Trying to make it as a sports commentator.

Detail from the 1994 USA World Cup poster.

The world’s third-largest youth soccer tournament, Schwan’s USA Cup, is held each summer on a vast stretch of converted farmland in Blaine, Minnesota. The complex comprises fifty-two full-size fields and an inadequate number of shade trees; it is a desert of grass. Throughout the week of play, parents huddled beneath umbrellas, protecting themselves from the sun, if not the heat. They shouted encouragement to their children and epithets at referees.

On the final day of competition, John Hadden sat at a folding table beside field A-1. He’d been hired by a local public-access channel to call play-by-play for a U-19 women’s semifinals match. His pants were khaki; his loafers, shiny; his briefcase was leather with brass clasps—his appearance and bearing resembled that of an accountant. He estimated that no more than two hundred viewers would tune into the broadcast. “There’s an if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest quality to gigs like this,” he told me, “which, if your aim is to reach people, isn’t ideal.” 

Hadden’s aim is to reach people. He wants to announce for Major League Baseball one day and has spent the last decade traveling the country to call games for farm clubs: the Idaho Falls Chukars, the Yakima Bears, the New Orleans Zephyrs. Every summer he lives somewhere else. Winters he returns to Minnesota, his home state, and picks up whatever commentary work he can get. He has called Pee Wee hockey tournaments. He has called high school gymnastics meets. While he admitted he was somewhat disappointed, at thirty-one, to be working youth soccer, he took his assignment seriously. Before the morning’s game he’d done three hours of prep work, he said, researching the teams and their previous results, the players’ names, the facility, the weather forecast. Rain, for the first time all week, was predicted. The parents’ umbrellas would be put to new use.  Read More