The Soccer Project

Crip-walking in Shanghai

2009-06-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

AK is a twenty-eight-year-old Chinese man who gave up a highly paid, highly respected job as a banker so that he could have more time to work on his football tricks. I want to say that while I watch him juggle the ball on his shins, it’s hard for me to imagine him wearing a business suit and sitting at a desk, but that’s not true—I can easily imagine him wearing a suit and sitting at a desk. Maybe he could see it too—like us, he’s at that age where things start funneling in directions you’re not even sure you want to go—and maybe that’s part of what led him to tell a disbelieving father that his grown up son wanted to become a street soccer player.

Several years ago, AK saw a youtube video of various street players. He enjoyed watching them so much that he started trying tricks himself. Everyday he spent hours mastering the moves he saw on the computer screen and then inventing his own, until he became arguably the best streetballer in China. Nowadays he has a small following of guys who meet him in public squares and attempt to replicate his tricks. They play outside the metro station, in the center of People’s Square, in front of a Mao statue at East China Normal University—anywhere they think people will see.

All over the world, we’ve managed to skirt the rain, roaming the streets, living in sunshine. But in Asia, our luck runs out. We arrive in the dead of winter, even though we haven’t planned or packed much different than we did for summertime. In Tokyo, we were American ragamuffins—layering our t-shirts, each wearing our only sweatshirt over and over again. In Shanghai, we’re just wet, terribly wet. We land in the middle of a record-setting stretch of rain. There are men using brooms to sweep the water off the sidewalk. It’s one thing to play in the warm rain of summer time, it’s another to play when it’s thirty-five degrees outside. Ferg and I buy tights and Luke and Ryan wear jeans beneath their warm-up pants and the four of us huddle beneath the umbrella we check out from our hotel. Ryan believes umbrellas bring out the worst in people—you see selfishness loud and clear as you’re jabbed in the eye, doused with repelled water, or nudged off the sidewalk in favor of the prepared people who have their lives in order and their umbrellas extended. Being tall—his face at the same level as most umbrellas—Ryan is especially susceptible to the various hazards.

The wet ball is not good for the Shanghainese streetballers’ tricks, but it does not prevent them from playing. On Saturday, they meet at the small amphitheater outside the metro station. They know all the public spots in the city where there can play without hassle from the police. It’s a different kind of soccer than Luke and I are used to—more like a performance than a game. Every guy has his own style. One guy’s specialty is a kung-fu infused ball dance, another guy is a master of the “around-the-world,” the foot somehow makes a full circle around the ball while it stays up in the air. He used the trick to woo his wife—she told him she’d marry him if he could do ten in a row. A small sixteen-year-old wearing a black I-Heart-Shanghai t-shirt and baggy jeans is a relative beginner and has not mastered a full range of tricks but his around-the-worlds are tight and clean. He and the other fourteen-year-old wear ear buds and periodically start tracing out dance moves. In order to improve their street-balling-rhythm, they’ve taken up crip-walking. In the same way the Brazilians wove the hip-sway of the Samba into their futbol, they want to make the crip-walking inflect their tricks. It’s a funny thing to stand in Shanghai, watching a sixteen-year-old try a dance that originated from a 1970s Los Angeles gang.

Not only can I not do any of their tricks, I can’t do half a trick. Compared to the snazzy juggling of these guys, even Luke is bad, and he at least knows how to do things like the “around-the-world,” even though he wouldn’t call it that because Luke doesn’t believe in naming moves—when I say things like “scissors” and “stepover,” he scoffs at me. He thinks it’s lame to name a move. He doesn’t like the idea of learning a prescribed set of movements. He thinks you should see something and then do it and then change it and then let it bleed into something else until it’s unique and unpredictable, not something you can just slap a word on. Luke has a similar approach to driving—he knows where he has to go and takes a different route to get there every time, while I sit in the passenger seat, miserably lost, longing for a route I can take over and over again. I’m not in it for new territory. I’m in it for the familiarity, for loyalty. Instincts, gut feelings—I only trust these things if I’ve spent enough time doing the same thing to know it will come out of me on its own.

But even here in Shanghai, where they are breaking the moves down for me, giving me the formula, showing me step by step, I cannot do it. I stand there behind AK as he does it again in slow motion. It has been a long time since I’ve tried to learn to a new move. I can vaguely remember this feeling of helplessness—a Sunday afternoon practice and a circle, the fear of something you don’t know how to do but dribbling into the middle and doing it anyway—I marvel over how brave I was as a kid and how not-brave I feel now. I can’t even hear what he’s telling me, I don’t want to try, I just want to stop. I’m embarrassed. I guess as we get older, and rule out the things we don’t like or aren’t good at, there are less face-to-face encounters with looking stupid. But inside the amphitheater in Shanghai, moving my legs in awkward, unfamiliar patterns—and invariably getting it wrong,--looking stupid is hard to avoid. I just wait it out until it is time to go to the neighboring park and play for real…and see if their juggling moves can translate to the field, to the game, to the kind of soccer I know how to play.

Next and final destination: Iran…

On the Rooftops

2009-04-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

PEOPLE TOLD US not to bother going to Asia. Franklin Foer didn’t make it there—when he wrote How Soccer Explains The World, it was the one continent he left out. The passion that spanned Europe, Africa, South America, and the Middle East apparently didn’t exist in Asia. China, the most populated country in the world, rarely qualifies for the World Cup; in 2002 when they did qualify, they failed to score a single goal. When I researched the Asian pick-up scene, the Internet turned up only one article in Time magazine: “Woes in Asia.” An excerpt:

"In Japan, it's often said that we teach too much," says Yahiro Kazama, one of the few Japanese to have played professionally in Europe. Japanese kids—like others in East Asia—participate in organized after-school soccer, but tend to abandon the sport outside regulation time. "They are good at learning," says Japanese soccer commentator Michel Miyazawa. "But if I ask my son to play with a ball, he seems surprised and says 'Really? Here? Now?'"

