Some of FC Indiana’s multicultural talent—now headed for the W-League playoffs starting Jul 25—gathers for a 2008 preseason photo opportunity: top row, left to right, Ria Percival (NZL), Veronica Phewa (RSA), Christie Shaner (USA), Fatima Leyva (MEX), Kristin Luckenbill (USA), Kelly Parker (CAN), Laura Del Rio (ESP); bottom row, left to right: Lena Mosebo (RSA), Aivi Luik (AUS), Julianne Sitch (USA). (Photo courtesy PDA | FC Indiana)

The story of this juggernaut begins in the north central Indiana town of Goshen (pop. 30,000), where horse-drawn buggies vie with sport-utility vehicles for right of way. Goshen lies at the center of Indiana’s Amish and Mennonite communities, Anabaptist Christian denominations with roots in 16th-century Europe. Some congregations shun modernity, avoiding electricity and telephones in the home, and use horses for farming and transportation.

Against this placid background, FC Indiana in Jun 04 played its first game, a 1–0 defeat of an Australian national team then preparing for the Olympic Games in Greece. In 2005, FC Indiana joined the WPSL, won the league championship and added the domestic cup. What has always differentiated FC Indiana is its ability to attract talented players, many from overseas. Coach Shek Borkowski had played soccer at the University of Akron, for the Canton Invaders of the American Indoor Soccer Association, as well as in the second division in his native Poland. Borkowski says that he and his coaches want players who buy into the club’s vision, regardless of nationality:

When you are evaluating you have to get players who represent the values of the club. At FC Indiana we have a multicultural vision. I like the commitment of the U.S. game, the pace and speed, but, coming from Europe, I like to add some technical values. What is good in soccer is that you don’t need to share the same language. A Russian, a German or a Mexican can play with an American if they both have the same vision. I think that our success stems from our environment in which we successfully fuse different soccer cultures and strengths.

That philosophy also extends to Borkowski’s staff, which includes coaches from the United States, Mexico, Ecuador, Serbia and Bulgaria. In 2005, FC Indiana mixed internationals Paty Perez and Fatima Leyva of Mexico and Tasha St. Louis and Leslie Ann James of Trinidad and Tobago with American college players from the University of Kansas and Notre Dame. The side also brought in ex-WUSA defenders Julie and Nancy Augustyniak, who chose FC Indiana over Swedish and German clubs they had played for the previous year while waiting for the defunct WUSA to re-form.

In 2006, FC Indiana’s reliance on American college players created a problem. The club missed the playoffs. Management realized it had to chart a different direction to continue to be competitive. The college students frequently had other commitments (camps, classes, trips, etc.) that kept them away from games.

Goshen, too, was a problem. “Not one good American player is going to Goshen when she can go to San Diego, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver or Tampa,” says general manager Anton Maksimov. “When you are a 20-year-old woman, would you rather go to Goshen, Indiana … or Boston?”

Former Notre Dame defender and Pennsylvania native Christie Shaner says, “Not many people know of Goshen. I didn’t myself until I played there.” The club’s selling point has always been its superior coaching and emphasis on player development. Players practice twice a day; some WPSL and W-League teams practice twice a week. FC Indiana decided to pursue players who had already graduated from college, focusing on international players who didn’t care about Goshen’s rural setting.

FC Indiana’s Diaspora Dozen

“They don’t come for the entertainment or anything,” says Maksimov. “They want to come to play soccer.” Maksimov feels that the internationals bring a different soccer mentality:

The American girls enjoy playing for fun. Other places in the world, the culture is different. They live soccer, they watch soccer, read about it, it’s everywhere. Here it’s not that way. They [American players] do their own thing—watch American Idol or things like that. They don’t have that soccer culture.

The club’s extensive global scouting network is the envy of other organizations. Borkowski and Maksimov scouted the 2006 U-20 World Championships in Russia and have developed links with clubs in Russia, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico and Nigeria. Borkowski says, “It is crucial that we keep identifying top young players to come to FC Indiana and not just from overseas. There are many people at FC Indiana who work with these young women, identifying them and bringing them to the club. I’m very proud of our youth identification at the moment.”

Ambitions within the club’s top tier are lofty enough that, before the 2007 season, FC Indiana held talks with Marta Vieira da Silva of Umeå IK through her agent, Fabiano Farah. “She decided to stay in Sweden,” Borkowski wrote by e-mail in Dec 06.

Borkowski places a priority on players with ambition and who are committed to improving their game. “We can only help someone who wants to achieve something. All we can do is give them a method to help them achieve that. That’s the real part of coaching. We try to be very selective when looking for players and afterward make the players conscious of what we want to achieve. … Long-term success comes from continuity of coaching, tactical approach, stability and shared vision.”

FC Indiana’s undefeated run against touring national teams from Australia, New Zealand and Trinidad and Tobago and U-20 sides from Canada and Mexico also has attracted attention from top-class players.

In 2007, the team brought back Australia native and University of Nevada–Reno graduate Aivi Luik, Leyva and Shaner to play with new imports Monica Ocampo of Mexico, Elisabetta Tona of Italy, Maria Ruiz of Spain and Elena Danilova and Elena Terekhova of Russia’s U-20 team. Along with a late signing at goalkeeper—U.S. international Kristin Luckenbill, who won a WUSA title in 2002 with Carolina Courage and an Olympic gold medal in 2004—the Lionesses captured their second WPSL crown, 3–0, over New England Mutiny. A few weeks later they again reached the U.S. Open Cup final but lost to California-based Ajax America, 1–2.

In 2002, Elkhart County officials dedicated a nearly half-mile-long gravel road so horse-drawn buggies could access the Goshen Wal-Mart without contending with motorway traffic (John W. Fountain, “Amish Find Gentler Road along Busy Highway,” New York Times, 22 Nov 02).

Following the ’07 season, FC Indiana made a number of important changes, moving from Goshen to Lafayette after acquiring a 60,000-square-foot indoor training facility and switching its home ground to Kuntz Memorial Stadium in Indianapolis. The team joined the W-League, accepting a limit on signees outside North America following a period of no limits with the WPSL. (Anna Laue and Ria Percival presently do not count against the roster cap of seven non–North Americans, given their eligibility for training and cup matches only.)

Competition for spots ahead of the 2008 season was intense. Current Mexican national-team forward Tanya Morales, for example, could not secure a position.

FC Indiana’s owners are Gary and Dale Weaver, who until 2007 operated a Goshen-based manufacturing center for trash-bin liners, which generated some $3 billion in annual turnover. They have also invested in the Chicago franchise of the new Women’s Professional Soccer league, set to launch in seven U.S. cities in Apr 09. Indiana maintains a technical alliance with Chicago and will continue to develop players for possible transfer.

The club operates an academy and fields a team in the men’s Premier Arena Soccer Leagues, which plays in a small-sided, fútbol rapido format. The W-League team offers supreme entertainment value: $49 ($11 youth) for a season pass to all Indianapolis and West Lafayette matches, including an invitation to a “meet the team” soiree at Hookah!, a Middle Eastern–themed restaurant near Purdue University.

The WPS is in the players’ sights, and they feel FC Indiana can help get them there.

