At five minutes to six, the yellow Volkswagen pulled into the lot. Luma got out, opened the trunk, and wrestled out a mesh bag full of soccer balls. She heaved the bag over her shoulder and made her way to the field.
Luma surveyed the young men who had turned out. There were six familiar faces; four from the current Under 15s—Kanue, Natnael, Mandela, and Bienvenue’s older brother, Alex—and two other boys who had come out for practices with the Fugees in the past. The rest were unknowns. Notably absent was Fornatee; when the other boys had called him, he had explained that he intended to play for the Under 15s if Luma reinstated the team. But he felt strongly that he had tried out once before and shouldn’t have to try out again. It was an insult, he said.
Luma gathered the newcomers, asked their names, and wrote them down on a sheet of paper. Then she divided the group into two teams and told them she planned simply to watch them play. As the boys took the field, Luma noticed that one boy was wearing sandals. She called him over and placed her foot alongside his: they were close to the same size. Luma kicked off the black Puma soccer shoes she wore each day to practice and offered them to the boy, who stepped out of his sandals and slipped them on. Sock footed, Luma sat on the ground and watched the scrimmage in silence.
“It feels like our first season,” she said finally. “There’s no base for the team. If we could practice five days a week we might be able to make it—”
She cut herself off. With two other teams to coach, that wasn’t possible. If Luma decided to reinstate the 15s, they’d have perhaps three practices before their first game. She’d be lucky if her players learned one another’s names. She had her concerns too about some of the new kids; she didn’t know yet who they were, or if they were the sort of kids she wanted in her program. And Luma feared that by going ahead with the season, she might be setting her kids up for failure. The thought of it all put Luma in a brooding mood. She was weak from hunger as well. It was Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting from sunrise to sunset, and though Luma wasn’t an observant Muslim, she observed the daily fast for the lessons it provided in humility, sacrifice, and patience. But she was worn down. For the first time since I’d met her, she seemed unsure of herself.
“What would you do?” she eventually asked me.
Luma didn’t wait for an answer. She dropped her head and sighed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”
LUMA STUDIED THE players. Kanue was leading the scrimmage, calling out to his teammates, urging them to pass, and sprinting desperately for each free ball. The new players responded. There was a pair of Somali Bantu brothers, Hamdu and Jeylani Muganga, who were relentless on defense. Mandela charged his way through traffic, using his large frame to shield the ball, and scored a goal. Natnael flicked a series of clever passes across the field to players he’d never met before. The boys were playing with desperation, as if they were trying to will their team back into existence.
Luma watched intently, making occasional notes next to the players’ names on the sheet of paper she held in her hand. She drew a soccer field on the back and began to write names in specific positions: The Mugangas were quick and determined; Luma wrote their names on the back line, on defense, and put Alex in between. She put Kanue at center midfielder, Natnael at left mid, and Mandela at striker. There was a quick-footed young Bosnian player named Muamer—easily spotted by his thin black mustache that made him look ten years older than his actual age of fifteen. He was an excellent ball handler, even though he was raw and seemed never to pass. Perhaps he could be brought along; Luma put him at right forward. She wrote other names down, erased them, and wrote them down again at other positions—an exercise she repeated until the sheet of paper was a nearly illegible jumble of names and smudges.
After an hour or so, Luma blew her whistle and summoned everyone in. The boys formed a semicircle around her and waited for Luma to speak.
“Out of the sixteen players here today I have only coached six,” she told them. “So only six of you know how I am as a coach, and only six know what kind of players I expect. And only six of you know what rules I am going to make you have.
“If we go in with this team,” she continued, “we’re probably going to lose the majority of our games. I say we might win one or two if we’re lucky.”
One of the newcomers groaned in disagreement.
“Are you guys going to be okay going into a season and losing most of your games?” she asked.
There was no response.
“You’re playing teams that have been together five years,” she said. “We’re not going to play this weekend. You play the weekend after—you will have been together one week. So five years against one week.”