The article concludes with the sentence, “Look around Asia and the goalposts just aren’t there.” This was discouraging.

In the editing room, we were already killing babies left and right. It’s impossible to go to twenty odd countries without acquiring more fantastic material than you could ever use. I stare at an image of somebody’s face, chewing on my knuckle, thinking, “Could we really possibly cut him? Could we really leave this out?” And then there was the other problem: with the economy going bust and our funding running dry, we were out of money anyway.

But we set out to make a movie about pick-up soccer around the world, the entire world. Luke watched J-League highlights every week and swore they were the nuttiest, most fervent fans he’d seen anywhere, and I too had seen the slew of Asian supporters at the 2006 World Cup. We didn’t believe they weren’t into it. So the four of us spent a month emailing everyone we could think of. We canvassed the celebrity world for people somehow associated to soccer, and who might, theoretically, want to help us fund the rest of our movie—Drew Carey owns an MLS team, Jon Stewart played soccer at William and Mary, Tina Fey wants her daughter to play sports, Kobe Bryant touts himself as Marta’s biggest fan, Steve Nash claims to be the NBA’s most skilled soccer player. But famous people are hard to track down. None of our brilliant plans for infiltration worked out. Instead, we worked odd jobs and answered fliers that said things like, “Alcohol study: Earn $100 to drink.” This, in conjunction with kind donations and one friend’s willingness to lend us money, was enough to get ourselves to Asia.

WE SAW A picture of a rooftop court in Tokyo—skyline bright in the background—so we came to Japan to find it. Music is everywhere, whether you’re getting on a subway, crossing the street or walking through a department store. It’s soft music, trance music. It feels like Tokyo’s made a soundtrack for your life. It’s a trippy thing to stand in the middle of Shibuya crossing, subliminal keyboard notes ruffling your thoughts as thousands of people—women with trendy hair-cuts, fingerless gloves and high-heeled boots, teenage boys with skinny jeans and fluorescent high-tops—swoop past you and your blind search for soccer courts begins.

Maybe the guy who couldn’t find the goalposts just hadn’t looked high enough. We stood on the street corners, craning our necks to the sky, as though we could see to the top of the skyscrapers. The Japanese do not label every street, and we have no address to go off of. We often feel like we’re on a massive scavenger hunt, a sometimes embarrassing scavenger hunt: we tap on shoulders and mumble sentences in broken languages. “What?” they say, frowning, leaning their heads in so the American can try again. In Tokyo, Luke repeats the sentence he has pieced together through language books and podcasts: “Do you know of any rooftop courts?” He tries different inflections until he sees sudden comprehension light up a face. This is often followed by a vigorous shake of the head—No, no, they know nothing about football courts. But eventually, we find people who point to the sky.

High above the busy crossings and electronic signs, there’s a secret world where sakka games are played. Because Tokyo is a city where space is at a premium, the courts have been snuck onto the rooftops. Entering department stores, we walk past Prada bags, Chanel counters, and ladies sampling perfume, and then we board an elevator, standing next to tired shoppers who empty out floor by floor until we reach the top.

When the doors open, we see businessmen wearing well-cut suits and deep blue scarves, leaning back against park benches. They’re smoking cigarettes, unrolling soccer socks and slipping off dress shoes. Changing right there in the open, they shimmy off their slacks and undo their button downs, donning long-sleeved replica jerseys, warm-up pants and winter gloves. They jump up and down to shake out the cold.

There are two courts cloaked in netting that prevents the ball from soaring off the rooftops. It’s not cheap to rent a court on top of the city and it’s not something they do everyday. There’s the special-occasion feeling, like renting a bowling alley or a skating rink for a birthday party. You can hear the faint sound of an automated voice: “Thank you for visiting Mitsukoshi Department Store.” As the smell of beef wafts up from the food court, we begin to play.

LA or Bust...

2008-10-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

WE WERE GOING 80 MPH down highway 94 on the twenty-second hour of our cross-country drive when we struck the deer.

Ryan, Ferg, Luke and I were moving to Los Angeles to try our luck in the big city and turn our 300 hours of footage into an hour and a half feature-length film. Ryan was taking the southern route, Ferg was cutting straight through the middle, and Luke and I were taking a slightly out of the way route via Montana. We’d loaded our lives into my ’96 Camry. While it had 168,000 miles on it and was missing three inner door handles and two outer door handles, there was no reason to believe we wouldn’t make it.

It was the good kind of drive—rolling hills, trees rising out of rivers, sideways light that lit up the cornfields, empty roads, good music and the feeling that so much was ahead.

It turned dark in North Dakota. The speed limit was 75 MPH. There was something vaguely eerie about driving so fast through empty land. We passed a trucker every twenty or so miles. Our Camry was humming and we were crossing off the hours—fourteen yesterday, twenty down today, two more to go before we reached the cabin in Montana Luke’s friend had won in a raffle. This was the land of Norman Macleans’s A River Runs Through It, my favorite book and the reason why Luke was able to talk me into a thirteen-hour detour.

I’d scrunched up my pillow against the window and shut my eyes when I felt Luke come down hard on the brakes. It happened in a second but it felt slow: there it was—the deer—appearing suddenly out of the dark, beautiful and bright from our headlights. He was moving right so Luke swerved left as our brakes and tires screeched. I waited for the relief, the heart pound of nearly hitting something but then I realized we weren’t going to miss it—we were going to hit it. The deer, his instinct clashing against ours, made an about turn and ran in the same direction we swerved.

