Rabih Alameddine

My father and I rarely saw eye to eye when I was growing up. We saw the world differently. It was only when we were both adults that we were able to share spectacles. However, football, and particularly the World Cup, was when we, enemy combatants, could traverse trenches and be together.

A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.

The Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990, spanned four World Cups. It would have been a more symmetrical five had the Lebanese begun in 1974, but you know, we're Mediterranean, and timing isn't our forte.

When the Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I was 15. I was shipped to boarding school in England and, after that, to UCLA.

I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read.

I was gay before I began to play soccer over 40 years ago. It's been 28 years since a friend and I organized one of the first gay soccer teams in the world.

A team without hope fizzles: no flameout, no fire.

I stuck out more in an English public school than I would have had I marched in a May Day parade with the Red Army in Moscow or sashayed the Yves St. Laurent catwalk with supermodels or hunted seals with the Inuit or - well, you get the idea.

I can make up stories with the best of them. I've been telling stories since I was a little kid.

I think I'm being conservative when I say there are more people playing soccer in the United States than in 90% of the world's other countries, probably 95%.

I oscillate between being cynical and being naive on a regular basis. I always think that not much shocks me until something much too obvious does.

Nobody ever calls me a soccer-playing writer, even though I play soccer and it's part of who I am.