Percival, an 18-year-old winger, joined the team fresh from New Zealand’s appearance at the 2007 Women’s World Cup. Most players her age would focus on gaining a scholarship to an American university, but Percival says that if she returns to school it will be in New Zealand. Her goal is to join WPS and to “see where it takes me.”

Her veteran teammate Luik, in her fourth season with the club, counts her blessings that a planned transfer to a Florida club in 2006 did not work out:

Good thing it bombed. I was kind of bored and wanted a change. I am so glad I didn’t end up going there. I think [FCI] is the best team in the country, club-wise. Not only that but they treat me so good every year. There is not too much to do in Lafayette, but it’s really not where you are, it’s who you’re with.

FC Indiana marketers, on the club website, engage in some cheeky gender marking.

FC Indiana bills itself, before the WPS launch, as the only fully professional women’s club side in North America. Although the season lasts just over two months and generates tiny home gates—attendance for Indiana’s home regular-season finale on Jul 17 was 325—the club reimburses players for expenses and provides lodging as well as a small monthly stipend. In Goshen, the players lived in a Ramada Inn; in Lafayette, they have apartments.

Club organizers pay attention to cultural differences. Veteran players help the newcomers adjust to the team and to the United States. The team schedules social events such as movies and dinners to help everyone appreciate each other’s uniqueness. FC Indiana provides English-language classes but, at practices and games, coaches or players translate tactical instructions.

“We’ve had unbelievable talent. I’ve learned a lot from the internationals,” Shaner says. “Hopefully they’ve learned a little from the Americans about our style of play.”

So far in 2008, to say that FC Indiana has gelled would be an understatement. Its regular season complete as of Jul 17, the club, with 40 points from 14 matches, having scored 67 goals and allowed three, finished in first place in the W-League’s Midwest Division. Playoffs begin Jul 25; FC Indiana must survive two Central Conference opponents before reaching the league’s North American semifinals Aug 1 in Virginia Beach.

Off-season restructuring no doubt will be required when the side loses many of its most talented players to the relaunched professional league. “The idea is for us to find undervalued assets in an inefficient market,” Borkowski tells the FC Indiana website. He also alludes, cryptically, to a forthcoming venture to survey young talent in Chile.

About the author

Tim Grainey is a regular contributor to World Football Pages in Canada and does additional freelance writing on women’s soccer. He is writing a book, Beyond “Bend It Like Beckham”: Women’s Soccer as a Global Phenomenon. Grainey can be reached at Tgrainey@gmail.com.

Smith’s approach has confounded me for decades. He appears to have adopted a role as a press-card-toting psychotherapist, delivering his subjects of confessions, but only rarely allowing these personalities to speak for themselves (see 26 Sept 03 for consideration of Smith’s article “The Secret Life of Mia Hamm”). Luma Mufleh, founder and coach of the Fugees, for example, is only quoted directly toward the end of Smith’s analysis. Yet untold hours of query and reply were required as Smith filled scrolls with his jottings, or consumed gigabytes on a well-traveled digital voice recorder, wresting enough self-disclosure to depict events, in you-are-there format, that he could not have witnessed.

One anecdote involves Mufleh entering the apartment of an Afghan refugee player and his family. The fifth-grade boy has been hurt in a fight before practice. Mufleh must allay the mother’s concerns:

“You said your coach was a woman!” she barked at her children. “You said she was a Muslim!”

The children fell to the floor laughing. Luma turned to face her. O.K … she was a woman. Sheila stabbed an accusing finger at Luma’s bare legs. “No Muslim you!” she cried.

“Muslim yes!”

“No, no!”

Luma thought fast. “ ’Ashhadu ’an la ’ilaha ’illa-Allah, wa ’ashhadu anna Muhammadan rasulu-Allah!” she rattled off. It was the Shahadah, the Muslim declaration of belief …

The snatches of dialogue—excluding the Islamic creed—are an imaginative reconstruction, the journalist working alongside the interview subject to piece together fragments of memory. Smith does come up with gems. He has worked hard. “We went from Kroger [grocery store] bags to Nike bags!” one player is quoted as saying, following the attention afforded the team in the New York Times and subsequent flush of funding.

The Fugees, we imagine, in addition to learning about survival and grace from their families, coach, community leaders and volunteers, have absorbed a great deal in past years about the upper echelons of American sports media. For months and months now they have been running the gauntlet of St. John, Smith, assistants and photographers as the writers and multimedia teams work on their prose projects and glossy feature spreads.

St. John’s book, Outcasts United: A Story of Hope, Conflict, and Transformation on the Playing Fields of a Small American Town, has been scheduled for release in Apr 09. Hollywood will follow.

Lacking thus far in the professionally wrought conjurings has been the truth that existing and potential Fugees sides—parallel XIs of exiled Kosovars, Liberians, Salvadorans and Burmese—exist in multiplicity in Atlanta and throughout America. Sacrifices continue to be made and battles fought to gain for the displaced young footballers, female and male, a right that seems neglected in the landscape of American striving and isolation: spaces to play in solidarity, spaces of remembering and forgetting.

Toward the end of a Jun 17 National Public Radio interview, Marlene Assmann of BSV Al-Dersimspor discloses that her multicultural Kreuzberg side from Berlin again will brave Islamic strictures for a second friendly match in Iran.

Assmann competed in the 2–2 draw on 28 Apr 06 at Ararat Stadium in Tehran that featured the Iranian national women’s team against the German amateurs (see 29 Sept 07). The match, along with the intense diplomatic maneuvering required to make it happen, forms the backbone of the documentary Football Under Cover, which has now received its North American festival premieres at HotDocs in Canada and at Silverdocs in Washington, D.C.

The Dersimspor team, affiliated with a German Turkish men’s club, has not rested since its involvement in what was intended as a two-match, home-and-home series. The second game, scheduled for 1 Jun 07 in Berlin, never occurred. It was canceled the night before, although more than 2,000 tickets had been sold. Iranian authorities cited “technical problems,” which Najafi interpreted as pre-match anxiety on the part of Iranian embassy staff in Germany.

In any case, Dersimspor has continued its mission to bridge cultures that it feels are consigned to “parallel universes” inside Germany. “[I]t is very unusual for Germans with and without a migratory background to cross these community lines and build real friendships on the other side,” says the club in a mission statement. “Playing soccer together helps our players to overcome the mutually existing stereotypes, but also demonstrates to the outside world that Islamic women too can play soccer—with or without a headscarf.”

Dersimspor has formed a youth division to enable nine- and ten-year-old girls to “take part in competitions at league level, even if they come from conservative families who would oppose their being athletes in another club.”

In addition to the NPR segment, worth digesting is the translation of an interview from Radio Eins on Jan 18. Najafi and Assmann make clear just how much of a fight that Iranian women face to play football and other sports. The women do play organized games—the Iranian women’s sports magazine Shirzanan showcases a range of different activity, including baseball—but in private. “The difference between life in public and private there is like that between day and night,” says Football Under Cover co-director David Assmann, brother of Marlene.

The struggle for spaces to play football, for a stadium, for a league, represents, according to Najafi, “a constant battle for their dreams and everything that they love.”