His face came at my face and for a second, we made eye contract—his weirdly human brown eyes staring into mine right before I closed them and his face hit the windshield. His body thumped against the car and I screamed. I felt surprised to hear myself scream.
Then it was quiet, except for the new rattle of the steering wheel and the thump of our bumper against tire. We limped to the nearest exit. Beneath the exit sign another sign read “No service here.” There was one shed with a flood light in a gravel parking lot so we turned off the car there. Luke got out and I waited for him to come around and let me out. The inside door handle was missing so this was always how it was—I was trapped in there until Luke made his way around to work on the outside door handle, which was also broken but could be pried open if it wasn’t raining or humid.

Luke’s fingers jimmied the door handle up, but the door still didn’t open, dented inward from the body of the buck. I crawled across the driver’s side and stood with Luke, staring at the shattered windshield and headlight. We tried to pull the bumper off the tire, the smell of blood in our noses and something wet on our hands. We tried to open the hood but it was also too warped to get open.

I leaned up against the unwounded side of the bumper, assessing my life with the slightly overwhelming clarity that happened when you’d spent thirty-five hours staring at open road. In the past year, I’d played in sand-swept streets in Togo, with felons in Bolivia, with fifteen-year-old rappers in France. Now I was in Montana, on my way to L-A, with my entire life in my car and deer blood on my fingers.

THERE WAS NOTHING around, so we got back in the car, turned on our hazard lights and drove 30 MPH until we got to the nearest gas station. We borrowed a hammer, banged the bumper off the tire, scotch-taped our windshield, ate two corn-dogs, and continued on our way to Pray, Montana.

At 3am, a policeman unnerved by our now missing headlight and our incredibly slow travel speed, pulled us over. Because our windows don’t always roll back up after you roll them down, Luke opened the door.

“Sir, I’ll need you to stay in the car!” the policeman shouted.

“Uh, well, our window doesn’t work,” Luke said through the crack of the slightly opened door. Then we explained about the buck.

“It’s unavoidable in these parts,” the policeman said. “My wife hit three last year. I just picked up my truck out of the shop yesterday—here’s the place to take it: Crash and Repair, they’re great with deer damage.”

TWO DAYS AND six-hundred dollars later, we were making our way to and then through California. We traded travel stories with Ryan and Ferg: we told them about our buck, Ryan texted, “Speeding Ticket? Check,” and Ferg burst a tire coming out of a camping site somewhere in New Mexico.

Now in Los Angeles, we’re ready to edit. The Europe-Africa trip had finished strong: in Togo, we found more games per street than anywhere in the world—motorcycles zipping through the middle of games played on sand-swept lanes. In Ghana, we went to the rural village of Mafi Sasekpe. There we watched boys make their own balls using machetes and plastic bags, met a nineteen-year-old who told us nonchalantly, “But my football age is seventeen,” and got sucked into the middle of a drum celebration.

After seeing a clip of George Bush on The Daily Show in which he dances during a trip to Africa, I’d thought to myself, “What an idiot,” but when Luke and I found ourselves dancing the Ghanaian version of the funky chicken—cameras rolling—I felt a rare note of empathy for George W. (Also, anyone going to Ghana—we have $100 in Ghanaian cash that no currency exchange place will accept…so let us know if we can make a trade…)

PLAYING PICK-UP has always felt to me like an adult form of pretend, reenacting the big games, imagining that you’re the guy playing in the stadium with thousands of people watching. Nowhere did this feel more true than when we found the workers of Green Point Stadium playing pick-up during their lunch break. They eat their sandwiches on their tea breaks so that at lunch, they have time to play. In the shadow of the stadium, they use their helmets as goals and play in yellow jump suits and heavy work boots. One of the guy watching from the side tells us, “If I couldn’t play inside the stadium, at least one day I’ll be able to tell my son, ‘your father built this stadium.’” Twenty minutes after it starts, the lunch-time game ends. When I say, “Already?” the guy shrugs, “It’s better than nothing.” Then they put back on their helmets and their suspenders and walk back to build the stadium that will hold the greatest sporting event in the world.

We’ve been to three continents and seventeen countries now—enough to see that fondness for the game spreads across the world, no matter how old you are, what your job is, what language you speak, or what God you pray to.

In that game in South Africa, Ryan’s camera locked in on one guy’s face. The guy had no idea the camera was on him. He was swept up in the game and while some of the guys were skilled and good—players—you got the sense that this round-cheeked, round bellied guy wasn’t a player or hadn’t thought of himself as a player in a long time but today, for some reason, he decided to play. His face was lit up with the best smile I’d seen anywhere around the world. There was so much joy in his face, such surprised, innocent happiness—and that’s the feeling we come across in so many of the places we play. You can’t help but feel hope, great hope, looking at smiles like that.

Austin's Field

2008-08-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

I am in the middle of the backseat of a taxi with one camera and a pillow on my lap when I see my first matatu. It’s a fuchsia pink mini-bus and there’s a giant picture of Mariah Carey above the taillights. It’s thumping loud music and there appears to be some kind of strobe light. A man is hanging outside the door—he periodically jumps off the still-moving vehicle, thrusting out a hand to those trying to leap on board, then shoving them safely down the aisle. He thumps the side of the bus and the driver takes off.

In the next seven days, under the gray, muggy skies of a Kenyan winter, we stand in the dust clouds and wait on matatus. Most have a name. We see Fabregas, Jay-Z, Beyonce, Jordin Sparks, Sir Alex, Messi, and Luke’s favorite: WESYDE written in huge letters across the front, AM THE FATHER OF THIS GANGSTA SH** written in huge letters across the back.

Some take on a collage format—pictures of various things slopped haphazardly across the back. We see Jesus alongside 50 cent. Wayne Rooney is inexplicably pasted over an American flag. The matatu emblazoned “Pirates of the Caribbean” has a plastic skull and crossbones attached to the front grill. We stand watching with wonder and appreciation until we see a number 32 or 41 and then we make a run for it.