Luma pointed out that they’d have just three practices to get their team together.
Kanue spoke up. They could get an extra practice in early Saturday morning, he said. The other kids nodded—they’d be there.
“We can do this,” Kanue said.
“If you still want it, then I’ll see you Thursday at five,” Luma said. “And if you don’t—don’t show up Thursday.
“Practices are not going to be easy,” Luma added. “You’re going to be running more than the other teams, kicking the ball a lot more. And I’m not going to be nice. So if you thought I was mean these past two weeks …”
Luma let that thought hang in the air for a moment, and then turned to walk from the field.
KANUE DROPPED HIS head in relief. His team was alive. He had vetted the newcomers and let them know Coach’s rules—he’d read the contract to many of them himself—and he was going to make sure everyone was there on Thursday afternoon, on time. He also believed the team could get in yet another practice, early Sunday morning—he planned to talk to Coach about that later. But for now he simply wanted to let her know what was on his mind, and he did so quietly, when no one else was around.
“I told her I appreciate her,” Kanue said later. “I told her thanks, and that we were going to do everything to follow the rules and give her the respect she deserves.”
Chapter Sixteen
The Fifteens Fight
There was plenty of raw talent among the group of boys who had come out for the second edition of the Fugees’ Under 15s, but there was little in the way of cohesion. The boys came from Liberia, Kosovo, Sudan, Somalia, Burundi, Bosnia, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan, and while most spoke functional English, they had little in common with one another. With just nine days to go before their first game, Luma figured her best shot at getting this disparate group of boys to bond was to make them face adversity together. After two standard practices that focused on the basics of passing and ball handling, she scheduled a scrimmage between the new Under 15 Fugees and their counterparts on the Under 17 team. The 15s stood little chance, which was the point; their reaction to the frustration of playing a much better opponent would give Luma a better sense of whether or not she would proceed with the rest of the games on their schedule. If the Under 15s lost their cool against the older Fugees, she figured, they stood little chance against the more hostile competition to come.
In truth, she was skeptical that they could actually pull it off. Mandela, one of the three anchors of the team along with Natnael and Kanue, was a particular worry. Although he’d contributed to the recruiting effort to find new players, at the practices following tryouts he was taciturn and irascible. Mandela was still angry that his friend Prince wasn’t on the team because of the hair rule, which he considered stupid. And now Fornatee, his other close friend on the team, hadn’t shown up for the new round of tryouts. Of his clique, Mandela was now alone on the team, which apparently now would include Bosnians, Kosovars, and Somali Bantu kids he’d never met before. That wasn’t what Mandela thought he’d signed up for. He seemed to have little interest in getting to know the new players. Before practice, he hid within his headphones and juggled a ball, content not to speak to anyone. In practice, his body language now conveyed his deepening d
issatisfaction; his posture was slumped and his arms flopped unenthusiastically as he labored through drills. He snapped at kids who made bad passes or who missed the opportunity to set him up for a shot during scrimmages. Again, Mandela simply wandered off in the middle of practice, once for no discernible reason and another time to join a pickup game of older players from the neighborhood at the far end of the field.
Luma hadn’t challenged Mandela on his attitude or on these disruptions. She sensed that he was upset and disappointed that his friends weren’t playing, and she thought he was waiting to find out if the team was any good before he really committed to it. She decided to ride out his moods, hoping that he would come around and that in the meantime her indulgence of him wouldn’t cost her the respect of his teammates.
FORNATEE TARPEH HAD gotten wind of the scrimmage through the kids in his apartment complex. Though he had not shown up at the second tryouts or at either of two subsequent practices, Fornatee thought that scrimmage day was the right time to make his approach to Coach Luma, to ask to get reinstated to the team. He knew he was talented and figured this was his leverage. The Under 15s needed someone like him up front.