Dersimspor in its ambition to reach beyond its own borders as well as the Football Under Cover production team in its goal of staging an unprecedented post-revolutionary sporting encounter had to proceed much of the time on belief. Says Marlene Assmann:

We didn’t even know initially which path was the right one to pursue. We were working in a hundred different directions. There had never been a game like it and we didn’t know what to do to make it happen. So we flew to Iran without a visa, without it even being clear that they would let us in at the airport. There were often moments where things seemed pretty hopeless but we thought we can’t just give up like this and we’re not going to let others decide whether the game should take place or not. We just kept on going, somehow.

Similarly, in organization Dersimspor must stay frugal. “Down to every single photocopy we have to find sponsors or (more often) pay ourselves,” reads a fund-raising statement. “The struggle for money to … keep us running is a constant hassle.”

Joyce wrote about football, in brief, very early in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light.” Still more significant, given the ongoing European Championships and associated cultural programming, is an extraordinary literary encounter in Paris in Feb 1937. Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov—the up-and-coming Russian exile yet to find his niche in English-language literature and lepidoptera at Cornell University—and the Hungarian national football team crossed paths for perhaps the only time.

Joyce lived in Trieste—then part of Austria-Hungary—while writing Ulysses, a book in which football does not feature. The statue is on the Ponterosso, near the Hotel James Joyce.

The circumstances, as one might guess, were unusual. Nabokov and Joyce had not met formally, yet Joyce felt called to attend Nabokov’s lecture honoring the centenary of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin’s death. Nabokov, then 37, filled in for a female Hungarian novelist, word of whose illness had yet to trickle through the expatriate Hungarian population. That contingent, on this night, apparently included a critical mass of literarily inclined footballers. Nabokov, in Strong Opinions, confesses his nervousness before the event but was heartened by “the sight of Joyce sitting, arms folded and glasses glinting, in the midst of the Hungarian football team.” He continues in a later interview:

[T]here in the middle of the Hungarian soccer team sat Joyce—he was a rather small man, you know—and he sat there with his dark glasses on and his cane and paid perfect attention to my lecture.

So many questions jump to the fore it is difficult to set them all down. Why was Nabokov certain that this was the Hungarian national team? Did they introduce themselves as such? Did he know them on sight? Were they wearing Hungarian kit? Or was this a soccer team, of unknown provenance, consisting in the main of Hungarians? A touring club side? An age-group team? Did they ask questions of Nabokov? Were they disappointed that the Hungarian novelist had not shown up? Had Nabokov (or Joyce) invited the footballers?

FIFA records do not indicate fixtures for Hungary in this time period. The Hungarian side’s previous competitive match had been in Dec 1936—coincidentally, a friendly in Dublin against the Irish Free State, which endured from 1922–37. Hungary won 3–2. The senior team would not play a competitive game again until Apr 1937, the month and year of Ferenc Puskás’s birth. At the 1938 World Cup final—which was in Paris—Hungary lost 2–4 to Italy.

We know that Nabokov, a native of Saint Petersburg, was a fan and player; Joyce was not. At some length, Nabokov writes in Conclusive Evidence and also in the revised version of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, about a fondness for tending goal that blossomed at Cambridge: “[S]occer has remained a wind-swept clearing in the middle of a rather muddled period.” He continues:

I was crazy about goal keeping. In Russia and the Latin countries, that gallant art had been always surrounded with an aura of singular glamor. Aloof, solitary, impassive, the crack goalie is followed in the streets by entranced small boys. He vies with the matador and the flying ace as an object of thrilled adulation. His sweater, his peaked cap, his knee-guards, the gloves protruding from the hip-pocket of his shorts, set him apart from the rest of the team. He is the lone eagle, the man of mystery, the last defender.

Out of the blue, footballers sometimes wander through Nabokov’s prose. In commentary on John Shade’s third canto in Pale Fire, Nabokov writes about two expatriate Russians who visit the mythical kingdom of Zembla as contract workers:

It was delightful to watch the two splendid Sovietchiks running about in the yard and kicking a chalk-dusty, thumping-tight soccer ball (looking so large and bald in such surroundings). Andronnikov could tap-play it on his toe up and down a dozen times before punting it rocket straight into the melancholy, surprised, bleached, harmless heavens; and Niagarin could imitate to perfection the mannerisms of a certain stupendous Dynamo goalkeeper.

Children playing football in Karl-Marx-Hof, Vienna, 1932, taking advantage of the space available in the Vorstädte. In describing a Viennese football boom in the early 20th century, author David Goldblatt writes of “innumerable kickabouts and neighbourhood contests” in these unclaimed industrial tracts. (IMAGNO | ÖNB | Lothar Rübelt)

While such musings are digressive—more like an aside than a sustainable trope—major competitions such as Euro 2008 regularly inspire creativity on the part of hosts eager to demonstrate legitimacy as a culture concerned with more than mere sport. Austria, nervous about its performance on the pitch, mounted a literary festival and related football tournament. Péter Zilahy captained the Hungarian writers’ team to victory and, in an article for the Observer, noted how the country’s cultural achievements might answer an ingrained fascination with failure: “Although we’re not always brilliant at football, like the English we are superb at coming up with excuses, seeking victories in the rhetorical sense.”

At Vienna’s Technisches Museum, “herz:rasen—die Fußballausstellung” (“racing:heart—The Football Exhibit”) presents artistic and historical responses to the sport, with Austrian accent. For example, an interactive station lets visitors see if they can overturn Austria’s shock 0–1 loss to Faroe Islands in Euro 1992 qualifying. The Vienna Independent Shorts cinema program in May offered 11 films of Swiss and Austrian origin, including documentary and drama.

A community theater in Dornach, Switzerland, presents a specially commissioned musical, TraumBall 4/2/4 (DreamBall 4-2-4), featuring the unlikely union of legendary Jewish Hungarian manager Béla Guttmann with Sophia Loren. They guide a young lad in search of his football heroes (see video), including Puskás and Eusébio, whom Guttmann mentored during his European Cup–winning years at Benfica. Czech author Eduard Bass’s 1922 novel Klapzuba’s Eleven has been adapted for the stage by the husband-wife team of Jean-Luc Bideau and Marcela Salivarova-Bideau. The show runs Jun 17–28 at Theater Saint-Gervais in Geneva (see AFP video).

One of the most substantive explorations appears to be the “Hors Jeu” (“Offside”) exhibit at the Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, which runs through 26 Apr 09. Curators, obviously with long lead time, contacted craftsmen in Côte d’Ivoire to carve totems, from rubber trees, representing a holy pantheon of world football: Diego Maradona (“God”), Joseph “Sepp” Blatter (“Pope”), Michel Platini (“Cardinal”) and Victoria Beckham (“Courtesan”). The figurines take an active role, according to exhibition curator Christian Delecraz: “They question the visitor: ‘Is football a good lens through which we can try and make sense of what’s going on in our world?’ ”

The “Hors Jeu” exhibit in Geneva, which looks at football “through an anthropological lens,” covers totemic aspects. Some players carry gris-gris (talismans) or wear lucky undergarments. An Italy supporter carried this doll at the 2006 World Cup—pins presumably placed ex post facto, following the Zidane-Materazzi incident. (Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève)

But of all the literary, musical and visual inspirations on view, among the most thoughtful words come from Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. In an interview with Der Spiegel (“Football Is Faster Than Words,” Jun 4), the Nobel Prize winner—again, a writer who occasionally lets football take a scene-setting or background role in his fiction—confesses his conflicted views. On one hand, Pamuk says, football has offered him community. Yet his imaginary football has suffered from attendant “nationalism, xenophobia and authoritarian thinking,” particularly in Turkey, where the game has been a tool for nation builders—even before its stunning, Euro 08–saving victory over the Czech Republic on Jun 15. In Pamuk’s novel Snow, “secret confessions of a national goalkeeper” form part of a patriotic stage production at the National Theater in Kars.