Once we are tightly packed inside, we pass our fifteen shillings forward and stare out the window as our insides vibrate to sounds of Rihanna. We are being dropped in Mathare Valley, the oldest slum in Africa. It’s similar to Brazil’s favelas and Argentina’s villas but more poor; fewer people are able to jimmy-rig electricity and the only place you can get water is at the top of the slum, at a faucet next to the soccer field. Women line-up in the mud to wash clothes, babies, and fruit, and then they fill jugs to haul down to their homes on the other side of the slum.

We’re coming for the Saturday football. Our friends are George, Tito, Bonfas and Keffa. They grew up here as a pack of tight friends and are now in various stages of making their way out. Ryan’s best friend spent a year here on a Fulbright and when we saw his photograph of Keffa taking a penalty kick, hundreds of people lined up watching, we came to find it.

It’s tournament style—everyone puts in twenty shillings and you play, the winner taking home the loser’s shillings. It’s only about 35 cents a person but it makes it so that you are playing for something instead of nothing. Many of the men make chang’aa, a homemade alcohol brewed in the slum, earning them about six dollars a day—so if they can win the tournament, they’ll stand to make up what they lost by playing instead of brewing.

“Brewing isn’t work you do because you want to,” James, a brewer, says in Sheng as we interview him at the base of the river. We’d thought we’d be able to communicate in Africa, but you learn quickly that English-as-an-official-language doesn’t mean it’s the language people actually speak. Sheng is a mixture of English, Swahili and tribal languages, more than a dozen different tribes living in Mathare. Bonfas translates as he stands with us at the base of the river, our faces warm from the fire-pits heating barrels of alcohol.

“I do it because it’s the only thing I can do to make money for my wife and son.” James is a water-hauler—filling buckets from the faucet at the top of the slum and then hauling them through the narrow garbage-paved alleys back down to the riverbank. He wears Copa replicas, the sides blown out, his feet coming off the soles, the cleats digging into the mud and sewage water as he hikes all day back and forth. “Most people drink a little to get some steam, it’s the only way you can do it,” he says. “But Saturdays is the chance to show people I’m not just another drunkard…I am proud because I can play football.”

The Saturday we are there his team is all brewers—they play hard and well and every game is close. The sideline is full—women with babies propped on hips, kids in a variety of Salvation Army cast-outs, and men in ball caps all stopping to watch. When the brewers score, everyone roars, men and children darting out onto the clay field. James is the one who stands out—his short dreadlocks flying as he races forward.

His sister Vinique plays with another group of guys. She stands with them, her hands in the pockets of her black warm-up jacket, talking with them as though it’s nothing that she's surrounded by men…though she does admit, “ Sometimes, later on, guys will come up to me while I’m working or just out walking and say, ‘I saw you! You were that girl playing football! Let me shake your hand.’ They want to buy me a soda just because I can play. It’s embarrassing…” When she’s not playing football, she braids hair in her sister’s beauty shop. There are four sisters in their family and when the violence broke out after the elections, they stayed in a displacement camp outside the police station for three weeks. “Too many people knew how many girls were in our family,” she says, playing with her braids.

Kenyans never thought it would happen in their country and Mathare Valley never thought it would happen to their slum—not when members of different tribes have lived next to each other in corrugated-tin homes for the past forty years. But when President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, was announced the winner of the election despite strong evidence to suggest that Mr. Odinga, a Luo, should’ve won, riots broke out all over Kenya. Vinique’s Luo neighbors stormed their Kikuyu home and told them they’d betrayed them. This happened in slums across Kenya, neighbors turning on neighbors, dragging members of certain tribes from their houses and clubbing them to death. Riots between Luo gangs and Kikuyu gangs raged in the street and over a hundred homes were burned in Mathare.

But now Kenya is once again calm. In Mathare, Kikuyus and Luos play with and against each other on Austin’s field at the base of the slum, the same field where many of them voted just six months ago, standing with hope in long-lines in the dirt—the election having prompted the largest turn-out in the nation’s history.

The field has its own history—before it was a field, it was a string of tin homes later burned down to the ground in a land dispute. Then it became the dump, people hauling their garbage here from all over the slum. After that, they cleared it into a field. The goal posts kept disappearing—too tempting of building material—until they got permanent goal posts nobody could take. When we ask why it’s called Austin’s Field, George says, “Because he’s always there.”

Austin has long, thick dreadlocks he keeps packed beneath a beige knit cap. If you played football in Mathare and are under the age of 25, he’s the one who coached you. He’s the guy who made the field happen and he spends all day there, coaching one team and then the next. He coaches for free—he makes no money on football whatsoever—and he seems to us like the type of guy who should win one of those hero-of-the-universe awards. “I came to Mathare when I lost my family—I had nothing and no where else to go. Coaching was what kept me going.” We watch him coach fourteen-year-old girls—when he calls them together in the center of the field, they hang onto every word he says. Two of them wear the same beige knit cap he does.

*
On Monday, we decide that if we’re going to see any animals before we leave this continent, Kenya’s the place to do it. We call Ruben, the taxi driver in Mathare who picked us up from the airport, and see if he wants to take us to Nairobi National Park, the only national park in the world that’s inside city limits. You can see giraffes silhouetted with city skyscrapers. On the way out, we pick-up George. He grew up in Mathare and though he’s just moved outside of it, he’s not trying to move past it: he’s working toward a degree in social development and he spends most of his week back in the slums, trying to help kids give Mathare the same fight he did. “People think Mathare is all drunks and drug addicts,” George says. “But that’s not all of us.” If you type in Mathare Valley into google, the first site that comes up describes it as “a place of criminals, drug addicts, the unemployed and prostitutes.” But the people we meet are not criminals or drug addicts—they are guys who survived the slum and are now doing everything they can to make it a better place. As for the football, George plays several times a week. “It’s not easy to quit—the kids, they look up to us. We’re the guys who made it out, so when we come back, they want to see us play.”

