Sports in Hell

by Rick Reilly

  Made me feel bad about bitching to the front desk about our lumpy pillows.

  Mweta was so overcome at living this week in first-world style that he refused to delve, even for a moment, into the sorrows of his third-world life. For instance, when I asked him about what made him homeless, he said, “My family, they feel sick and they die.”

  Your parents?

  “They feel sick and then they die.”

  Your brothers and sisters? “Feel sick, and die.”

  But what caused them to feel sick and die?

  “Sickness is sickness and dead is dead,” he said.

  Hey, there’s no moping in homeless soccer.

  This week was the week of wonders for Mweta, who would walk along the streets and stare in disbelief at the shops, the stores, the giant gleaming windows of sparkling treasures. In Zimbabwe, even if he had a penny, there would be nothing for him to buy. “You must understand, all the store shelves are empty. There is no sugar, no bread, no corn, no gas. There are electrical outages all the time. There is no water all the time. Here, they don’t run out of water. They don’t run out of anything!” As he talked about it, his eyes were saucers and moonbeams were floating out of his mouth. Sigh. “Maybe in another life, I could live like this.”

  It was that kind of stuff that started melting the ice around my heart toward the Homeless World Cup. I mean, you should’ve seen the way these people wore their uniforms! They practically burst the chests out of them, they were so proud. In five days, I never saw one of them in street clothes. True, the soccer they played in those uniforms was laughable, aimless, and hopeless, but the way they wore their nation’s uniforms you’d have thought they were Manchester United (which, by the way, let the English team train on its pitch).

  I went from spitting Whose ridiculous idea was this? to rejoicing Whose wonderful idea was this?

  Turns out it was two editors of a homeless street paper in Scotland called The Big Issue—Mel Young and Harold Schmed. One night over beers at a homeless paper convention in Cape Town, the drink led to a think.

  What if we tried something different? they said to each other. What if, instead of trying Way No. 147,383 to try to scrape together enough money for somebody’s lunch or somebody’s night in a fleabag or somebody’s unending prescription, we went at it from the opposite angle? What if we gave them something to be proud of, something to feel good about? What if that thing made them feel better about going out and finding their own lunch and their own housing and their own way off their medication? So using the hundreds of contacts they had at that convention, they decided to throw a worldwide soccer tournament. Now, that’s an idea that could never work, right?

  “It’s been way beyond my wildest dreams,” says Young, a handsome grayhair of fifty-three. “When we dreamt it up, we only thought we’d have one event. I now do this full time!”

  Can you imagine this man’s job? Just imagine—for one horrible moment—the task of getting about 500 rootless, drug-and-booze-besotted drifters from around the world into one country for a week. Young slaps his forehead. “The biggest challenge is just getting them visas. Most of these guys don’t have passports; some don’t even have identities. ‘How old are you?’ I don’t know. ‘Where were you born?’ No idea.”

  The American coaches—two former Division I soccer-playing brothers from Charlotte, NC, named Lawrence and Rob Cann—will tell you coaching disenfranchised nomads to play the team game of soccer is tiddlywinks compared to getting them on that plane to the tournament. “Do you have any idea how hard it is finding handwritten birth certificates for these guys?” asks Lawrence. Says Robb, “We’re getting so good at it, I could get almost any American, born in this country, a passport in one week, start to finish.”

  Then imagine trying to get it all paid for. The tournament site operations were paid for mostly by the Danish government, with other help from Nike and a few other companies, which probably never dreamed they’d be getting good press out of endorsing crystal-meth addicts and felons.

  Just Do It. But Not at Halftime.

  The criticism pours under Young’s door and over his transom. “We hear it all the time. ‘How could you spend all this money for sport? Why not get them housing instead?’ I’ll tell you why. It doesn’t work! There are all kinds of empty houses, but you can’t get them to move into them. They are so marginalized. If they’re on drugs and alcohol, they’re not going. This process—getting them off drugs, giving them some pride, giving them some responsibility, having them be part of a team, something outside themselves that gets them ready to live in a house. Handing them a month’s rent, it doesn’t work.”

