Gary Thomas rechecked his ticket and after making sure everything was in order, he kissed his wife and daughter good by and boarded the airliner for his non stop flight to Rome! He would be gone for two whole weeks covering the first round of the World Cup soccer matches in Europe, and while he was looking forward to revisiting the Continent as they called it, he was surely going to miss his family back in the states! 

The flight was pretty uneventful, and between reading a new novel he had picked up at the airport and sleeping, the twelve hour trip slipped by quickly! Once on the ground in Rome, he passed through customs and took a taxi to his hotel where he flopped down in bed and went fast asleep!!!

The matches weren’t set to begin for several days, and while there were press conferences and press gatherings to meet the players and coaches, for the next few days he was pretty much on his own, and since he had never been to Italy before he was determined to see as many of the sights as was humanly possible in the short time he was allotted!!! After spending the better part of his first day taking several prearranged guided tours around the old part of the city, at around four in the afternoon he stopped at an outdoor café for a glass of wine and a piece of crusty bread! While he sat in his chair savoring the moment, he noticed in the park across the street there was a lively soccer game going on with the usual yelling and shouting that accompanied a game among close friends!!! He dropped some lira on the table and wandered over to watch some of the action, and after settling down on the grass on the sidelines, he was a little surprised to find that the boys playing weren’t really boys at all but young men probably in their late teens or early twenties!!! He watched intently for almost half and hour, and while they certainly weren’t World Cup status, they had enough skills that he thought about writing a companion piece about the stark as well as subtle differences in a pick up game in the park and the championship matches that were to be held in a huge stadium!!!