The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (15 page)

"This is what you get," Miss Rose says again, wanding a finger at the lone small van. An air of mutinous outrage gathers over the players, who stand scowling by the Toyota.

"For the homeless fucking all-stars, what did you expect, a limousine?" says Diego Viveros. Diego is a lithe and muscular young Colombian, who before he was homeless sold subprime mortgages to Spanish-speaking clients throughout the five boroughs. "They don't give a shit about us, bro."

Goaltender Leo Lopez, a man built like a Coke machine, is surprised, to near amusement, that HELP-SEC would dare to trifle with a man like him in such a way as this. "I used to do maintenance here. Doesn't it dawn on them that I know where all the gas lines are? I was a Navy SEAL. Keep fucking me around, I'll blow this place to the clouds." What were Leo Lopez's duties when he was a Navy SEAL? "Suffice it to say that I was the one doing certain work behind enemy lines between one and four in the morning, carrying a photograph and a .45 and some piano wire."

The van negotiations remain at an impasse. The team captain, a brooding man named Quentin, becomes so exasperated that he walks off in the direction of the East River footbridge, where he is known to have a favorite thinking spot. Chris Murray ruefully watches him go.

"He got sick of the BS," explains Jason Moore, a twenty-four-year-old Baltimore native who has been at Ward's Island for eight months. Jason is a religious man, and he is known at the shelter as the Reverend, or as Reverend Pimpin', and is usually seen in a pinstriped suit. "In fact," the Reverend says, "a lot of the brothers are thinking about walking."

But thankfully, before Team New York disintegrates, Miss Rose undergoes a change of heart and astounds everyone by producing a second minivan. She could have released the van a couple of hours ago, but this particular van is brand-new, and so lending it out is, for Miss Rose, an anxious matter of last resort. And so, finally, the motorcade departs, a player and captain short, the remaining six players already feeling not so much like winners, while the ocher leavings of a sunset wane above the Jersey Palisades.

 

Despite pregame publicity on National Public Radio and local distribution of some very professional-looking programs, when the Homeless Soccer USA Cup gets under way the next day, bona fide audience members tally out at zero. But the media complement—print, radio, and a crew of elfin young men who have secured Hollywood funding to make a feature-length documentary—is dense. At this point, they record the quotations and take photographs of people like Mayor Adrian Fenty, who will not be attending the competition but who has come by to say a few words into a microphone and to have his photo snapped. The players from the 13 competing cities are politely corralled into the background so as to obscure the empty bleachers.

A cursory survey of the other teams reveals that competition will be both fierce and otherwise. Los Angeles promises to be murderous: Latino men in their early twenties, whippet thin, sinewy of leg, betraying not a trace of infirmity. They scamper around the pitch in a precompetition showcase of rainbow and bicycle kicks and other high-bounding feats of ball art. Minneapolis's youthful squad and salon-grade coiffures inspire grouchy conjectures that they are in breach of the rule stipulating that all tournament players must have been documentably homeless within the past two years.

The newspaper photographers are not so interested in the fresh-faced, virtuoso teams as they are in teams like Austin, which includes a trio of men looking recently recruited off the steam grate. Although Austin will suffer terrible losses on the field, they'll remain uncontested champs in the ambassadorship game, owing to the camera-ready charms of Tad Christie. The only entirely toothless player in the league, Tad, 37, is a versatile subject for portraiture. When he is not wearing his teeth, his face has the collapsed, cronelike topography we associate with long-Serm methamphetamine addicts, which Tad was, on and off, for two decades or so. With his teeth inserted and his sandy-blond hair combed out, he seems to shed 20 years, appearing as handsome as a 1970s television star. Upon request, he will pose or conduct interviews with his teeth in, or he is glad to remove them, holding them up to reporters' dictaphones and manipulating them, ventriloquist-style, while uttering a rapid, winning patois of inspirational pull quotes and bawdy one-liners.

Q:
What position do you play, Tad?

A:
My position? I'm pro-choice, and pro-life. My position is forward, though sometimes I do it in reverse, or doggie-style.

Q:
So, Tad, how did you get these teeth?

A:
My coach bought them for a hundred dollars, and I'm glad to have them, not just because they look good but because they help me advocate for the homeless. They're a little uncomfortable, but you make sacrifices, because looks are important. For example, when I was stripping, I wasn't about to start wearing a change purse just because the coins kept falling through my G-string.

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.