I was kickboxing or playing soccer every night of the week and had lost enough weight that I’d bought an entirely new wardrobe of sports coats, tapered jeans, and slim-fitted button-downs. I was in the midst of remaking myself from a dopey loudmouth who’d been tossed aside like spoiled yogurt by a woman who’d vowed to love him but couldn’t into a smooth-talking gentleman that no woman of sound mind could resist.
Kelly told me she didn’t know much about Haley, other than that she was in school at UT and really close with one of her little sisters, who also happened to play soccer. I was coaching a girls club team at Emerald at the time, so I used that knowledge the next Friday night we played together. Walking over to Haley on the bench, I opened with some small talk—I realize now that it was the first time we’d actually spoken—then told her that her sister should come out to Emerald to try out for one of our teams in May. Heck, I’d even let her practice with my team if she wants to play against some older girls and work on her skills. Without making eye contact, Haley told me that, nah, she wasn’t going to do that.
At the time, I had developed a faultless defense mechanism, based on this simple maxim: A woman was never again going to see Brian Canever weak. If you didn’t make eye contact, or you blew me off when I asked you out for dinner, I shrugged it off with a smirk and a nod, like I was the one doing you the favor by asking. But we’ll get back to that in a second.
Because the Monday night that Haley asked me to join her team was more than a year after that night at Fuse. I was leaving tryouts, and I loved my girls. But I also loved tacos made from a cluster of fried cow organs and served up oily and hot at Esperanza on Washington Pike. That’s where I was off to once I’d handed in my tryout sheet. Then, as I was walking across the field, where the adult league was set to kick off, Carlos shouted, “Hey dude, we need another player for our game, want to hop in?”
“Nah dude, I’m dead. I’m heading to get some tacos,” I said. And then a girl’s voice shouted from somewhere behind him, saying come on, you should play with us. I didn’t recognize it because it was only the second time I’d heard Haley’s voice. But I stayed, played, and eventually joined the team for that season and two others.
Fact is, the smooth-talking thing wasn’t working out as I’d hoped. I was into my second year of singleness the night Haley asked me to join her team. I went out on a lot of dates, dressed like I belonged in Santo Domingo instead of Appalachia. But I was still a mess of insecurities and anxiety. Most Monday nights, Haley sat off to the side and talked to Jenna, the other girl on the team, instead of me. But I still liked her.
Between the second and third time she ever spoke to me, I was rolling out my back at South Landing CrossFit with Billy and some other gym dudes. We were talking about women, as men often do, and I brought up my dilemma. I had narrowed my next pursuits down to a girl at the gym who had brown skin and was funny and good-looking, and the skinny kid from my soccer team who had less-brown skin but was also funny and good-looking. The only problem seemed to be that she was nearsighted when it came to my existence. Which was very annoying, because I was putting in work.
An older divorced friend who had managed to land himself a funny and good-looking wife told me over beers at Alliance that my best chance to land a babe was to do what he did: go to the free beer runs or workouts around town. South Landing was literally across the street, so I Googled and saw they offered free workouts on Saturday mornings. I started going and eventually became a member. It was serendipitous because I had found out through Sherlockian means—I stalked Haley on Instagram—that she did CrossFit.
So, one Monday night in July—two months before the cleats were in my car—I got to soccer early and announced very loudly while talking to one of my male teammates that I was like so sore from the WOD, dude. Haley’s ears perked up. “You do CrossFit,” she said, turning to me. “Where do you go?”
Third conversation achieved!
Of course, through Instagram, I also learned that Haley was still in college—and I was literally within two months of starting my first semester as a professor (and as my director reiterated in her office when she hired me, professors cannot date students1). I wasn’t sure about our age gap, but it was big enough to make me feel very weird about asking her out, even though she started being nice to me and asking me whether I was going to do this or that CrossFit competition.
The big concern was what felt like the very real possibility that Haley might laugh in my wrinkly face if I asked her to dinner. She wasn’t like the other nice Christian girls who made themselves tiny when they rejected me, saying they just valued our friendship far too much to risk ruining it. Haley was a badass who responded to shit talk from Mexican dudes by calling them putos and whose hair seemed to be permanently disheveled and moistened with sweat. She might emasculate me then leave a trail of laughter in the air from the field to her car, where she would immediately roll down the window for fresh air to keep from asphyxiating due to laughing too hard.
When my balls finally dropped, I asked for her number, you know, to coordinate soccer stuff like if we need a sub or something. And we started texting like dumb millennials. Most of the time, she included strings of emojis at the end of her messages—that felt like a good sign. Then one night, while driving around town in a nostalgia bender, I crossed over the railroad tracks on Cherry Street and called to ask her out on a date.
