The Best American Sports Writing 2011

by Jane Leavy

  At 10:00 A.M., New York prepares for its first match, an exhibition game against a homeless all-star team from a previous year, under a sun of hot-dog-lamp intensity. Homeless Cup games are played not on a traditional full field but on a cramped, proprietary tennis-court-size arena enclosed by Triton Barriers and tiled in a red and blue plastic milk-crate material capable of delivering the mother of all friction burns. Clock and team structure are miniaturized as well: four-on-four with seven-minute halves. Though the game's rules are presumably tailored to be comprehensible to people who have never really played soccer before, the regulations are in fact knotty and cumbersome. There are complicated offsides stipulations, and rules about where the goalie is permitted to tread, and how he is permitted to throw the ball, and permissible proximities of attackers to the goals. In the last moments before the whistle, Chris Murray—a voice-over man and aspiring actor who coaches Team New York as a favor to the founder and CEO of Street Soccer USA, Lawrence Cann, with whom he played on the Davidson College team—conducts a frantic, muddled explanation of the rules while fielding such questions as "Do we have an offensive strategy? What about defense?"

  The next 14 minutes are more or less a hyperventilatory cadenza of whistle-bleatings against the New York players. Jason Moore, the friendly diplomat, plays a friendly, diplomatic game. He does much ardent capering alongside the ball, though he politely refuses to touch a foot to it, even as the attackers bear down on the New York net, which Leo Lopez inadequately tends. Despite Leo's purported lethal grace in enemy camps under cover of night, and despite the way his bulk almost entirely obscures the goal's aperture, he is pretty much incapable of thwarting even the most fainthearted attempts on goal. His huge frame seems to bend space, to draw balls to it like an anvil on a trampoline, only to let most shots roll dawdlingly between his knees or slip into the net from his vast clasping hands. David Cotiere, a tall gloomy Haitian, manages the occasional possession, yet whenever he's forced to give up the ball, the grief of the loss immobilizes him, and he stands in his tracks, arms akimbo, and moans in a piteous way: "We are terrible, the worst team. We will never score even one goal!"

  Compared with his teammates, Diego Viveros, the former broker of high-risk home loans, turns out to be an artistic, nimble player, whose feet move about the ball in a deft, lancing embroidery, like a spider swaddling a grub. But his every step, it seems, also draws a penalty for a breach of one or another of the game's obscure rules. By the middle of the second half, Diego has pretty much stopped playing in order to bawl frustrated obscenities at the capricious referee, which compounds the team's penalty woes. At one point Coach Murray turns to me, deflated by the incessant whistles, and says, "It's such a perfect metaphor for these guys' situation. It's like every time they turn around there's some rule they bump up against."

  At the end of the first day, drubbed and woeful, the team loiters in a dining tent pitched adjacent to the bleachers, awaiting dinner, courtesy of Papa John's pizza, which will be arriving shortly. The talk turns to women, reportedly common agents in the team members' paths to homelessness. Joey Martinez, a recovering substance abuser, speaks of his lady, who kicked him out of the house he'd shared with her and their two children. Diego Viveros laments that he'd failed to heed his father when he met the first great love of his life. "My father told me to keep my mind on work, not to get too wrapped up in that bitch," he says. "But I was like, 'Fuck you, bro.' And then what happens? I lose my job, and the bitch leave, and I wind up in the shelter."

  And here, Glenn Richards, who has been taciturn for most of the trip, puts his spoke in. By his own telling, he is a man of storied sexual reputation, a venereal buccaneer known variously, he says, as the "Hammer Man" and "Ding Dong." Glenn offers the general advice that girlfriends are not a good idea, that enlisting the services of a prostitute is a more sensible, cost-effective method for a trouble-free romantic life. Then someone raises the point that what you save in hassle you may stand to lose in trips to the STD clinic, to which Glenn cries, "Not true!" Glenn has a method. "You take two condoms, and in between you sprinkle Dettol disinfectant. You never have any trouble." He does concede that there was this one time, down in the Caribbean, when he contracted a bad case of biting underlice despite his special system. But he handled the problem in his own way, by dousing himself with diesel fuel, which did indeed kill the crabs but also gave him blisters of a terrible kind.

