African Soccer a Humbling Experience

I never played soccer growing up. This was a few years before "soccer mom" became part of the American vernacular, but already there was something different about soccer boys: they became brand-conscious at an earlier age, wearing Umbro shorts in the summer and letter jackets in the winter for whatever college team was doing well. There were no soccer girls: girls would pick a more sensible, effeminate sport, like field hockey or gymnastics or why can't you be a cheerleader like your mother? Soccer was not American football and it definitely wasn't American baseball; with its high socks and tiny sneakers and Parks and Rec Leagues it always struck me as preppy and vaguely British.

My attitude towards the game changes with time, but never more than when I had the pleasure of living in Africa for two years. I learned to appreciate the simplicity of the sport and the infinite complexity it can create. The inherent equality of the field and its potential to let one man or woman stand head and shoulders above the other competitors. I learned to read the intricate nonverbal communication in player's stances, trajectories, facial expressions, and minute adjustments to their movements, and it helped me understand what it means to communicate and to communicate effectively. Not least, I learned what many others have observed: that this game (soccer to us, football to the rest of the world) is a motif that spans the globe, not so much a cultural unifying element as a recurring meme, like alliteration in a line of a sonnet.

What is required for the sport - what are the bare necessities? Think of a pick-up thrown together at a friends house when the number of neighbors and visiting cousins reaches that critical mass: you need a ball. You need two goals. A goal might be formed by laying two doffed sweaters a few feet apart, or lashed together from golf-club sized sticks and bits of twine and rubber. I wonder why they used such shoddy materials to build goals in Africa that saw extensive everyday use, and I learned in sobering truth: any bigger, more valuable pieces of wood would be taken to build houses or furniture. And the re-appropriation would not be considered theft, except maybe by some of the players. Football is important, certainly more in Africa than America, but food and shelter are more so.

This is my iconic image of a roadside store: dust-beaten wooden frame, or a converted shipping container. A starting lineup of Coca-Cola products neatly displayed in front of the proprietor. Buckets of half-penny candy and gum, cheap plastic combs, pens, loud polyester baby outfits looking like oversized Barbie clothes. And hanging from the ceiling, still in their clear plastic cocoons, three neon-colored footballs, stitched by a pair of tiny Asian hands half a world away. For me, the store is in Africa, but there are others in Central America, Asia, Eastern Europe, wherever the dollar-a-day (or a-few-dollars-a-day, or a-dollar-every-few-days) people live. Those footballs are for sale, but their primary purpose is to give kids something to stare are with their noses pressed to non-existent glass. And like a thousand dollar a pair sneakers, some of them would never dream of sullying such a treasure on a dusty field.

Here is how you make a football: go to any town big enough for the roads to be tarmaced, for the buildings to go from mud-and-stick to low, uniform cement or cinderblock, and for the market district to be more than four or five old women selling tomatoes and onions on woven mats. Find a ripped, dirty, plastic shopping bag on the ground (with a two-color image of 1984 Madonna album cover, or the Marborlo Man, or a badly drawn Mickey Mouse with Arabic writing). Pick it up. Then pick up another. Grab all the sisal twine you can find as well (check the drainage ditches) Ball up one of the bags, wrap it with twine, then alternating layers, bag, twine, bag, twine. Stop when the ball is a little bigger than a grapefruit (a ball with twice the diameter is eight times as heavy and requires eight times as many bags). Find some friends. Play ball.

Football pitches have no uniform size or shape in the dollar-a-day world. There are no leagues, no uniforms, no reservations, no flood lights. (At least not out in the sticks. The major cities have all of these things and more: advertising, international tournaments, loudspeakers, radio coverage.) The rural pitch may be surrounded by thorn bushes or cassara plots; it may be kept trim by goat or curved lawn-knives or have no grass at all. The teams may be five ten-year-olds on each side or twenty twenty-year-olds. Some of the most impressive games I have witnessed were a combination of ballet and Arkanoid: the plays contort themselves at impressive angles and unbelievable speeds to ensure that the ball seldom, if ever, touches the ground. Put a tracer in it, take a time-exposure photograph, and you would see a forest of parabolas planted feet-down like gunslingers' legs or copies of the Saint Louis Arch. Each player wears his collection of football gear: shiny black knock-off football jersey, a fuzzy sweatband. One or two might have sneakers, purchased at the used clothing markets that buy American thrift store seconds in compacted bales. The rest play barefoot or in cheap flip-flops. Some wear torn shirts and shorts that have attained the same color of hand-washed laundry with too much dust and not enough money for soap. The ball doesn't care; it follows the same predictable arc through the air towards a stick framed goal that has endured because it is too cheap to be stolen.