Pamuk has stored his affections in memory. Of seeing Fenerbahçe matches with his father, Pamuk likens the players in yellow strip to canaries, “fluttering into the stadium out of a hole”:

I can still recite the entire lineup of the 1959 Fenerbahçe team like a poem. Of course, it has something to do with identifying with my father. We always sat in the main stands next to the VIPs, who looked like capitalists from a Bertolt Brecht play. Throughout the match they smoked cigars, a sign of great wealth at the time, and because a breeze from the Bosporus was constantly blowing into the stadium, the smoke made my eyes tear up.

We issue a call to playwrights around the world. If football can fire such recollection, the cast of 1937 Hungarian players now cries out for rebirth. Why not a reenactment, with these kitted-out Magyars as intermediaries, of the Joyce-Nabokov meeting on its 75th anniversary … in 2012 in Kyiv?

Sources

Michael H. Begnal, “Joyce, Nabokov, and the Hungarian National Soccer Team,” James Joyce Quarterly 31 (summer 1994): 519–25; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1981); Vladimir Nabokov, Conclusive Evidence (New York: Harper & Bros., 1951), 195–200; idem, Pale Fire, in Novels, 1955–1962 (1962; New York: Library of America, 1996).

It makes no difference to me,
If I shall live or not in Ukraine
Or whether any one shall think
Of me ’mid foreign snow and rain.
…
It makes great difference to me
That evil folk and wicked men
Attack our Ukraine, once so free,
And rob and plunder it at will.
That makes great difference to me.
—Taras Shevchenko (1847)

Toronto | At any given time, an uncountable number of football universes exist in parallel.

On 19 May, at the Ontario Soccer Centre, a proxy contest between teams of Ukrainian heritage occurred two days after Shakhtar Donetsk had clinched Ukraine’s official championship. Ukraine United, a side created in 2006, blending professionals from Ukraine and the former USSR, semi-pro journeymen from Canadian leagues, former U.S. collegians and several newcomers on trial, has been rising through the ranks of amateur, ethnically oriented clubs in the province, winning the Ontario Soccer League’s George Finnie Cup in Oct 07.

United wore the blue and yellow of its homeland, a representation of the sky and wheat fields of Europe’s “breadbasket.” The opponent in this friendly game, Shakhtar FC, in the custom of the coal miners’ club of eastern Ukraine, wore the bright orange shirts and black shorts said to symbolize the shift workers emerging from the antiquated coal piles (see also 28 Dec 07). While United players chatted and sent tactical information in Russian, however, Shakhtar’s second- and later-generation Ukrainians let fly with salty, North American–influenced epithets. “F—!” screamed the Shakhtar goalkeeper as one of six United goals billowed the back netting. Shakhtar lost 2–6.

The grounds surrounding the Saint Vladimir Institute on Spadina Avenue—the street that Toronto writer Matt Cohen called “the centre of the universe”—received tender loving care the week of 18 May, presumably in advance of the state visit by Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko.

A Portuguese man watching elite Toronto FC academy teams train before the United-Shakhtar match, his teeth chattering, reported the temperature as 3°C. Rumors circulated of snow in Kitchener, Ontario, to the west. During Ukraine United’s game, the only seated spectator cloaked herself in a quilt. After the one-sided contest, Victoria Day fireworks colored frigid May air as United players convoyed to a York, Ontario, establishment for chicken wings, pitchers of beer and cigarettes (enjoyed surreptitiously on an outdoor patio).

While many of the United players had dropped down several competitive levels since their elite playing days—due to the myriad personal reasons that influence migration—they moved through pre-game drills professionally. No doubt, though, some missed the infrastructure and support of previous times.

Koval

When players needed the indoor facilities to attend to injuries or just to get warm, they exchanged a bulky dressing-room key as one might acquire a key fob at a roadside petrol station. At the end of the day, Vladimir Koval, one of three player-directors, quickly took inventory of the team’s supply of footballs: “Guys, we had eight balls.” The explanation for the shortage? Throughout the pre-game warm-up, balls had soared over the goal and perimeter fencing into a moor-like landscape of tall grasses. Players had to hunt for the hidden orbs themselves; sometimes, they gave up much too early.

Reflecting on these players’ situations, it becomes evident that, while the global movement of elite footballers has been closely examined in past years, little is said about what happens to former top-level players once they retire or decide that pursuing a high-risk, itinerant soccer career is not the best idea.

The Ukrainian and Russian players (others are from Latvia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Poland), many of whom are longtime friends, have found various ways to plug in to a long-standing network of expatriates—a legacy, in the case of Ukraine, of four waves of immigration to Canada since the late 1800s. For financing C$15,000 in equipment and league fees, the club relies on Ukrainian sponsors, previously a credit union and now an architecture studio, Stoyanovskyy Design.

They aim to enter the international division of the Canadian Soccer League, although recognizing that it would require a five-fold jump in investment. For now, the team competes in a hodgepodge of Ontario-based leagues and cup competitions, indoor and outdoor, winter and summer, and travels, most recently to Cleveland, to play in Ukrainian-themed tournaments. United won the eight-team Ukrainian independence tournament in Toronto last year.

Piecing together the journeys of Ukraine United’s organizers and key players does not yield one narrative, but an assortment of personal decisions, motivated by family or pragmatics, that typically entailed radical changes in livelihood. One former player for CSKA Kyiv, renamed Arsenal Kyiv within the past decade, simply said that he decided “to take a risk.” He has a civil engineering degree but now works as a truck driver.

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Andrei Malychenkov, 40, Ukraine United’s player-coach—frustrated by the corruption infecting football and other aspects of Russian life—ventured to Canada in 1999. He did not speak English and, between work and four days of football training per week, had no time for study. He took a job making shish kebab at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market. “I started the job in the springtime and, I don’t know, maybe I just was good—made it quick. … Six months, just quiet—make shish kebab. Six months, I don’t speak with no one.”

Malychenkov

A native of Saint Petersburg, Malychenkov had risen to the elite levels of football in the former Soviet Union. The midfielder was one of two players to win a professional contract among some 1,000 trainees at the Dynamo Saint Petersburg academy. From there, he moved to play for the club affiliated with the Kirov machine-building factory, where he was listed as a “driver” but worked, in reality, as a full-time footballer. At Metallurg Lipetsk, he began to enjoy the fruits of a more open economy, earning $1,000 per game plus bonus money; the team provided a condo along with pre-season training excursions to warmer climates.