  Later that evening, when Chris Murray and I are heading to Georgetown to eat dinner with Lawrence Cann and his fiancée, we bump into Diego out in front of the George Washington University dorms, where the players are being lodged. He asks where we're going, and before I can think the better of it, I say, "We're going out to eat in Georgetown!" Then I launch into a fit of stammering apologies about how very sorry I am that Diego won't be joining us at the fancy dinner. He pats my shoulder and gives a warm but wounded smile, and says, "It's okay. I'm fucking homeless. What are you gonna do?"

  By the time the tournament closes on Sunday evening, New York is pleased to finish 9 th in the field of 13, having eked out narrow victories over Austin and St. Louis, the team with the dwarf. New York owes its modest triumph pretty much entirely to its leading scorer, Diego Viveros, whose peremptory manner on the field and lopsided share of playing time have made him an object of resentment rather than admiration among his teammates.

  When the trophy-dispersal hoopla relents, Lawrence Cann takes the microphone to dispatch the more significant business of nominating players to the U.S. National Homeless Soccer Team, whose eight members, selected at the discretion of Cann and colleagues, will enjoy an all-expenses-paid ride to the Homeless World Cup, a weeklong, forty-eight-nation tournament taking place five months hence in Melbourne, Australia. Two lean aces from Los Angeles make the cut, as does Tad Christie, Austin's genial captain. Then Cann announces Diego's name, and Diego's features, which are generally tuned to the affective register of a lowered portcullis, suddenly bloom, his mouth and eyes dilating to beauty-pageant-finalist diameters. He falls to his knees and presses palms to cheeks, cooing, "I can't believe it! I'm going to see fucking kangaroos!" It's precisely this sort of joyous display that the human-interest beat reporters have been on the lookout for, and Diego is temporarily obscured by a video crew, a photographer, and a radio man prodding a shotgun mike at his chin, scarfing up breathless, articulate quotes about Diego's gratitude to the Street Soccer program and his zeal to be an example to homeless people everywhere, evidently confirming the soundness of his election to the national team.

  The rest of Team New York does not share in his gladness. "Knowing what I know about Australia, Melbourne isn't all that," says Jason Moore. "If it was Sydney, now that'd be something worth checking out. Sydney's what's up."

  "They got some beautiful women in Sydney," says Leo Lopez.

  "But Melbourne," Reverend Pimpin' adds, his face aslant with scorn. "Melbourne just ain't the place."

  Danny Boansi, a squat 43-year-old Haitian, takes the news exceptionally hard. "Why didn't I get picked? I scored four goals. They should have picked me."

  "They went for youth," the Hammer Man consoles.

  "You had two blue cards," Chris Murray points out. "That didn't necessarily look good. But keep training. You were right near the top."

  "Train for what?" says Danny. "I'm done. I have lost hope."

  ***

  The sullen, pugnacious air that settled on Danny Boansi seems to expand into a minor epidemic as the players say their goodbyes. With nothing on the line now, several of the players discard the pretense of sportsmanship and lapse into squabbles and near-assaults. At the George Washington dorms, as we board the minivans, the newly nominated goalie for the national team, a large, bald Charlotte player named Tim Cummings, is roaring at a member of the San Francisco team, promising to "bust that ass" for reasons having to do with the San Francisco player's advances on Cummings's Kool-Aid jug.

  As we caravan north through New Jersey, the shelter assistant driving our
vehicle loses contact with the second minivan, the new and precious one, and presently gets a call from the Hammer Man. We can hear him screaming incoherently through the receiver. We circle back and find the Toyota parked on the shoulder of the highway. The men have spilled out onto a grassy berm, where a gory fistfight is just now exhausting itself. Danny and Joey are howling curses at each other. Both are rinsed in red. Diego, who donned a brocaded white button-down shirt and expensive jeans after the last game, stands between them. He looks as though he's just slaughtered a pig.

  We learn that the fight broke out while the van was in transit at fifty miles an hour. The problem was this: one man had wanted to use what was left of the food per diem at McDonald's, while the other was in favor of spending it on cigarettes. Fists and head butts were thrown, and then men rolled into the front seat, spraying quantities of blood and partly destroying the dashboard of the brand-new minivan, fulfilling Miss Rose's bodings that the D.C. trip would not end well for the Toyota.