Like us, George’s never seen animals outside of the zoo. The six of us cram into Ruben’s car and go. When we pull up, there’s a smattering of people wearing khaki safari clothes and riding in Land Rovers equipped with tour guides. We wave to them from our station wagon. We buy tickets and a map and they send us off, bouncing down the dirt roads… city kids, off to see the lions.

No one mentioned any rules or guidelines, so when we see giraffes not fifteen minutes later, we get out of the car and go schmooze.

Luke and George on the field

Luke and George with the giraffes

Then we are off again, figuring if we can see giraffes within fifteen minutes, what more might be out there? We immediately take a wrong turn and spend two hours driving down a road that isn’t on the map. When we link up with a real road, we intersect a herd of zebras. We head towards Hippos Pond and see a crocodile but no hippos. At Lions Den, we see more zebras but no lions. We do, however, drive by a big, friendly-looking baboon. He is sitting there, with the valley spread out beneath him, and because we can’t find any of the foreboding animals we are looking for, we decide he can be our photo op. He is a good model for the first few minutes, staring straight ahead and giving us a full-face shot. “When he started to move closer, I was thinking, oh yeah, he keeps coming more and more into my frame…this is going to be a great picture,” Luke said. “Until I realized he was coming right at me.”

The baboon picked up pace and darted through all of us, catapulting himself onto the roof of our taxi. We, of course, had left all of our doors open for the impromptu photo shoot. George sprints towards the car and slams one of them shut in an effort to scare him. Instead, the baboon is angered, rearing up on his legs and letting out a roar…we scatter in all directions, waving our hands over our heads and yelling, half joking, half scared. That's when we notice the sign “Beware of baboons.”

The baboon calmly climbs into the car. He finds my purse in the passenger seat and fingers through it as though he’s handled purses all of his life. When he doesn’t find any food, he climbs into the backseat and gives Rebekah’s purse a go. He finds a piece of cake—the only piece of food we city kids brought for our safari. He unwraps it, eats it, and climbs back into the car for further investigation. He is so human-like, Ruben is afraid he might actually drive off with the car. This taxi is his livelihood—his father sold his store for it. When the baboon finds and eats a discarded banana peel and then waddles slowly back into the great beyond, we laugh with relief and drive off, station wagon still in tact.

Back at Tito’s apartment, we haul buckets of water up eight flights of stairs, use a coffee mug to dump it on our heads, and then climb beneath our mosquito nets into our side-by-side beds. Mosquito nets are a blessing, an incredible blessing, and we know this from our sleepless nights in Egypt, where through a friend of a friend of a friend, we ended up in an abandoned apartment in a hundred degree weather without a fan. So you had to keep your windows open in order not to die, but the mosquitoes eventually had us sleeping in full sweats, hoodies scrunched up around our faces so that only our eyelids were eatable.

Back in Nairobi, we are sound asleep when there is sudden disturbance. The first “Ryan” shout I am able to ignore because I am enjoying a night without mosquitoes biting my face but the second “Ryan” has the distinct tone of alarm, what I’d imagine someone to sound like if waking up to an earthquake.

“The bunk bed is collapsing! The bunk bed is collapsing!” Rebekah screams from her sleep, digging her feet into the mattress of the bed above her, holding Ryan up with her legs.

When Ryan doesn’t respond, she yells it once more, this time less convinced, “The bed is collapsing?”

“Ferg, Ferg, it’s not,” Ryan mumbles with his eyes still closed, even though his mattress is at an angle, like those convertible hospital beds, this one powered by Rebekah. “Down, put me down.”

Frequently bedmates, they accuse each other of various things—Ferg tells Ryan he sleep talks, Ryan tells Ferg she touched his face, we add the alleged fall of the bunk bed to the list and catch a cab to the airport, next stop South Africa.

Ten-minute Game

2008-07-21T00:26:00.001-07:00

We always listen for yelling—from the Iraqis in London to the old men in Brazil, the best games are marked by a failure to refrain. It’s not usually the fourteen-year-olds or the eighteen-year-olds shouting into each other’s faces; they’re too conscious of keeping their cool, of portraying to the world that there are more important things ahead. But right around the time you’re on the other side of your playing career looking back, there’s a behavioral abandon. Weeknight games matter as much as or more than anything else in your life and you’ve stopped trying to fight it—so yes, you’re going to yell your head off if someone’s saying your goal is not a goal or trying to jip you out of your final two minutes on the court.

We’ve heard yelling in every country—in Hungarian, Italian, French, Portuguese, German and Spanish—but when we are on a court in Jerusalem and the yelling is between Jews and Arabs, there’s a new level of heat.

Walking down the white-washed streets of Jerusalem, you pass Muslim women wearing burkas and Hassidic Jews wearing top hats, ringlets of hair drooping down past their ears. All three major religions believe their faith has roots in the Old City. While space and territory are big issues, every quarter has found room for a football court. In the Christian Quarter, kids wearing replica jerseys—from Messi to Van Nistelrooy—play goalie-wars on bleached stone. In the Jewish Quarter, guys with yarmulkes pinned to the back of their heads play on a field overlooking the graves on Mount of Olives. In the Muslim Quarter, players scrimmage on a court lining the fortified wall of the Old City.

But it’s not until Friday night, when we head to a park outside the Old City, that we find a game where Jews and Arabs are playing on one court—though the players are quick to clarify, “We’ll play against each other but never with each other.”

There are no nets so it’s not always easy to tell whether a goal is a goal and when Luke scores, the Jews and Arabs can’t agree whether or not it went in. When they are crowded in the box, pointing fingers and gesturing angrily, some clasping their yarmulkes in hand, some pointing outside the post, some pointing within the post, there’s the sense that they’re arguing about more than this game, that they’re also yelling about yesterday’s terrorist attack and tomorrow’s never-ending mistrust.