Among the absences of Liberian boys from the second tryouts, Fornatee’s had been the most surprising. He respected Luma and the impact she’d had on his life. He was passionate about soccer. Fornatee had closely cropped hair, so he wasn’t affected by the short hair rule, which had driven Prince and some of the other Liberian boys away. Standing on the field on scrimmage day, waiting to speak to his coach, he said he had skipped the second tryouts as a matter of pride.
“I wasn’t going to come to tryouts,” he said, “because I tried out.
“I love playing soccer,” he added as he waited for Coach. “I love playing with my friends, but my friends aren’t here. It’s like you break up with your family. And this is why: Don’t nobody want to cut their hair. I want to play on the team, but I want to play on the team with my friends.”
I asked Fornatee what it felt like to be off Luma’s team.
“I’m not off the team,” he snapped. “She hasn’t called me, and I haven’t called her. So in my opinion, I’m still on the team.”
A few minutes later, Luma arrived. Members of the Under 15s and 17s were warming up when she walked onto the field past Fornatee, without making eye contact. Luma blew her whistle and told the two teams to gather at opposite ends of the field.
“She’s more than a coach—that’s why,” Fornatee said, almost to himself. “She’s a great person. I’m going to go over there and tell her, ‘That’s my team.’”
Fornatee hesitated. I asked him if he was nervous about talking to Coach. He laughed anxiously, then composed himself.
“Nah—I’m not nervous,” he said.
A moment later, Fornatee made his way toward Luma. She was standing in the midst of a huddle of Under 15 players, assigning them their positions, when he approached. Fornatee tried to blend into the group as if he expected to get a position assignment himself.
“Fornatee,” Luma said when she saw him, “go away.”
Fornatee was startled. He froze as the other players turned to look at him.
“Coach, can I talk to you after?” he managed, feebly.
“Yes—go away,” Luma said before continuing with her position assignments.
Fornatee padded sullenly back to the jungle gym, where Prince and some of his other friends had gathered to watch the scrimmage. He would watch and wait, and try to persuade Coach to take him back.
THE 17S WERE not just older and more mature than the 15s; they were much more talented. They were led by a talkative and selfconfident Iraqi refugee named Peshawa Hamad and a quiet, graceful Sudanese player named Shamsoun Dikori, whose younger brothers Idwar and Robin played on the Under 13s. Luma had no doubt who would win the scrimmage, but she wanted to see how the 15s would react to the challenge of a superior team—to see if they would crumble and lose their composure or if they would keep fighting. She handed out red mesh pullover jerseys to the 15s; the 17s wore white. The YMCA still had not delivered soccer goals, so Luma designated the two chain-link baseball backstops on the field as goals instead.
Luma blew the whistle, and soon a white cloud of dust began to rise from the scuffling feet of the two sides.
The field at Indian Creek was more chaotic than usual. There was a pickup game of older boys at one end of the field, and children wandered from the jungle gym into the Fugees’ playing area. In the parking lot beside the field, teenagers drank beer from cans in paper bags. Luma tried to focus on the scrimmage while simultaneously keeping an eye out for trouble.
From the outset, the 15s displayed a new energy and determination, and took control of the ball. On an early run, Mandela set up Muamer, the new, mustachioed Bosnian forward, with a touch pass off the back of his foot, but Muamer missed the shot.
“Man!” Mandela shouted in frustration.
Moments later Peshawa slithered through the 15s’ defenses and fired a shot that clanged into the chain-link fence of the backstop. The 17s were up 1–0.
The 15s didn’t give up. Soon Mandela dribbled through a seam in the 17s’ defense, got a clear view of the goal, and fired a perfect shot: clang! The 15s had tied it 1–1. Luma blew the whistle for halftime. She left the 17s to strategize on their own, and summoned the 15s.
“You’re outhustling them—keep it up,” she told the 15s at the break.
On the 17s’ side of the field, Peshawa had grown angry, and embarrassed: he had no intention of getting shown up by the younger team.
“Wake up!” he said to his teammates. “They only have Mandela. Shut that down and they don’t have anything. Control the middle. These players—they’re nothing. Let’s finish it off!”
