Sports in Hell (26 page)

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 this 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.

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?

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 beautiful game.

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?

Or Desiree (Dez) Weimann, the little mortician's-assistant running back. She's got to be in the top three women in America at what she does, and yet she pays for her own equipment, pays for her own travel, and works a full-time job just to keep playing. Has Adrian Peterson ever had to do that?

And I can't get out of my mind Leila Kulin, the woman with a face like an Easter Island statue who sat in that 261-degree sauna in Finland as though it were a park bench in Central Park. While the woman next to her was going into triple fits, she sat there and didn't move so much as a cuticle. Her skin was literally frying and yet she didn't even blink. Has Tiger Woods ever been more focused?

My Opie moment was this: Turns out “dumb” is in the eye of the beholder. You couldn't see the face of one of those homeless soccer players as he soaked in a standing ovation and think it was anything but pure grace. Really, considering my preconceived notions of what these sports would be like vs. what most of them actually were like, maybe I was the dumbest of all.

Still, I did do one smart thing during this quest. About two and a half years into it, I married TLC. I love her. She loves me. And for lonely nights, she beats the bejesus out of ferrets.