His transition to the North York Astros of the former Canadian Professional Soccer League represented a considerable come-down in earnings, necessitating a full-time job. He still works part-time as a butcher but has gained coaching qualifications and also takes on clients as a personal trainer. Of the hybridized life he has had to construct, in which soccer fits as a hobby rather than vocation, he says:

It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. When you play professional it’s your job first of all. Plus before that you love what you do. It’s my dream when I was a kid to play professional. My dream come true. I just give everything. Weather-wise, we play in the snow, we play in the freezing, so it doesn’t matter. You just don’t think about the weather, because you’re in a team. I never look at the soccer as money … never. I just love it.

Koval, 33, attended the academy at Karpaty L’viv in western Ukraine and at 17 signed a professional contract with second-division Hazovyk Komarne. At 19, with one brother already in Toronto, he decided to join the CPSL, eventually playing for Mississauga Eagles PSC, North York and Toronto Croatia and for other teams within the alphabet soup of Canadian and provincial leagues. His native skills, despite recent ankle surgery, rapidly show themselves against Shakhtar. The striker scores one goal, then, isolated with the Shakhtar goalkeeper, deftly flicks a right-footed chip just wide of the post. After this maneuver on the artificial surface, Koval has to be substituted with a hamstring pull.

“Things change, people can leave,” is how Koval explains a life-altering decision in 1994 to depart his native L’viv, a university city close to the border with Poland. Although he wears the no. 7 jersey—the same as Andriy Shevchenko—with his name in Cyrillic characters on the back, he is now a Canadian citizen and runs an import-export concern, purchasing construction materials from China and shipping cars to Ukraine and Russia.

Along with many other United players and a sideline retinue of hangers-on, he possesses the familiar bearing of male footballers, whatever the league standard or nationality—clad in stylish jeans and jacket, mobile phone a vital appendage. Fellow director and team captain Yuriy Hlyva, who loosely resembles Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, dresses for dinner in a trendy Che Guevara T-shirt. But whatever their identification with a new set of cultural referents, team members have retained the European custom of formalized greetings, shaking hands ritualistically on each gathering and departure. It is an affecting gesture, helping to create a strong sense of comradeship.

Ukrainian festival in Toronto, summer 1945. Some 35,000 political refugees and displaced persons arrived in Canada from Ukraine between 1945 and 1954; they settled primarily in Ontario. Toronto became the national center for Ukrainian sport. (Bud Glunz | National Film Board of Canada; Photothèque, Library and Archives Canada)

These players form part of the fourth wave of Ukrainian immigration, according to classifications by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, and help give Canada the world’s largest population, at 1.2 million, of Ukrainian émigrés. The first wave, lured by 160-acre homesteading offers in the Prairie provinces, preceded the Russian Revolution of 1917 by some 20 years. By 1914, 180,000 had come, setting the precedent for many thousands more who would flee a tragic chronology that made Ukraine in the 20th century a ground zero for human suffering. (See Apr 29 on the connections between football and the Chernobyl nuclear accident.)

Corresponding with the visit of Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko in late May, the Canadian government became one of the world’s first to recognize the Holodomor, the famine of 1932–33, as genocide inflicted by Stalin’s policy of forced agricultural collectivization. Some sources say that 10 million died. Yushchenko began his itinerary May 26 by visiting the International Holodomor Remembrance Flame in Ottawa.

He used the trip, in part, to acknowledge the various waves of Ukrainian migrants to Canada and their influence in preserving the culture of home. “I can only pay my gratitude to these people who left our country not because of something good,” Yushchenko told the Toronto Star. “They made their families there and are very important for the entire life of Canada, [while] still keeping big hearts and great memories about the fatherland.” Beneath a Winnipeg statue of 19th-century Ukrainian poet and artist Taras Shevchenko, the president appeared as a hero to 150,000 Ukrainian Canadians in Manitoba, reports Winnipeg Free Press columnist Dan Lett. Anna Zubajy, 92, who came to Canada in 1950, made sure to kiss Yushchenko’s dioxin-scarred face three times.

Only marginally acknowledged, according to K. W. Sokolyk, author of Their Sporting Legacy: The Participation of Canadians of Ukrainian Descent in Sport, 1891–1991, is the place of Ukrainian sporting associations in both facilitating integration into Canada and preserving distinctive cultural expression. In football, a teacher’s training school in Brandon, Manitoba, launched the first Ukrainian Canadian club in 1910. Soccer teams became affiliated with community schools (ridni shkoly) and the various Prosvita (Ukrainian for “enlightenment”) societies. The Ukraina Sports Association of Toronto fielded, at one time in the 1950s, as many as seven teams; its top XI gained promotion to the National Soccer League, what was the top level of Canadian soccer, and in 1953 became the first “ethnic” side to win the national championship. Ukraina repeated as champion in 1954 and 1955.

Ukrainians called the migrant sides nashi, meaning “ours.” In attending matches in large numbers—SA Ukraina–Toronto reports attendance of 1.1 million between 1952 and 1960—Ukrainians, according to Sokolyk, felt it “their moral duty to provide the team, in both the size of the crowd and the loudness of its cheers, with the encouragement necessary to win games.”

American author John Steinbeck, during a 1947 excursion to the USSR with photographer Robert Capa, witnesses the nature of soccer passions at a Kyiv nightclub:

At about ten o’clock a fight started, a rushing, striking, running fight, among a number of young men. But it was not about a girl. It was about soccer, which is a very serious business for the Ukrainians. The men of Kiev feel as strongly about their soccer team as do the Brooklynites about their baseball. The fight raged over the platform for a moment, and then it settled down, and everyone went to a table and had a drink and settled the problem.

Rivalries formed among ethnic teams in various Canadian cities, creating discomfort for soccer authorities regarding the extent to which such competition diluted interest in forging a viable national organization for native-born players. While Toronto might be “the most multi-cultural settlement in the history of humankind,” writes Ben Knight, contributor to the Globe & Mail’s “On Soccer” blog, this does not mean that the various ethnicities unite behind Canada.

A sampler of team names from the recent Ontario Cup draw—Hellas Toronto, Scarborough Ulster Thistle, Oakville Wisla United, Croatia Hamilton, Niagara Club Italian Juventus—illustrates the diversity. Often the ethnic identities are in name only. Malychenkov of Ukraine United, for example, says the team is open to anyone. Yet teams such as Toronto Croatia have long held prominence on the Ontario scene; its Canadian Soccer League rivalry with the Serbian White Eagles last year prompted officials to keep rival supporters separate for two key weekend matches in October. Dragan Jankovic, a White Eagles fan, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.: “It’s nothing major, nobody kill anybody.”

Nevertheless, Ukraine United works to keep politics off the field. Says Malychenkov:

I don’t know where this comes from. These guys are very competitive. I’m competitive, too, but I’m competitive just in the sport field. I don’t think about the politics when I play against you. … I think it’s just from the pain back home or something. If somebody brings that into sport, it’s a huge mistake, huge mistake. I heard about fighting in a game and fans fighting. This is not good.

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Ukrainians certainly have their disagreements: over Ukraine’s future relationship with Russia and the West, even over the language, Ukrainian or Russian, that will become the national standard. But they have come together in diaspora after facing innumerable threats, both in the motherland and abroad, to cultural survival. Writer Lisa Grekul recalls that, before Canada’s move toward multiculturalism, Ukrainian Canadians often felt the need to “pass” as Anglo. Ukrainian names were changed: “Mikhaylo” to “Mitchell,” “Harasym” to “Harrison.”

