Sports in Hell (25 page)

You could picture the Brazilian coach going,
Uh, this is our striker, Ronaldinho. Many is the night he has spent on the streets. Yes, he was in his limo, but still
.

Mostly, the whole idea just seemed cruel. Seemed like somebody's idea of a yuk at someone else's expense.
Let's watch these bums stumble around and throw up! Be hilarious on YouTube!
How
stupid was it to spend 3 million euros flying the world's homeless to a damn soccer tournament when that money could go to, I don't know, homes?

Man, was I wrong.

Usually in Copenhagen, everybody looks like Sting, including the women.

But on this week, everybody looked like Moms Mabley. Dentally speaking, first-grade class pictures have more teeth. This was soccer? The so-called “beautiful game”? There was one catcher's-mitt-faced woman named Isabel—she played for Spain—swear to God, not a single tooth in her head.

That's how you knew, right away, that this whole thing might be real. Because these people really
were
homeless. You could tell by the epidemic boniness and the asphalt-carved skin and the Oakland airport haircuts. These people really had been pulled up from their steam grates and their doorsills and flown to Denmark to play, of all things, soccer. Not just play soccer, but play soccer in the middle of Copenhagen's main square, right in front of City Hall, in two walled soccer pitches the size of a kids' YMCA basketball court, with full stands on each side and game announcers and the Crown Prince of Denmark watching, for the love of Jesus.

And what were they watching? Merely some of the worst soccer known to man. Pitiful dribbling. Clueless passing. Goalies diving for the ball a second and a half after it had come to rest in the back of the net.

The games were two seven-minute halves. Most teams had a few women. No rules on playing them or not. Three players on the pitch plus the goalie. Two could play the whole field, one had to play only on the defensive half. Although, with the field only seventy feet long and the goalies generally having all the athletic skills of grouper, plenty of goals were scored by defensemen just firing from their own end line.

But there were two things homeless players did far better than the pros:

1. Draw fouls. In trying to draw a whistle from the refs, your true World Cup soccer player will get brushed lightly with a kneecap and then fall to the ground and writhe around like he's been pole-axed. When your homeless World Cup soccer player writhes around, it's much more believable, probably because he usually
has
been shot before, and …

2. Celebrate. After every game—even if it was 21–0—all the players would gather in the center of the pitch, form a line, grab hands, raise them over their heads with utter joy, and then go rushing up to the crowd with a festive “Heyyyyyy!” Every time, the crowds would give them standing ovations and the players would hug and the referees would hug and the opposing coaches would hug. You'd have thought they'd all just won the European League Championship. Only it wasn't fake or cheesy or over the top. You could just feel what a singular moment it was for homeless people—people that this crowd would usually cross the street to avoid—to be cheered lustily and long and honestly.

    Actually, once you met them and heard some of their stories, you damn near wanted to hug them yourself. Like a kid on the Ghana team who became homeless when he lost all his papers while traveling in South Africa. Without ID, he had no way of getting home, getting a job, nothing. So he walked into a mall and stole the first thing he saw—a candy bar—then walked up to the security guard and said, “I stole this.” Only they didn't send him home to prison, they sent him home to a mental institution. Which turned out to be a break, because that's how he found the Ghana soccer team.

Or the Australian team captain, goalie Adam Smith, who had enough holes in his eyebrows, nostrils, lips, and ears to easily display the entire jewelry collection of all four Desperate Housewives.
Adam usually sleeps in a parking lot. Not in a car. Under a bush. Possibly because he's a schizophrenic. Which might be a rule violation in itself.
Hey, no fair! They've got two guys in goal!

The other thing I should mention about Adam is that he robs banks.

“See,” he explained, “I got a court order to stay on a certain kind of drug. And I
hated
that drug. Just hated it. I appealed and appealed and they wouldn't let me off it. But then I found out that the only way to have the (order) rescinded was to be sentenced to a prison term of two years or more. So I went and robbed a bank. It wasn't much money, really. I was just walking in and robbing one teller. But nobody caught me! So I robbed two more. I really thought I'd gotten away with it. But then, four months later, somebody saw me on
Crimestoppers
and turned me in. I was going into work and I was greeted with the butt of a gun right in my forehead.”

Now, you tell me, who else would you want as your captain?

But our favorite player was a young kid on the Zimbabwe team named Faral Mweta, just for the fact that until the moment he checked into the team hotel, he had never slept anywhere with walls, carpeting, or plumbing. Never! In Zimbabwe, Mweta lives under a piece of plastic, though this in itself is an achievement. With inflation at 100,000 percent at tournament time, the sheet of plastic and the poles he needed to hold it up went for one million Zimbabwe dollars. Mweta couldn't afford that, so he had to go out and cut down branches instead. His roof is flat, though, so when it rains, the roof collapses on him. Either way, he sleeps on mud floors. So you can imagine his face when he checked into his fifteenth-floor room in his Copenhagen hotel—a one-star hostel to you, heaven to him.

“Oh, oh, oh!” he beamed when recounting the moment. He threw his head back and laughed, with his huge smile just completely annexing his whole fabulous face. “When you compare it to what I'm used to? Oh! Oh, oh, oh! It's the best! It's amazing! It's awesome! You must understand, I live without electricity and
water. Oh! To have a comfortable bed? To wake up and go straight into the bathroom without having to go outside? To simply switch on a light? Oh, it's awesome! I wake up each day and I am SO happy!”

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.