Reporter's Notebook: In Small-Town Russia, 'Football Is My Life'
Millions of Russian adults and children play soccer on various levels. In one small town, three generations of soccer players take on the meaning of the game and the World Cup.
My father parks the car and gestures toward the ground-level window of a squat red-brick apartment building, pocked with jutted-out balconies.
"This was my room," he says. "Mom would send me off to do homework, but I'd go quietly to the window — hop! — and off to the stadium."
As in: a few leaps to cross the street, jump the fence and there you are.
"We had no other life except for school, mandatory, and everything else was at the stadium," he says. This was his
