The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (16 page)

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.

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 interview 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.

I am curious to know what "right things" Drucker is inspiring Jason to get done, and where departing Ward's Island figures in his aims. Perched on the edge of his waferlike mattress, he tells me many things: that he has been corresponding regularly with fund managers via the free computers at the public library and plans to enter the market soon, that he is planning to launch a men's clothing line, and that he not only intends to leave the shelter but is in negotiations to close on a home of his own, six weeks or so from now.

"Where?" I picture an efficiency apartment bought with inheritance hoardings in an unimproved neighborhood in Jason's native Baltimore.

"Trump Tower," he replies. "Eighteen million dollars. Four thousand four hundred square feet, four bedrooms, six bathrooms. There's a bathroom in each room, and the master bedroom has two bathrooms. I'll convert one bedroom into a library, and it's on the 43rd floor, unit 43C. I'm gonna say, just for the sake of being safe, by the end of next month."

Jason says he has spoken to the broker, whom he mentions by name.

"Really? You're going to have 18 million dollars by the end of the next month?"

A sly, luminous smile brightens Jason's face. "It's not as big as it sounds."

Jason's zeal for Drucker's teachings has inspired him to join the Drucker Society of New York City, a group that includes an assistant professor of sports management at NYU, a young woman who works for a hedge fund, and a European whose expertise is improv comedy. For want of a proper headquarters, they meet every other Tuesday at a restaurant or coffee shop in Manhattan, to ponder strategies for bringing the great man's wisdoms to bear on the social problems of the day.

But companionable evenings with the Drucker Society are a rare distraction in the life of Jason Moore. During his days, when he is supposed to be out applying for jobs, he goes instead to the Park Avenue United Methodist Church on East 86th Street, where he tries to make sense of the troubling elements of his own history. He worries over the failed marriage of his parents, who met at Philadelphia Biblical University and who divorced when Jason was six, when it came to light that Jason's father was bisexual and had been conducting affairs with men and had contracted HIV. He worries over his mother, over the early years after the divorce when, lacking money for an apartment, she and Jason lived much of the time in homeless shelters in Mid-Atlantic states. He worries over his father's long and gruesome death, which took the last of the family's money. He worries over his grandmother, a woman he loved and who, in 2001, was choked and then stabbed to death by Vernon Beander—her grandson, Jason's cousin—who, along with several others in the years of Jason's raising, inflicted upon Jason cruelties and savagenesses that we will not discuss here. But let us say that if you yourself had suffered the sorts of things that Jason Moore ponders in the noonday silence of the Park Avenue UMC, you might also be somebody who finds analgesic power in the words of the Bible and Peter Drucker, and who exchanges fanciful emails with stock and real estate brokers, if it affords you, even for an hour, the relief of being someone else.

 

I receive a succession of urgent messages from Diego, asking in a dire tone for me to call him back. Is some misfortune afoot? No. Diego is simply keen to know if I have a digital camera he can borrow. Next week the team will gather to train in Los Angeles before shipping out to Melbourne, and Diego wants to memorialize the trip in photographs.

"Where's the camera?" is not the first thing out of Diego's mouth when I meet him in California; it is perhaps the third or fourth. And so I tender the camera, along with a craven, murmured speech about how it is my only camera but that we can share it, sure, no sweat. Diego does not appear to be listening; rather, he is absorbed by the camera itself. He tests its heft, twists the focus ring, and then drapes the strap around his neck, where the camera will hang like a talisman for many days to come.

We are sleeping, team and entourage, on a floor and on cots in a Brentwood home belonging to a friend of Lawrence Cann's, where a farting, chaffing camaraderie quickly takes hold among the members of the team. But Diego shows little interest in getting acquainted. He does not take pictures of his teammates, but photographs instead Brentwood's sumptuous homes on walks he takes in solitude. He refers to Team USA as "those people," as in, "I can't sleep with those people; it fucking stinks in there, bro," which is what he announces when he withdraws his bedding from the group dorm in the living room, preferring to camp alone out in the hall.