  When the tournament is over, does it work? Young says 35 percent of the players got a job since the last tournament, 44 percent improved their housing situation, and 92 percent said they had a new motivation for life. “When I first saw those figures, I said, ‘That’s crap. Not possible.’ But we track them. ‘What are you doing now? Where are you living?’ It’s working … You know, it costs $60,000 a year for someone to be homeless. Police time, services. They’re seventy percent more likely to end up in hospital. No insurance. So if we keep five hundred guys from being homeless—that’s five hundred times $60,000—that’s, what, $30 million? That’s a pretty good investment.”

  It’s possible. For a lot of the players we talked to, just getting on the team changed their lives. If they really wanted to play and be part of it, they had to stop using drugs or they’d be throwing up every day during tryouts.

  “A guy might say, ‘You know what, I’m not gonna take drugs the night before a game,’” said George Halkias, the Australian coach. “‘It’ll spoil the fun.’ So they don’t!”

  Ireland’s best player, Trevor Curtis, twenty-six, was a heroin addict. He’d been on the school soccer teams in Dublin as a teenager, but then his mom suddenly died of asthma. “My da’s a drinker,” Curtis explained. “I’ve no contact with him.” The grief of losing his mom was a black stone in his chest. He began to sink. He got into drugs, was disowned by his family, started robbing to feed his jones, and went to prison for eighteen months. Lucky for him.

  “The treatment center was next to the pitch,” recalls Curtis. “They were playing five-a-side. So I tried. I was in terrible shape. I couldn’t run for ten minutes. Nah, five minutes. Unless I was runnin’ from the police, then I could run all day, but for this, nah.” In order to make the team, he stopped using. He slept on the streets near the pitch. “Nobody’d rob me. I had nothin’ to take.” He became Ireland’s captain. Now his family—“eight sisters and four brudders”—are back in his life. “They’re proud of me now. I ain’t out there takin’ drugs. I’m playin’ for me country. Before it was like I was stuck in the crossroads, y’know? Just everything coming at you this way and that and you don’t know which way to go and you know you could die any minute. I don’t feel that way no more.”

  And how does it feel to have people cheering for you?

  His face goes 10,000 watts. “Oh, man, I love it! I lap it up! People used to walk around me when I was lyin’ on the streets. Now they come right up to me and say, ‘Give us a picture?’” Last we checked with him, he was working toward going to college and studying coaching in Dublin. And if his mom could see him now?

  “My ma? She’d say, ‘’at’s me boy!’”

  The Homeless World Cup remains the only sport I’ve ever covered where everybody on both teams seemed delighted anytime anybody scored. Vince Lombardi would’ve hated it, but I grew to love it. Just to see a man score and raise his arms and see the old needle marks and realize that’s a kind of score the guy probably never thought he’d make.

  Occasionally, you’d see a player who was three light-years better than the others in wind and skill and savvy—Russia had one—and curl your lip, but Young insisted they weed out the cheats. “You can tell who’s really homeless and who isn’t,” he said. “Homeless people are smart. They know who’s a fraud. They’ll quiz them. ‘Do you know thi
s soup kitchen? No?’ They start to get suspicious rather quickly.”

  Except the Afghanistan team, of course. According to their coach and chef de mission, Raz Dalili, there are no homeless in Afghanistan. He said it like there was a man standing next to him with pruning shears, waiting to chop his tongue off at the first ill-chosen word, but he said it.

  Dalili: There are no homeless in Afghanistan. They stay with family. The families take them in.

  Me: Really? No drug users living on the streets?

  Dalili: No, there is no drug abuse in Afghanistan. We have none of that.

  Me: No homeless from the Thirty Years War, or the Taliban takeover, or the American invasion?

  Dalili: Yes, 2.5 million people from the war, but the families took them all in. Life is better now, but hopelessness is bad again, like four years ago, it’s bad again.