On the other hand, is-it-or-is-it-not-a-goal is a fight we’ve had all over the world, a sign of being swept up in the game, and there must be some relief in arguing about football instead of the overwhelming history of crimes against each other. They want to know whether the ball went in.

Then comes the realization that we have it on tape. Two separate swarms of men charge Rebekah. In the rest of the world, we’ve been able to fend off similar demands for a repaly, as rewinding tapes while shooting can be a headache. But these guys don’t hear us say ‘no.’ Their hands are up to the camera like they are ready to rewind it themselves. Rebekah gives in and their heads crowd around the LCD screen until they see it and disperse in continued disagreement—even the replay is unclear.

Once our team is off, Luke and I sit in the center of the divide. The right side of the court is full of Jewish men, their thumbs slung through the belt loops of their black dress pants. The left side of the court has been left to a family of ten or so Arabs, who sit along a wall and use a wristwatch to keep track of the ten-minute games.

“So do you guys play here a lot?” I ask a bald man with a large stomach.

“I am here under doctor’s orders,” he says, tapping his gut.

Unsure of how my next question will go over, I ask, “So why are all the Arabs over here and the Jews over there?”

Immediately, the entire family marches over to the Jew side, laughing, put their arms around guys’ shoulders, shaking hands, and saying, “Shalom.” I notice one Jewish man’s face. He is frowning and it’s hard to tell whether this is out of distrust or is just an effort to show the seriousness of the matter—if he’s going to shake this guy’s hand, he’s not going to laugh about it, he’s going to give it the gravity it deserved. The Arabs and Jews sit uneasily together for the remainder of a ten-minute game, and then they drift back to their earlier sides.

Our flight to Cairo leaves Jerusalem at 7:45 AM. We’ve heard that the Israelis take security seriously, and when we arrive at 4:40 AM, more than three hours before our flight, we feel pleased with ourselves.

The airport is staffed by the Israeli Defense Forces and there are brisk, beautiful, twenty-year-olds serving their mandatory duty and asking us hard questions.

“How many of there are you?”

“Four.”

“Are any of you a couple?”

“We are.”

“How many years have you known each other?”

Luke says four at the same time I say three. We feel guilty all of a sudden, scrambling to clarify that while we’ve been together for three, we’ve know each other for four. The soldier looks hard into our faces and slaps a number two sticker on the back of our passports.

Ryan and Rebekah are faring less well. “You are not a couple?” No. “But you used to be?” No. “But you date?” No. It is apparently a very suspicious thing for a male and female to travel together if they are not romantically connected. The Israeli government does not believe in being just friends. Ryan and Rebekah’s passports receive a number five sticker. When they are being thoroughly frisked for a half an hour, their bags entirely disassembled, we know that is better to have a number two.

Once we have endured the hour-long investigation, we coast to the carry-on security, operating under the false impression that we are in the clear. Luke and I thoughtlessly drift to one checkpoint, leaving the suspicious, just-friends number fives on their own.

We wait for Ryan and Rebekah to emerge. After twenty minutes, we poke our heads back around the corner and see that their carry-ons are now being seriously inspected. Luke and I sit down, watching Jewish kids wearing yarmulkes, backpacks, and Wheelies skate by on their heels. After another ten minutes, we check again and discover that Ryan and Rebekah have vanished. A backpacker wearing a t-shirt that says “Meat is animal murder…tasty murder” says, “They got sent back to the beginning of security.”

We feel glad we arrived more than three hours early. But when it gets closer and closer to our boarding time, we decide to head to our gate.

When we tell a woman at the desk that our friends never emerged from security, she tells us, “Don’t worry, we will not leave without your friends.” The board is flashing “Final Boarding Call.” Luke and I are standing on our tiptoes, hoping to see Ryan and Rebekah booking it down the hallway, backpacks bouncing up and down. The ladies speak in Hebrew to each other and I wait patiently until the woman who promised me everything would be ok, says, “Ok, I just wanted to close the flight before I let you know what happened to your friends.”

“One of your bags set off a security alarm and must undergo a 24-hour investigation. You will take a bus to Cairo.”

On the other side of the airport, Ryan and Rebekah have spent the last two hours undergoing questioning and getting their carry-ons dumped all over the investigation room. Though we have two identical cameras, only one of them set off an x-ray machine. “Probably, if it went through again, it would not go off…but now we must check and make sure.” At first, they said they could not get our other bags off the airplane so Ryan and Ferg scrawled out a note to be hand-delivered to us, telling us to get on the plane without them. We never receive the note. Security then decides there is time to offload our bags. “Would you also like us to offload your friends?” As we never got word that we were suppose to get on, there was never any need for us to be offloaded.

Frequent flyers, we are used to feeling screwed by airports, but we are also used to getting some scrap of compensation, a meal voucher hastily thrown your way…it is hard for us to grasp that it is possible for them to simply not let us on our flight and not be willing to put us up in a hotel and not be willing to get us onto another airline and not be willing to refund our ticket. The x-ray machine made a stray beep and now we had no way to get out of Israel. Upon examining the bus route, we discover that we will not be allowed across the border because over-land-routes require a pre-existing visa. All Royal Jordanian flights for the next three days were booked and unless we can convince the security to forgo the 24-hour investigation and let us onto the night flight, we’re done for.

“Probably, if you were Jewish, if your security profile was a little different (maybe a number two instead of a number five), you would be on your way,” a Royal Jordanian flight attendant tells us. “I think it is very bad what they are doing to you. It does not encourage tourists to come back to our country.”

Five or six hours into the process, somebody apparently decides Ryan and Rebekah aren’t terrorists after all. They agree to an abbreviated investigation and hastily wrap our camera in saran wrap. “We will return it to you at the gate.”

By five pm, we are sitting at the gate and the board is once again flashing “Final Boarding Call.” No one has delivered our camera. Our bags really are on this flight so Luke and I go ahead and board.