The expatriate community has not merged as a seamless whole. Witness the sound clip above, recorded May 20, that preceded what might have been a sedate lecture at Toronto’s St. Vladimir Institute by an authority on Ukrainian affairs. Before the introduction of the speaker, Taras Kuzio, a man stands to object that the lecture will not be in Ukrainian, prompting murmuring, counter-objections and the exasperated comment of one member of the audience: “God, no wonder we haven’t got a country.”

The influence of the confident figure outside the institute’s front door, the statuesque great prince Volodymyr I (“the Great,” r. 980–1015), becomes important at this point. The patron saint who gave Ukraine its alphabet and its faith—banishing thunder-god Perun to the River Dnieper in 989—keeps perpetual watch over the Spadina Avenue trolley line as a similar piece of statuary in the Ukrainian capital surveys the former Kyivan Rus’. Mikhail Bulgakov, in The White Guard, highlights Volodymyr’s presence as the Bolsheviks lay siege in 1918:

Above the bank of the Dnieper, the midnight cross of St Vladimir thrust itself above the sinful, bloodstained, snowbound earth toward the grim, black sky. From far away it looked as if the cross-piece had vanished, had merged with the upright, turning the cross into a sharp and menacing sword.

This historical presence and the team-building of an expatriate klatch on a nearly frozen, fake-grass field thousands of miles distant may seem unconnected. But the motivations are similar: keep Ukraine united.

After the 19 May friendly, Ukraine United journeyed into one of the Ukrainian and Russian population centers in York. Arsène Wenger would not have approved of the training-table fare at the St. Louis Bar and Grill.

Sources

Lisa Grekul, “Ukrainian Canadians: A Study in Assimilation,” chap. 1 in Leaving Shadows: Literature in English by Canada’s Ukrainians (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2005), 3–10; Taras Kuzio, Ukraine: State and Nation Building (London: Routledge, 1998); Oleksandr Lytvynenko and Yuriy Yakimenko, “Russian-Speaking Citizens of Ukraine: ‘Imaginary Society’ as It Is,” Zerkalo nedeli, 17–23 May 2008; Anna Reid, Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997); K. W. Sokolyk, “The Role of Ukrainian Sports Teams, Clubs, and Leagues, 1924–52,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies 16 (summer–winter 1991): 131–46; Roman Solchanyk, “Little Russianism and the Ukrainian-Russian Relationship: An Interview with Mykola Ryabchuk,” in Ukraine: From Chernobyl’ to Sovereignty. A Collection of Interviews, ed. Roman Solchanyk (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 19–30; John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal (1947; New York: Penguin, 1999); I. Tesla et al., “Ukrainians Abroad: In Canada,” in Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopaedia, ed. Volodymyr Kubijovyc (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 2:1151–93.

Updates

• Richard Whittall on his website A More Splendid Life: The Chronicles of One Fan’s Escape to the Beautiful Game has done important research into Toronto soccer history, compiling arcana and images from newspaper microfilm to flesh out this pan-ethnic tale.

  He adds context to mention above of the Toronto Ukrainians’ successes in the 1950s. The year 1951, with football as leading agent, marked a “beginning of the city’s long experiment with multiculturalism,” he writes (Jul 7). The experiment, however, featured ethnic tensions and on-field fisticuffs. Two British sides in 1951 sat out the playoffs in the National Soccer League Western Division rather than face the potential conflicts, Whittall surmises.

  “Toronto Ukrainians,” Whittall says, “were one of Toronto’s fledgling ‘Displaced Persons’ or DP sides. … The moniker indicates how these recent arrivals, most of whom had fled from countries ravaged by war, were viewed by older English Canadians—[as] outsiders.” Only an emergency late-season intervention prevented the DP sides from forming a league of their own.

• That football remains on the political agenda in Ukraine has been clear in efforts this year to prove to UEFA its ability to co-host, with Poland, the 2012 European Championships. Squabbles over the country’s readiness have become part of the ongoing war of words between Yushchenko and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. In a letter to Tymoshenko, Yushchenko set a Jun 18 deadline, according to Reuters, to “resolve issues including preparation of legislation, cooperation with Polish officials, road upgrades and improved conditions for investors.” Organizers must also settle on a plan for upgrading the Olympic stadium in Kyiv.

  Football, too, has entered the ongoing dialogue with Russia. While defending, on Jun 4, Ukraine’s moves toward NATO membership, Tymoshenko felt it appropriate to mention “unifying achievements,” namely, Zenit St. Petersburg’s UEFA Cup triumph in May. The side was captained by a Ukrainian, Anatoliy Tymoshchuk.

Miami | Haiti past, present and future came together earlier this month on an urban oasis in La Petite Haiti. After 10 years of negotiation and bureaucratic delay, an all too rare inner-city, publicly funded, full-size soccer pitch opened May 3 on one-time industrial ground north of downtown.

In the end, consecration of the park became an act of remembrance to Emmanuel “Manno” Sanon, referred to as an “objet d’art du football haitien” in obituaries following his death in February, at 56, from pancreatic cancer. Sanon’s home was in Conway, Florida, outside Orlando, but he had maintained contacts in Miami as well as his broader significance within Haitian culture. His goal against Italy in Haiti’s first and only World Cup finals appearance in 1974 proved, at some level, Haiti’s existence to the world.

Some grumbled that the Sanon Soccer Park had cost too much, took too long to be realized and lacked the necessary amenities, but on opening day it looked like paradise. One would be hard pressed to find such an unbroken greenscape—consisting of a regulation FIFA field and practice area along with airy, covered grandstand—elsewhere in urban America (see also Feb 9).

The atmosphere took on aspects of Carnival with roving bands of konè (trumpet) players and revellers. Pointing to one group that bounced and drummed during a series of three friendly matches, local businessman Edward Leon said, “This is what it is like in Haiti,” referring to the rara festival or Haitian Mardi Gras, the time to acknowledge the return of life. In front of the stadium, kids splashed in a water park surrounded by palm trees; water sheeted from the top of what looked like a giant mushroom. Vendors sold goat’s-meat pies and banaan peze (pressed plantains), accessorized by sugary fruit drinks. A steady kreyòl patter burst from the announcer’s booth—comments on the play and sales pitches for currency-transfer shops and bargains on international dialing rates.

Goat’s-meat pie with rice adds savor to a display of futebol arte, the preferred Haitian expression of the game.

Given its longtime connection with the Haitian diaspora—intellectuals, exiled by François Duvalier, started arriving in Miami and South Florida in the 1950s—Little Haiti, while boasting its own institutions and creative force, has retained some of the factionalism in Haitian society. “There is division here, too,” says Marleine Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami (Haitian Women of Miami). But, echoing the comments of other Miami-based Haitians, Bastien mentions soccer’s rallying power and its capacity to give life a communal purpose. “The only time Lavalas, Convergence and other factions come together is for soccer. Everyone is there. When there is a game, people wave the Haitian flag.”

According to Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, some 400,000 Haitians and Haitian Americans live in the Miami-Dade region, having arrived in increasingly impoverished and desperate waves beginning in the 1970s. A soccer park fills a gap in the slow reconstitution of a neighborhood that many Haitians, once established, seek to leave. Haitians have made their mark locally in creating radio stations and newspapers and in winning political office, but the centrality of football to Haitian life could not find a steady outlet.

