サッカーのあるライフスタイル

Davis CA:  Look at all those lovely football kits – or soccer jerseys, uniforms, shirts or whatever your preferred vocabulary choice is. It is like football heaven. This is “Soccer and Lifestyle”, on 2nd Street, my favourite shop in Davis, and was the first shop I ever came into when I first visited this town. I remember chatting that day to the owner, Rami, about my team Spurs who had just played against Charlton Athletic. I was just so impressed there was a shop here devoted to my favourite things – football shirts – that I told my wife “we have to move here!” Considering I’ve been here in Davis ever since that is looking like a fairly big life decision, made on the simple fact that colourful sportswear happens to be sold there. It isn’t that surprising. When I was a kid, I used to regularly go on pilgrimages to Soccerscene in London’s Carnaby Street, back when it was a thickly jumbled mess of shirts from all over the world, where you could actually see and touch that old Fluminense shirt, rummage through disorganized racks to look for old Sparta Prague away kits, spend hours gazing longingly at all the little metal world cup badges. I felt so fortunate to live in a city where I could go and just spend time hanging out among football shirts from around the world. Such shops are my home. (Soccerscene nowadays however is a vacuous mini-Nike-store with no chance of finding old gems, very much a cog in the corporate replica-jersey behemoth). A couple of weeks ago, with it being the height of the 2014 Brazil World Cup I figured that the time was right to finally sketch Soccer and Lifestyle. I went down there one lunchtime, wearing my recently purchased dark blue France shirt (it is in my opinion the best kit at the tournament; if you’re interested in my opinions on the many kits of this tournament – and I am quite opinionated on the matter – I have been posting 私のブログで along with little MS Paint illustrations of each kit – yes I am far more obsessed about soccer kits than fire hydrants) and sketched while watching the first half of France vs Switzerland. It was a vintage match for France, while the Swiss had a mountain to climb. Rami, originally from Egypt, is a friendly guy who knows his stuff, and was invariably on the phone answering inquiries about the availability of その red and blue USA jersey. There was a sign asking people not to loiter during World Cup games, but I’m a professional loiterer (aren’t we all, Urban Sketchers, aren’t we all). I love standing among all the colours of the World Cup shirts, but I do buy them as well; I purchased my son the new green Mexico shirt, which he loves because of the little lightning flashes on it. With all the crazy colourful boots (cleats) and all the footballs (soccer-balls) from various World Cups, as a kit-nerd and a footy-fanatic, this is very much my kind of store.

I hope you’re enjoying the World Cup!

ピート・スカリー