Royal Jordanian is doing everything they can to help us. The pilot announces to the flight, “Alright folks we are already to go, just waiting for two passengers who got held up in security.” Another ten minutes goes by and Luke and I are staring anxiously out the window until we see a black SUV peel around the corner. Ryan and Rebekah breathlessly emerge.

“Gabby was doing everything he could to get our camera, racing back and forth, his comb-over billowing in the wind,” Ryan says as he collapses down in his chair. “Our car was racing through the airport…we almost took out a median…squealing tires…it was like a scene out of Courage Under Fire.”

The flight attendant hands them a cold orange juice, pats them on the shoulder, and says, “Time to relax.”

Cuss a Gnome

2008-07-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

The European Wrap-Up

EURO2008 Spanish and Swedish fans

Red Cross vs. EMT

Marseille, France

Paris, France

Vatican Update:
Ruben, the Swiss Guard we almost played with, emailed us after reading the blog: he wanted to let us know that he was not just ignoring our calls, another Swiss Guard got sick, causing him to work a double shift…as you can imagine, they’re not allowed to answer their cell phone on duty.

Everywhere we go, we try to find a family who will take us in. This is in part because traveling around the world is expensive—particularly in Europe where the American dollar is a joke—but it’s also because of their ability to show us the real Italy or the real Germany…the places beyond the tour books.

In Italy, we stay in Biagio’s apartment…who is out of town, in a cave somewhere spelunking (the vocab word none of us have encountered since Where in the World is Carmen San Diego.) The building is 700 years old. Hundreds of knives hang from one wall, another wall is covered with black and white photos from the time Biagio invented a flying bicycle and the town gathered to watch the test-drive. The rest of the walls are covered with his art: oil paintings of all kinds, incorporating every kind of material, from twisted roots to mummified cats. We move aside a long wooden table full of oil pants and palettes and lay down cots. The ceilings are high and the walls are made of thick stone, keeping the building cool even in summertime. We pick cherries in the hills and hide in a barn when it starts to downpour.

In Germany, we head to Rodermark, a small offshoot of Frankfurt, where we are meeting Erich Braun, Luke’s old college teammate. They barbecue sausages, open Franziskaners, and rehash memories: how upperclassmen Braun liked his balls rock hard, sending freshman Luke back to the locker room to repump the bag. How the Notre Dame team fined each other $2 for PDA, guys hiding in the bushes to catch unsuspecting teammates. “My girlfriend was already suspicious—me being thousands of miles away at American college,” Braun says. “And then she comes to visit and I won’t hold her hand in public.” And as the night gets later, they say to one another: “You were good man, you were good…”

In Hungary, we stay with Balint and Butter in a 250 person town called Szentbekalla, where Balint and his mother first came when they were hiding out from the communist regime. We sleep in a loft used for drying lavender and almonds, the nuts spread out along the wood near our head. They’ve started their own vineyard and we drink homemade wine as we overlook the Hungarian countryside. On Thursday nights, the three local villages—Szentbekalla, Mindszentkalla, Koveskal—meet at the largest grass field (though it gets smaller as they get older, the goal posts moved in five yards every year). This is our first county we can say absolutely nothing: we can’t pronounce the town name, we can’t say hello or goodbye…only thank you, Köszönöm, because we are able to make a lame mnemonic device (“cuss a gnome.”)

So when we get to London, we bask in the ability to eavesdrop on the tube, to read the headlines over people's shoulders, to know what kind of food will arrive in front of us. It is our first English-speaking country since Trinidad and it feels like we are in pretend land—a magical place where they speak English even better than we do.

While the Americans jog after work, the British play football. You can see them on the tube—cleats on the their feet, ball in hand. It’s a park culture—games spread out across the grass. They call it having a kick about or a kick around, the term “pick-up” having an entirely different connotation—something you do in relation to women and bars.

Our first day, we head out to Regent's Park and proceed to play in what is by far the most boring game of the trip. No joking or yelling, no anger or enthusiasm, only an occasional player muttering beneath his breath. The most entertaining moment happens when a guy wearing a t-shirt that said CRAP chased a softball through our midfield. Having a kick about felt no more joyful a thing than riding an elliptical machine.

Luke tells me that Eric Cantona, former Man U star, said the British were the best fans: while the Italians and the Spaniards will boo you in hard times, the British will suffer through it with you. To some extent, you can feel this approach in the Monday kick about—they are out there no matter how dull it gets, loyal to the game long after the life has died out.

As we are leaving the park, we hear loud shouts coming from the far corner of the grass. There are guys flailing their arms and arguing intensely. Drawn to signs of animation, we head over to watch. A guy on a bicycle tells us, “If you want to play in an interesting game, this is the one you want.”

They are Iraqis—most of them Kurds, a few of them Sunnis. Because Iraq is one country we will most likely not be going to, we’re excited to play with them.

We walk up to the brawl—which apparently involves who will play on which team—and ask if we can join. This appears to overwhelm them. A man in bright yellow board shorts puts his hands up to his face. “No, no,” he says. “We are busy today. You come back tomorrow. 7pm.”

Coming-back-tomorrow almost always goes poorly, so when we arrive at 7pm on Tuesday night and no one is there, we’re not surprised. We make circles around the park. We do some detective work, talking to several guys who confirm that they do play here, often, towards the end of the daylight hours. So we camp out around a tree and survey some mild games that make us more and more sure we want to play with the Iraqis. We wait until it’s dark and there’s no chance they’re coming. Then we come back the next day and stake out our familiar spot around the tree. They don’t show, but we hear loud British accents and enthusiasm coming from another side of the park. We end up playing in a game that has a mix of pasty guys and Africans—from Gambians to Sudanese. One Londoner complains about the lack of grass: “No wonder England’s team is so weak…you can’t get any pitch because of all the cricket and the softball. Softball for God’s sake.” When we follow the guys to a bar to watch the EURO game, Dean tells us about the time this little American guy named Woody walked up to them and asked to join their game. It was an hour into it before someone recognized him as Woody Harrelson.