Miami attorney Andre Pierre, who emigrated from Haiti in 1983, opened his own firm to emphasize immigration law and has represented several hundred asylum seekers. He played in the opening friendly match on May 3. His recollections of playing street and school soccer in Haiti are strong:

In Haiti, even while you’re in school during recess—they used to call it “gym”—we play soccer. … This is what we do for a living. … Playing soccer, it’s not [just] a matter of being in a sport. [It's] understanding team concept, understanding how to be disciplined, understanding how to be on time. And you’re doing it because you love it.

Tales of gangland violence and Haitian self-loathing add resonance to the statistics compiled in 2005 by the Sant La center. Little Haiti’s poverty rate exceeds 30 percent, with an average annual household income of just over $14,000. Child abuse, domestic violence, violent crime and substandard housing coexist with language barriers, cultural misunderstanding, social isolation and fear to create a malaise that could begin to be addressed with well-managed soccer programs to complement the shimmering new park.

A Miami Herald story appearing the day before the Little Haiti festivities suggests the stresses that mount on newly arrived residents. Nadeige Laleau came to Miami in 1984 with the intent of joining her father. He fled, however, before she even touched American soil, leaving her to struggle for years with chronic depression that once required hospitalization. “I didn’t think I would make it past 18,” Laleau told the newspaper. She only found purpose when a teacher noted her facility for languages; she speaks Haitian Creole, English, Spanish and French.

Further, a loophole in U.S. immigration law puts recently relocated Haitians at jeopardy of deportation from which Cuban Americans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans in similar circumstances are protected. The zeal with which immigration authorities pursue improperly documented Haitians has severed parents from families and created shadow-like figures moving almost daily from one house to another to avoid detection (see Ana Menendez, “Immigration Being Unfair to Haitians,” Miami Herald, May 4).

A soccer park, clearly, will not solve all of these woes. Mario Apollon, who ran the Miami-based Youth Education through Soccer, said he had to fight with his parents to play the sport. In Haiti and Miami, being a soccer player sometimes correlates with, in Apollon’s words, being a “street guy”: “You can have the talent, but that doesn’t mean that you are a street guy. … If you play soccer, that doesn’t mean you’re not educated. I had to fight with that philosophy so my parents can let me play soccer. When I came here I always wanted to prove to them that soccer is not something [harmful].”

Wallace Turnbull, who has worked with Baptist Haiti Mission since 1946, recalls an almost innate appreciation for the sport among the island’s youth. He writes of toddlers kicking avocado seeds and the dangers that thorny acacia plants posed to bladder-filled balls. Solid rubber spheres came to be preferred, although much of Haiti’s vegetation has since been sacrificed for charcoal, part of an environmental catastrophe of which topsoil erosion, water pollution and losses in agricultural productivity are the consequence.

In a highly stratified Haitian society, a centuries-old legacy of an exploitative plantation economy, football has offered some consolation for the perennially poor. Qualification for the 1974 World Cup finals and Sanon’s goals against Italy and Argentina, even though Haiti lost all three of its group-stage games in Germany, gave some exposure to what Jean-Philippe Belleau calls “one of those invisible sports nations.”

Fatton

University of Virginia Haiti expert Robert Fatton speaks of the Duvalier regime’s partial dependence, “for its well-being,” on the national side’s performance in the 1970s and alludes to particular clubs’ associations with society’s upper tiers (see podcast below). To the mind of Robert Duval, founder of L’Athlétique d’Haiti in Cité Soleil, “The elites have always shied away, the people of money have always shied away from soccer.”

He describes, in fact, his grassroots organization as a model of self-sufficiency, relying on local resources (“those who believe in social justice”) and its associations with mobile-phone company Voilà and Yéle Haiti, the foundation of Haitian musician Wyclef Jean, for backing of its soccer, basketball, athletics and education programs. Given food riots in April, Duval said he now must devise a sustainable agriculture program, on top of his efforts to back a Caribbean soccer league as an alternative to the Haitian system. Although L’Athlétique, established in 1996, has contributed players to the senior national side, Duval says of Fédération Haïtienne de Football, “They don’t give us a dime.”

Sanon and other players from 1974 had their own tribulations with Haitian soccer authorities. Le Nouvelliste, a French-language newspaper in Port-au-Prince, characterized a meeting between the Préval government and representatives of the 1974 team in May 07 as a reconciliation, a belated recognition of what the players had done to place Haiti on the map of world sport. Writer Enock Néré says the meeting “was an act deserving of the [René] Préval government and served to reconcile these heroes, frustrated to have been abused and cheated, without shame, by unscrupulous leaders” (“Pour dire adieu à Emmanuel Sanon,” Mar 5).

The front page of Le Nouvelliste (Port-au-Prince) on Mar 6 shows the cadre of 1974 World Cup players who served as Sanon’s pallbearers. At front is Philippe Vorbe, who launched the long speculative pass that led to Sanon’s goal against Italy.

The power of deeds such as Sanon’s and those of his teammates lies, however, in their capacity to reach the population directly, without mediation from authorities. Fatton’s connection to this generation of Haitian players came almost accidentally. After living in Spain, he had developed his own artistic flair for prolonged cries of gól and came to the attention of Radio Métropole. “Suddenly,” Fatton recalls, a Métropole producer “gave me the microphone and said, ‘You’re on.’ And that was it. I was on.” A resident of Pétion-ville, Fatton had the opportunity to see Sanon’s rise through local side Don Bosco, a small club compared to Port-au-Prince teams with large followings. The team won the national championship in 1971 for the first time. Feeling for the 1974 national team, says Fatton, was accentuated as a result of the poor infrastructure for athletic training.

You would see them literally in the streets of Port-au-Prince running, because we had very few places where they could run. They would go up the road to Pétion-ville, which is a very tough, long kind of a ride. You would see them several times a week running for four or five kilometers on that very painful road. It was extremely hot. They knew they were representing the country.

Images from Sanon’s 2½-hour state funeral in Haiti on Mar 5 remained fresh in mind two months later. Emmanuel Sanon Jr., asked to dedicate the Miami park, appeared in casual clothes, in contrast to the dark suit in which he had been pictured on Haitian state television in March, along with political leaders such as President Préval and Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis (Alexis was dismissed in April).

Sanon’s funeral had packed Stade Sylvio Cator, named after the Haitian long-jumper and 1928 Olympic silver medalist. Sanon’s death inspired a deluge of homage in the Haitian press, recalling him as the “poto mitan” of Haitian sport. The phrase refers to the center pole of vodou ritual. Sanon had been recognized as a centerpiece of Haitian expression even before his exploits in Munich in 1974. The song “Toup pou yo,” rendered by renowned compas (konpa) musician Jean Elie Telfort (“Cubano”) and released before the World Cup journey, helped make both Sanon and Telfort household names.

The idea of christening the Little Haiti park in honor of Sanon had been hatched only weeks before the opening as city leaders grappled with a contentious suggestion to name the entire Little Haiti project, also including a community center and culture complex, after late Miami Commissioner Arthur E. Teele Jr.