  Me: So, utter hopelessness, but no homelessness?

  Dalili: No.

  Me: Think any of your players will seek asylum here?

  Dalili: No, why would they?

  Me: Hopelessness?

  Dalili: No. And if they did, I would turn them into the police. Besides, these players, they will be better off. They become famous for being on this team. They get jobs. We pay them $80 a month.

  Me: I noticed your players don’t congratulate your opponents after games.

  Dalili: It is bad luck; they are enemies of Afghanistan.

  Who knew Afghanistan was so hard up for enemies?

  Mostly, though, it was a week in the life of about 500 homeless people like none they’d ever spent. They were suddenly transferred from “diseased pariah” to “esteemed star.” That took some getting used to. For instance: On the cover of the tournament program—which was everywhere—there was a Denmark player with a world-class Afro and bottomless brown eyes. He had suddenly gone from a bum sleeping on a ripped oven box to a local hero. “I am famous now,” he said. “People are asking me for autographs. It’s crazy. It’s like a blessing.” As he talked, I noticed that all his homeless drunk friends were waiting for him, with bottles of wine in paper bags and filthy coats and the aroma of unbathed lemurs. They kept yelling things at him in Danish that sounded like, “Party with us, dude! Have a drink! Give us a cigarette!” He’d look back at them and then look at me and try to finish the interview, but it was making him a little uncomfortable. “They are happy for me,” he said, swallowing. “But they, they—well—they—”

  Got it.

  The American team, for instance, had a documentary film crew following them everywhere they went. Which was kind of different for guys the Chamber of Commerce tries to sweep off the streets before they take postcard pictures. Most of them were from Charlotte—where the Cann brothers run an urban ministry center—despite holding tryouts in other American cities, like Philly, New York, Atlanta, and Austin.

  They managed to find some not entirely awful players, though. The fastest was a twenty-four-year-old from Honduras named Daniel Martinez, whose family moved to New York City when he was a boy and whose father died shortly thereafter. “He got sick and he died,” Martinez explained. Yeah, lot of that going around.

  They found their starting goaltender, Reggie Jones, with a big swollen black eye on the day of his tryout. He’d won a little job in a warehouse and got jumped for his trouble. The team was driving back into Charlotte after a tournament in DC, and Rob said, “OK, now where does everybody need to go?” When they’d dropped off everybody, they looked back and found Reggie still sitting in the last row of the van. Awkward pause. “We just sort of dropped him off at the center … and he just sort of disappeared into the night,” Lawrence remembers. Turns out he was a refugee from Sierra Leone who left there with his mother in 1996. But she met a man and threw him out—in no particular order—and he’s been on his own ever since.

  “I love waking up in the morning and having something to do,” he said. “I wake up happy. I go to the center, and I do art, and then I play soccer. I like being on a team. I don’t want to disappoint the other guys. I don’t want to let them down. Now, if somebody gives me a loaf of bread, I break it in half and give it to somebody else.”

  And at night?

  “At night, if I have a little money, I can go to a friend’s house and say, ‘I have $20. Can I spend the night here?’ Sometimes it’s yes and sometimes it’s no. So then I walk the streets all night. I can’t lie down and sleep or they steal my clothes. They steal my shoes. Sometimes I get too sleepy and I find an open spot—a big open spot—and I stay on the open side, where people can see me and I can see them.”

  You think David Beckham has that problem?

  Coach: You suck today, Beckham! What’s your problem?

  Beckham: Well, I walked around town all night, Coach. Couldn’t find a big open spot that was safe enough.

  The USA’s best player was a guy who really had been shot—Dave McGregor—and not shot like Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens, syringe-shot. Shot shot. The whole team was a kind of Bad News Bears in real life. One player, Ray-Ray, had his house burned down, leaving him without a roof and without a hope. He started sleeping in the graveyard because, he says, “people are superstitious and won’t go in there at night.” He’s started to make a life comeback playing on the team. He’s been selling some of his paintings and he’s got his own place now. Good thing. He has eight kids.