She said yes but was at the beach. So we kept talking, all the way until I got to my house on Woodbine. We talked as I went through the front door, grabbed a drink, and then walked out the back door. I was so transfixed, talking to this girl from my soccer team, that I accidentally locked myself out and had to hop on top of the AC unit and crawl through my roommate Cody’s unlocked window2 to get back in the house.
Haley and I spent the next week talking on the phone until early in the morning3. After the first night, I was 95% certain that I was going to marry her. But I knew for sure by the third night when I opened up about my divorce. That news was usually the moment Christian girls blessed my heart with an aww you poor thing and acted like the call was breaking up before blocking me on a dating app. Haley’s response was: “I don’t give a sh*t. You think you’re the only one who’s screwed up?” I swear, if I had one on me, I would’ve driven 10 hours to South Carolina and put a ring on her finger right then.
Our date was scheduled for the Sunday she got back. I cleaned my Civic at the Zips on Western Ave more thoroughly than I ever had before or since. And the first thing I did when she walked down the stairs was ask if I could kiss her on the lips. She said yes, and we made out in public view beside the passenger door, which I then opened to take her dinner to dinner at Aubrey’s. Afterward, we went to the Menchies on Northshore for frozen yogurt and for a walk at Suttree Landing Park in South Knoxville. We capped the night with more kissing in the back seat of the Civic to the sounds of Taylor Swift on the stereo4.
The next few weeks were like any other in a young relationship between two people who know they love each other but can’t say it yet because it seems crazy to tell someone you love them when you’ve not even officially asked them to be your girlfriend. And then, about a month in, we went on a hike around Mead’s Quarry, and Haley was acting off. Before driving to meet me, she hadn’t included any emojis at the end of her text messages. On my porch afterward, she told me that she didn’t think she could do it. I had come into her life like a meteorite and ravaged everything she had envisioned for her future. She was too afraid she might wind up marrying me and had too much on her plate to rewrite all her plans for a divorced Argentinian from up north who obviously wanted to make babies with her.
Now about those cleats. It’s not like we quit playing soccer together after she ended it. In fact, the breakup only officially lasted four days—until I texted to tell her that she was a 22-year-old idiot and that I didn’t accept the dissolution of the relationship. And she told me, Thank God. We existed in a limbo state until that October 2, dating in the shadows and away from social media. And I wish right now that I could find the text message chain or travel back in time to the conversation when we decided it was finally time to step out into the light. Maybe leaving her dirty soccer cleats on the floorboard of my car after I drove out of my way and across town to drop her off at her house off Westland Drive was an act of her subconscious. Maybe Haley knew that for many years to come she’d leave her soccer cleats in the Honda Civic of a dude from her soccer team that told her he was going to marry her and did.
By March 2017, seven months after our first date, Haley was so impatient for me to confirm that I was going to put a ring on her finger that she had written out two life plans: one that included me and babies and a lifetime of arguments and adventures and laughter, and another that didn’t include me and sounded way more depressing and like she had only written it out to demonstrate to me that it was time to put a diamond ring on her finger. Little did she know, I had already bought fricken ring with the help of Emily, a mom she babysat for who was also the first person at church to ask me where my ex-wife was years earlier when I was at rock bottom.
We got engaged and were married on July 21—two days shy of one year of dating. We don’t play soccer together now because she’s six months pregnant with our third baby and still as likely to kick an opponent in the shins then tell them to suck it up and stop being a crybaby. I’m just as likely to stand aside, wondering how I could’ve ever expected any different. Her cleats aren’t the same; for one of her birthdays, I bought her white Adidas cleats with Messi’s name written in blue across the back. Those cleats are sitting just inside the garage, a dozen paces from where I’m writing this right now. And I can’t wait to see her put them back on.
Some of my writing about love and my marriage:
One of Haley’s favorite early threats was that, if I didn’t act right, she was going to register for one of my classes. Fortunately, she was a speech path major and I taught sports journalism. Risk averted.
Which was very irresponsible on his part, since he was in New Mexico for the summer and a thief could’ve broken in to steal my sports coats or my DVD collection.
I wrote the poem “A Thousand Minutes” about that week in our lives.
A journalist must do his research. Every element of that night was meticulously planned and vetted—even though my trustiest single friends, Patty and Peter, both thought I should’ve waited until the end of the night to plant a kiss on her. But I would rather teach my grandchildren about love by telling them that when you know, you take the risk.
Your honesty man. It makes this rich. Also, I'd love to play soccer soon.