Teele had been involved in initial meetings on the park in the late 1990s, but his name now is uttered in hushed tones. Tarnished by allegations of corruption, in 2005 he committed suicide in the lobby of the Miami Herald. Present commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones, whose constituency also includes Overtown and Liberty City, said the city would name the forthcoming community center after Teele. A public-address announcer dedicated the last goal in the final friendly game to Teele’s memory.

Having spent $25 million on the park, the city did not settle for school-size soccer fields surrounded by metal bleachers. The vision from the beginning was large, originally to encompass 60 acres of blighted industrial ground and trailer parks. Scaled back, the Sanon park nevertheless sets a high standard for urban, public-access soccer destinations, including a grandstand with transluscent cover—essential in the South Florida sun—and floodlights. But members of the Miami soccer community had to turn in embarrassment May 3 at the sight of players changing behind the few trees scattered about. Showers were arranged at a nearby high school.

Spence-Jones acknowledged that the city had not approached the U.S. Soccer Foundation for support, although the USSF sets money aside for development of fields in urban centers. City leaders only learned that changing rooms would be required with recent formation of a soccer committee to help guide the development. “It’s crazy,” Spence-Jones said. “The point is we’re here now. We can at least expand and at least the community will have something.”

Neighborhood activists had objected to the small seating capacity (approximately 750) at the new park. Top Haitian sides in past years have attracted thousands to individual Copa Latina matches.

Little Haiti had not before had its own park. That it had to fight so long for a place to showcase the Haitian national sport can be read against a long struggle to escape, as Haitians, from overriding perceptions of a dysfunctional people that cannot govern themselves. Comments at public forums preceding the park’s opening gave voice to fears from local business owners that the facility would become another crime center once the inevitable deterioration had occurred.

The park reconnects, via another vital cultural avenue, a vast diaspora community to its heritage. This becomes obvious in passing through the Little Haiti Cultural Center before the soccer matches, where works of local artists as well as paintings from sister city Jacmel, Haiti, occupy new exhibition space. Spence-Jones intends the exchanges to be ongoing, in the visual arts as well as in football.

Duval

L’Athlétique’s appearance was the anticipated event of opening day. Duval reclined with pleasure, elbows propped on a grandstand railing, and watched his coaches and charges, many on their first trip to the United States, put the Brazilian-inspired futebol arte on display for eager locals who filled the stand and stood behind police tape ringing the field. Any display of native technical ability from the much smaller Haitian side, opposed by an improvised lineup of talented high school players from Miami, drew cheers. When a diminutive Haitian defender calmly executed a drag-back to evade a towering striker close to his own goal, supporters burst into song and shouts, celebrating the young Haitian’s willingness to play his way out of trouble.

There was no question that the crowd was here to back the team from Cité Soleil. Men in the grandstand wadded up American money and threw bills onto the pitch at halftime. L’Athlétique players put the money into their bags; later, city workers trolled the area in front of the stand, collecting cash in hats. The Haitian team won 4–1.

The work with footballers from Haiti’s most impoverished neighborhood has become “more real” to Duval than his earlier advocacy for democracy and social justice. Such advocacy had earned him confinement in the Casernes Dessalines during the Duvalier regime. (Cells in the military barracks, now planned for preservation as a museum, provide the setting for the culminating tale in Miami writer Edwidge Danticat’s book of linked stories, The Dew Breaker.) At Casernes, Duval witnessed the deaths of hundreds of his fellows; the former footballer for Violette AC of Port-au-Prince withered, dropping to 90 lbs. Intervention by Jimmy Carter secured the release of Duval and of 105 other political prisoners in 1977.

What Haiti has lacked to this point, according to President Préval, is an accounting of and reconciliation following the Duvalier period from 1957 to 1986. Nostalgia for the jobs, electricity and overseas-study opportunities during the father-son dictatorship suggests that memories of the period’s horrors have not been secured. “In the Protestant faith, when people convert, they speak,” said Préval. “They talk to remove all of their sins from their conscience. That is what we need” (Jacqueline Charles, “Haiti Keeps Alive the Truth of Past Evils,” Miami Herald, Jan 2).

In soccer, fading domestic glories have heightened support for Argentina and for African teams but, above all, for Brazil. Haitian soccer fans, writes Belleau, refer to themselves as “Brazilians.” After 1974, “Haitian society had no occasion to access the acts of collective communion such as those that took place in the [World Cup] participating countries. In the idea the peoples create of themselves, an international victory in soccer yields symbolic capital, and this is precisely because soccer is the most popular sport … the only truly universal religion.”

Along with religious parallels, soccer also offers suitable analogy for Haitian persistence, at home and in diaspora, in working in solidarity to facilitate new businesses, community improvements and education. Soccer fits well with a collectivist tradition of which anthropologist Mark Schuller writes. He quotes a Haitian proverb, bourikchaje pa kanpe—“The overloaded donkey can’t stand still.”

If you face many problems at once, you must keep going.

Sources

Stéphanie Renauld Armand, A Taste for Haiti: Haitian Creole Cuisine (n.p.: S. R. Armand, 2004); Jean-Philippe Belleau, “The Country That Would Be Brazil: Soccer, Representations, and Identity in Haiti,” trans. Sophie Hawkes (paper presented at the International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 2000); Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (New York: Knopf, 2006); Robert Fatton Jr., “Haiti: The Saturnalia of Emancipation and the Vicissitudes of Predatory Rule,” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2006): 115–33; Amélie Gauthier, “Haiti: Empty Stomachs, Stormy Politics,” Open Democracy, 21 Apr 08; Kimberly Green, Once There Was a Country: Revisiting Haiti (documentary, 53 min., Green Family Foundation, 2004); Peter Hallward, “Option Zero in Haiti,” New Left Review 27 (May–June 2004): 23–47; Gepsie M. Metellus, Leonie M. Hermantin, and Sophia Lacroix, “Effective Outreach Strategies in the Haitian/Haitian-American Community of Miami–Dade County,” Working Paper Series: SL WPS 04 (Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center, Miami), June 2005; Mark Schuller, “Haitian Food Riots Unnerving but Not Surprising,” Worldpress.org, 29 Apr 08.

Update

More than 2,000 packed Little Haiti Soccer Park on Aug 2 for an exhibition between Miami FC and the Haitian national team, according to the Miami Herald. The game ended 1–1.

Left behind in the silence: a newly built football stadium sitting just to the north of a bright yellow Ferris wheel, a gift from Soviet authorities in commemoration of the upcoming May Day holiday.

Marks on a training wall in a 2006 photograph suggest how life once flourished in Pripyat. (© pripyat.com)

The atomograd (“atom city”) along the River Pripyat has now sat deserted longer than it flourished. Construction began in 1970 for what would be a model high-rise community supporting the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Memorial Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station three miles distant. By 1986 it was, as the football stadium attests, still a settlement in process.

Football would never be played at the new stadium. Children, except for a test ride or two, would never queue up for the fairground attractions. The webmasters for pripyat.com—an interactive community of former Pripyat residents, a virtual city through which one can track down old neighbors and see landmarks in their present disrepair—include several views of Pripyat stadium, its pitch covered with 30- to 40-foot-high trees that have encroached on the model Soviet town. The photo caption refers to the tribunes placed in the grandstand, arrayed befor