  Now they were wearing USA across their chests and suddenly doing things they’d never dreamed. For instance, the American ambassador to Denmark showed up on Day Three, noticed the documentary crew, and suddenly wanted to give the team an inspirational speech, a few hugs, and maybe a few photo ops. Suddenly, Pops—who’d been in jail not long before—was getting asked by an ambassador if he could take a photo with him.

  Wonder if, out of habit, Pops had to swallow the urge to take it from the front and the side?

  Not that it matters, but the winner of the whole Homeless World Cup was Scotland, which beat Poland in the final 9–3. The Americans finished in the bottom half, going 1–2 in the opening rounds—losing one game to Burundi, 4–2, though that’s no shame, since Burundi has a mess of homeless people. In their final game, the Yanks lost to Greece, 7–6, in a battle for—as the publicity release said before the game—“the honor of being named the 33th best team in this championship.” What do you get for “33th”? Something made of aluminum?

  Faral Mweta’s Zimbabwe team finished in the bottom half, which was nothing compared to the sorrow he must’ve felt turning in the key to his beloved hostel room. Adam Smith, our schizophrenic Aussie bank robber, captained the team that played nearly the worst but had the most laughs. Scotland beat them in one game 13–0. “True,” Smith allowed, “but we held them to less than a goal a minute!” Their greatest victory probably came from a typo. The tournament secretary typed “Australia” for a consolation trophy game when she meant to type “Austria.” So both Australia and Austria showed up, and it took them about ten minutes to figure out that it was really Austria that should be playing, which was a good thing, because Austria got cleaned like Aretha Franklin’s fork, while Australia got to watch.

  But this was the topper: Remember that Spanish woman with no teeth? Isabel? She actually scored a goal. True, it was phonier than Velveeta, but it was a goal. Spain was getting whupped by Ireland 10–1 with a minute left when the Spanish coach finally put her on the pitch and Ireland decided to play along and let her kick one and the goalie pretended to fall down just short of it and it rolled like an anesthetized sloth into the net.

  It took her a full second to realize what she had done and then she went absolutely bananas. Her teammates picked her up and carried her aloft while the Irish players cheered her from below and then even some of them carried her for a while. Her head flopped backwards and joy flowed out of her toes and ears. It had to be, far and away, the greatest moment of her life, and you knew it because her block-wide smile showed every single one of her missing teeth.

  Hmmm. Maybe it really IS a beauti
ful game.

  Conclusion: The Winner

  T he best TV show ever is Andy Griffith, partly because at the end, Andy would strum his guitar on the front porch and wait until it suddenly hit six-year-old Opie what the lesson of the week was, usually something like, “Maybe I shouldn’t have burned down the silo.”

  So what lessons did we learn in trampling the globe to find the world’s dumbest sport? Well, for one, we learned how to make our projectile vomits extremely colorful and sticky. You know, if we’re asked to perform at bar mitzvahs. For two, if you must put large hairless rodents down your pants, it’s better to remove all penile jewelry. And three, very few black people are into this country’s underground Jarts movement.

  The dumbest sport in the world? Besides baseball? It’s gotta be chess boxing. I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t help but laugh every time I’d see some poor geek get the cobwebs wopped out of him by a right hand one minute, then have to play the Sicilian Defense the next, blood dripping from his nose, eyes crossed. That’s just dumber than a wheelbarrow of toupees.

  But what surprised me the most was just how not dumb a lot of all this was. What I learned more than anything is that the number of people who watch a sport or play a sport or have ever heard of a sport has zero to do with how much guts or passion or skill the people who play it have.

  I’ve covered great athletes for thirty-plus years, but I’m not sure any of them could do what Edward (ET) Trotter could do. Remember? He was the Angola State Penitentiary prisoner who lets 2,000-pound bulls run over him so that he can reach up as he’s being trampled to pull off a $500 chip. I mean, honestly, were he in the same position, would LeBron James do that?