  II.

  After returning to New York, I find myself in the habit of reciting Diego Viveros's biography to colleagues and dinner-party guests. I tell of his beginnings as a quintessential American bootstrapper: an industrious immigrant who came to New York from Colombia when he was 13 and valiantly dropped out of school three years later, taking a job at McDonald's on Queens Boulevard to help his parents with the bills. In his early twenties, Diego says, he began a successful career as a salesman. He started with cars, working his way up from Nissans to Mercedes and BMWs, and at last accepting a position as a mortgage broker with a Wall Street firm in November 2006. I tell of the ideal piquancy of Diego's reversal of fortune, the lure of housing-bubble cash leading to him losing his job in late summer 2007. Shortly thereafter, he says, his apartment was burglarized, and his Green Card was stolen; lacking the money for its replacement, he was unable to apply for work or to pay the rent. Too proud to move in with his parents, Diego entered the shelter system and "became homeless," a phrase that makes him grimace with disgust.

  During the tournament in Washington, Chris Murray and I had both come to like and admire Diego, and over the course of the weekend we began making him into a receptacle of our unsolicited sympathies. We found his situation painful and especially worthy of remedy because Diego is handsome, intelligent, and charismatic, apparently unplagued by the overt deficiencies of mind, body, or character that grant us the comfort of Erewhonian indifference when on the street we pass an unfortunate person trembling on a flattened box. When Lawrence Cann balked at picking Diego for the national team because of his tendency to fly into furies at the referees, Chris and I mustered a passionate defense, saying that we too would fly into rages were we—perfectly employable Americans—to find ourselves flung into America's lowest caste, and lobbied and pestered Cann until, in the end, he agreed to admit Diego to the team.

  As a member of Team USA, Diego will receive far more than a free trip to Australia; he will also get financial and case-management assistance unavailable to his 200 fellows on Ward's Island. Diego says he has foundered in New York's shelter system for nine months for want of the four or five hundred dollars it will take to get his Green Card and working papers in order. Street Soccer USA will now pony up the dough to restore Diego to legal employability, oversee the procurement of those documents, and even advance him the money to rent an apartment where he will not have to claim his bed by 7:00 P.M. or lose it, or submit to surprise drug tests, or pass through a metal detector en route to his shared dorm room, or have as his neighbors the terminal alcoholics and hopelessly insane across the courtyard in the building for "noncompliant" cases. It is a wondrous time for Diego, and a nearly as thrilling time for me, because I have stumbled onto something singular and valuable, the chance to chronicle a species of moment rampantly counterfeited but rarely witnessed in the annals of human-interest reportage, a genuine Life-Altering Correction of Wracking Misfortune.

  I am so certain that in Diego's story I've pried up the first rich nuggets of a narrative mother lode, I go to lunch with a literary agent and tell her the events of the weekend, the van, and the exciting business with the blood and the moving peripeteia of Diego Viveros. She shares my feeling that this is indeed a golden story, one that ramifies in all sorts of matterful ways: the collapse of the American economy, the immigration debate, the merit of entitlement programs, the mythos of competitive sports in American society, and so on. By the time the bill arrives, we have roused ourselves to the conviction that it's no mere magazine story I've stumbled onto but a cross-platform media gusher with at least two movie angles ("It's the Bad News Bears meets Hoop Dreams!") and a television angle ("It's like Friday Night Lights!") and a plump book contract to boot.

  As I plot the payoff of my mortgage with the earnings from his story, I am also heartened that Diego has begun to regard me as both advocate and friend. Through the summer and fall of that year, hardly a week passes when he fails to telephone. Sometimes he calls because he's bored or lonely. Other times he calls in frantic need of help. When the shelter confiscates his possessions, preparatory to evicting him, he telephones me, and I telephone Lawrence Cann, and he telephones the shelter, and Diego is allowed to stay on Ward's Island. When he needs a four-day loan of 50 dollars, he telephones me, and I give him the 50 dollars, which he does not pay back in four days. When it is time to go to the Colombian Consulate to obtain a passport for the first time in 16 years, he calls me to accompany him.

