He must have worn a size 18 shoe, but his feet were not the super thin and bony type either. You’d also see these huge wet imprints on the floor of the locker room that told you Matt was there. You’d actually hear a wet sucking sound as he popped off his cleats.
His socks were so wet that when he took them off he had a habit of wringing the sweat out of them with his bare hands. The once white sock was now discolored a deep orange, stained as usual with his toe prints on the bottom. As it hit the floor I stared down at the thing for a minute. Several times I’d be walking when suddenly **swap** the sound of his long wet soccer collided with the bridge of my nose and lips. He knew I was the lame towel boy that was supposed to take all the soccer players soiled socks and jocks to the Laundromat. Until one day…I was walking into the locker room, and Matt knew who I was. Even when he took off his huge cleats in the locker room, and people felt the compulsion to hold their nose, no one would ever dare to complain about his intensely sweaty foot odor.
But no one would think to ever question Matt about his sock habits. A lot of the soccer players noticed that he would go for weeks of playing soccer without changing his socks. Matt was a big dude, about 6 8’’ and he had these long white Adidas soccer socks he loved to wear to pretty much every practice. I remember watching his feet resting on the edge of the foot stool from the other room, afraid that he might catch me staring at his rank and smelly feet. “Geez, man, my feet fuckin stink today!” he exclaimed out loud.īoy was he right.
“Thump…thump” his cleats sounded as they hit the floor. Usually he’d go over to the lazy boy recliner that he owned in the den and remind himself that it was time to veg out and relax. Everyday he’d come home all muddied from soccer with his socks stained from a long hard game and sweat pouring down his ankles. Matt was the star player on his high school soccer time.