In the second half, the 17s took advantage of their size and experience. Their passes were crisp, and they chipped their way downfield methodically, using their elbows to control the movements of the younger, smaller team. Again Peshawa juked around the 15s’ midfielders and a toddler who had wandered onto the field, then tapped the ball around Hamdu Muganga, one of the two Somali Bantu brothers who had joined the 15s on defense. Peshawa scored; 2–1, the 17s now led.
A few minutes later, Kanue was dribbling downfield and had just passed the ball when one of the older players took him out with a vicious tackle. Kanue rolled forward violently on his right shoulder and tumbled to a stop in the dust. He looked up for a whistle, but there was none. Luma was letting them play. Kanue was furious. He set his sights on the young man who had tackled him, and with the ball clear across the field, Kanue slid into his ankles, cleats up—a move that almost certainly would have drawn a red card in a regulation contest.
“Hey!” Luma shouted. “Kanue! Take a lap.”
When Luma blew her whistle a few minutes later, the final score was 3–2 in favor of the 17s. Luma waved the 15s over.
“U-Fifteens—you played a decent game,” she told them. “Kanue, if I see you lose your temper again, you’re off the team. They’re going to foul you in a game and you’ll get red-carded.” Kanue shook his head in disappointment at himself. He knew he had made a crucial error, the kind that could put the very existence of his team in jeopardy. Coach had let him off easy with a lap.
AFTER PRACTICE, LUMA wasn’t despairing. She had concerns: Kanue’s outburst had been troubling, and she wasn’t happy that Mandela was lashing out at his new teammates when they made inevitable mistakes. But the 15s’ effort had been heartening. They had managed some clever runs on offense, thanks to their newfound speed on the wings. The Muganga brothers had played well on defense, chasing down loose balls and catching up with the 17s’ more experienced front line when they had managed to get free. Mainly, though, the Under 15s hadn’t quit when they fell behind. They wanted to win.
There was one more order of business before Luma could wrap up her day. She had agreed to hear out Fornatee’s case for why he ought to be allowed back on the team. Luma turned and looked toward t
he jungle gym where Fornatee had been watching the scrimmage with Prince and the others. But the boys were no longer there. At some point during the scrimmage, they’d walked off, and, in Fornatee’s case, away from his team for good.
After the scrimmage Luma gathered her soccer balls into a mesh sack, which she slung over her shoulder and carried toward her car in the parking lot below. The lot was still teeming with young men who had come to hang around the basketball court, smoking blunts and drinking beer. She kept her head down and walked straight to her Beetle. She opened the hatchback and heaved the sack of balls into the backseat. Truth be told, she was growing tired of the whole scene at Indian Creek—the chaos on the field as well as the menacing crowd in the parking lot.
There was a safer place for the Fugees to play, of course: Armistead Field in Milam Park, the park Mayor Swaney had declared a soccer-free zone. Besides offering the luxury of grass, Armistead Field was set away from the flow of pedestrians in and out of the apartment complexes around town. The field was in a hollow, surrounded by chain-link fence. Clarkston police cars frequently patrolled the park. Granted, they came in part to make sure no one was playing soccer on the field, but the effect of the police presence meant that there was little in the way of beer drinking, pot smoking, and hanging out in Milam Park. The thought that such a perfect resource was sitting unused had previously struck Luma as absurd, annoying, and perhaps frustrating; now it simply made her angry. She resolved to do something about it.
The next day, Luma got in her yellow Volkswagen and drove to City Hall to ask Swaney once and for all to change his mind and let the Fugees use his field. Swaney was in his office when Luma arrived, and agreed to speak with her. She spoke calmly; she didn’t want the mayor to get his back up. Luma pointed out that her program kept kids off the streets after school, at no cost to the city. It was exactly the sort of the program, she argued, that Clarkston should support. The field in Milam Park was completely unused; it seemed little to ask that the Fugees be allowed to practice there four days a week.
Outcasts United Page 17