  When Diego is contacted by members of the media who find his story through the proud press release on the shelter's website, he calls me in a panic. Although he relishes the special dotings, the cash assistance for his important documents, and the image of himself as a kind of soccer star, the attention also makes him nervous, because he regards his homelessness as the most shameful of secrets, one unknown to his friends, his parents, his sisters, and something he can't discuss with reporters without wanting to throw up.

  He agrees, however, to be the subject of a short profile for a television show called SportsLife NYC, which offers fitness tips and inspirational true tales that fulfill its slogan, "Sports and human interest stories coming together." I join him for the taping. Diego is still living on Ward's Island, though he has found work with a construction crew, and the shoot commences in front of a building on the Upper West Side where he has been spared an afternoon's toil uprooting a bathroom floor in order to appear on television. The camera rolls. The cable channel's producer, a woman with short bleached hair and a black tunic, asks Diego to state his name and his housing situation.

  "My name is Diego Viveros, and I am homeless," he tells the camera, pursing his lips in an embouchure of discomfort.

  Then the crew heads indoors to conduct an interview with Kevin Gleixner, Diego's boss, while Diego, in the background, quietly pretends to sweep construction flotsam from the parquet floor. The show's producer asks what it was about Diego that made Gleixner want to give him a job. Gleixner gives a confused sort of smile, because Diego, having been hired only a couple of weeks ago, is more or less a stranger to him, and Diego did not disclose his homelessness until this very afternoon.

  "He was well groomed," he says at last.

  "You're obviously a person who believes in giving people a chance," the producer observes.

  "Absolutely," says Kevin Gleixner.

  "I need you to say it," she instructs.

  "I believe in giving other people chances," Kevin Gleixner says. "My favorite movie in the world is Pay It Forward." And then, apropos of second chances and redemption, Gleixner tells the camera that he is a recovering alcoholic who must remind himself daily to "keep smiling" and that nobody promised him a tomorrow.

  "What do you think is going to happen to Diego down the road?" the producer asks.

  "Good things," Kevin Gleixner says. "So far, he's done whatever I told him: 'This needs to be cleaned up in this area.' Or, 'This needs to be put somewhere,' or, 'Start stacking this here.'"

  With Gleixner's intervie
w wrapped, the crew gets a few shots of Diego savaging a linoleum floor with a pry bar, and the producer and I linger by the living-room window giving onto the sherbet-tinged bosk along the Hudson, whose waters double the extravagant blueness of the sky.

  "Diego—what an incredible story," she says with a slow shake of her head.

  "It sure is," I say.

  "It's hard in everybody's life," she says.

  "That's true."

  To illustrate this truth, she leans toward me and says in a confidential tone, "My daughter just got off crystal meth."

  And I say, "Mm, mm," which comes out less as a sympathetic murmur than as noises betokening erotic pleasure or the consumption of good food.

  Nine weeks before Diego is to fly to Australia, nearly all the men of Team New York have been transferred from Ward's Island or have left of their own choosing. Leo Lopez is relocated to a Brooklyn shelter, Joey Martinez moves back in with his estranged girlfriend, and, according to rumor, Danny Boansi is sent to a treatment program after his urine tests positive for marijuana. Only Diego and the Reverend Jason Moore remain. Although HELP-SEC typically ousts even employed tenants after a season or so, Jason has managed to dodge eviction for almost a full year, which he takes as proud proof of his cunning. "I have not shown them one pay stub," he tells me. "No job applications, no nothing"—a dereliction of HELP-SEC's tenant covenant for which he has not been made to suffer because, he believes, of his status as a man of the cloth. "Being a reverend, you kind of learn to be pimpalicious. The way you talk, the way you relate, and you pimp them into doing what you want them to do."

  Jason has to himself a cinder-block room containing a bed, a tin armoire, a grade school chair-and-writing-palette rig, and a hard-used copy of a book called The Daily Drucker: 366Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done, by the late management guru Peter Drucker. "I'm getting very deep into Peter Drucker," Jason explains.