Dazed and relatively alert

There's a scene in the TV show Ted Lasso (season 2, episode 1) in which star footballer Dani Rojas accidentally kills Earl, the team's greyhound mascot, when Earl is struck by Rojas' kicked soccer ball. It's a little bit counter-intuitive, as a soccer ball is relatively soft and full of air, but physics. You know, potential energy, velocity, mass × acceleration, that sort of thing.

Last night as I was preparing for an umpiring shift, I found myself empathizing a lot more fully with Earl. Some guys playing soccer on our field, dilly-dallying about getting out of our way so we could start our softball game, kicked a soccer ball—hard—and clocked me right in the temple. I went down, sort of blacked out (in the sense that my vision went dark but I was still conscious) for about, I don't know, 15 seconds, maybe, and then got up and made my displeasure known to the soccer jerks. One of my softball players was out to assist me straight away and he moved to go after the soccer guys, but I just shouted at them and they left without further incident. 

I didn't see it coming, of course, so I can't say if it was an accident or a deliberate attempt to hit me without understanding how hard the impact would be, but I am fairly sure there wasn't an intention to injure me. I've had enough conflict with soccer players who won't leave our fields that it makes things murky and I can't be sure of their hostility or lack thereof; could go either way.

Either way, it rattled my cage pretty good and it took a while for things to normalize. Don't ask me what happened in the first couple innings of our game, I couldn't tell you. I do know I didn't think to do some of the normal pregame stuff like clearing foul ground of obstructions (soccer goal) and checking the bases (one had a broken post the other day) until midway though our game. Things seemed fine by mid-game, but I woke up today with a splitting headache and basically lost my whole Wednesday to trying to sleep off the pain.

It's OK now. I still feel the sting of the impact on the side of my face, but the headache is gone and I don't feel at all dazed or impaired. But I'm glad I don't have another game to ump until next Tuesday.

Fucking soccer.