“Was he any good?” Luke asks.

He laughs out loud. “No skills whatsoever, but he did play hard. Rode his bicycle up to the pitch everyday. Even came when it was pouring. Became quite a good friend.”

On Friday, it is our fifth day at Regent's Park. It’s empty, the English presumably celebrating the end of the workweek by loosening their ties at a pub rather than sprinting around in the grass. We are leaning back against our depressing little tree when a man begins to juggle a ball in the exact patch of grass where we saw the Iraqis play. One after another, they begin to show up. It feels to me like a scene out of Field of Dreams.

When a guy from Fallujah asks where we are from and we mumble the United States, he makes a sound of surprise and yells, “Fallujah versus New York!” A few plays later he tells us, “I hate your government but I have no problem with the American people.” The other guys moan and tell him to stop—nobody wants to talk politics on the field.

It is one of those games where you would never know it didn’t matter, that it was just a pick-up game in the park between middle-aged guys with jobs in concrete-mixing and information technology. They played with so much effort, as passionate about each goal and each play as the players in EURO2008. When I ask the guy in construction how he could do hard work all day and then find enough energy to sprint the field, he shrugs as though this is too obvious a question, “This is my fun, this is my happiness.”

The Legend of Ruud van Nistelrooy, The Curse of the Americans, and The Cake Side of Life

2008-06-17T01:48:00.001-07:00

Four years ago, Ruud van Nistelrooy--international Dutch superstar--took a vacation along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. The weather was bad--dark sky, poor visibility, unappealing road trip conditions. So when he saw a sign for Holiday Inn Drive, he pulled off the highway and opted to wait out the weather.

While hauling his bag out the car, he noticed a small white placard: ASHEVILLE INDOOR SOCCER CENTER.

The Asheville Indoor Soccer Center is a massively confusing place to find--you must drive down Holiday Inn drive through the hotel parking lot until you reach a winding, poorly-lit road that takes you to a vinyl-sided warehouse one could think was abandoned were it not for the small, easily-missable sign with an arrow allegedly pointing toward an indoor soccer field. If you are Bobby Somerville, indoor center manager, there is no chance an international superstar is going to arrive in your foyer.

When the tall brown-haired man with a strong nose walked into the indoor center and explained that he was on holiday and had been driving for a long time and wanted to bang the ball around a bit to stretch out his legs, Bobby Somerville was getting ready to go home. Because Bobby is a softie, and not because he thought he might be talking to Ruud van Nistelrooy, he agreed to keep the field open for another half hour.

Ruud's first strike banged off the ceiling lights. Irritated, Bobby stood up from his desk and raised his arms. Ruud smiled sheepishly and gave him an apologetic wave.

Five minutes later, Mike Rottjakob, the Asheville soccer coaching director, walked in and said, '' Who are those guys?''

''Hell if I know,'' Bobby said.

Mike walked out of the office and back to the field, watching for several minutes before returning to Bobby's desk. ''I think that's Ruud van Nistelrooy.''

Together, they leaned over the walls of the indoor field and tried to decide if it was possible that one of the top goal-scorers in the world could be playing right there in front of them, in Asheville, North Carolina.

''Ruud?'' they called.

''Ruud van Nistelrooy?'

He never answered them directly--just smiled and continued to hit perfect volleys from goal to goal.

''He was very coy,'' Bobby would tell me, as I made him repeat the story again as I filed team registrations at my part-time job at the indoor center. ''He'd smack a volley, saying in jest, 'Who could hit a volley like that? Ruud!'''

Within twenty minutes, Mike and Bobby called every soccer fan they knew and Ruud van Nistelrooy was playing in a pick-up game with anyone who wanted to play.

Because of this story, and my subsequent fondness for Ruud van Nistelrooy, when Ryan, Luke, Ferg and I are putting $10 on a team in the EURO 2008, I choose the Dutch.

Ferg bets on the Germans--a solid, safe pick, Luke opts for the French, which he blames on the boys of Marseille, who effectively convinced him of their greatness even though they'd be missing Zidane, and Ryan went with the Italians.

I don’t hold Ryan’s pick against him. Primarily a tennis player, I figure he must not know the Italians are the team you love to hate...performative dives and pouty faces nothing you would ever knowingly choose to support. I haven’t forgiven them for the dramatics that brought on the questionable penalty kick robbing the Aussies in the semi-final, nor the questionable penalty kick against the United States in group play, nor the way Materazzi insulted Zizou's mother and then crumbled to the ground. Some countries teach the dive as a component of the game…and some countries don’t.

Of course, once we are inside a roomful of Italians, I keep this perspective to myself.

As the Italians were kicking off against the Dutch, we were arriving an Arezzo, where we were spending the night at an art school...an art school without a working television. We drop off our bags, hop into our rental car, and begin to scour the streets for a television, which is usually quite easy to find when the national team is playing. But the Arezzo downtown is not accessible by car. It's a twenty-minute walk we don't have time for. We know of one bar on the outskirts of town but when we arrive, it's closed, garage door all the way down.

But we can hear sound coming from the other side of the door.

Rebekah and Luke bang on the door and someone from the inside raises it halfway up while we state our case.

A second later, we are surrounded by Italian men who have shut down the bar in order to fully focus on the game. It is a very loud room, but not a happy, loud room because the Italians are already down 2-0.

With a two goal lead, I am able to keep my game reactions fairly neutral. It is not until Holland scores their third goal that Rebekah, Luke, and I give ourselves away with a small hoot of happiness. The four men to our left slowly turn their eyes on us, a new awareness in their faces: they have let traitors into the room. They have given their beer and their food to traitors.

The Americans are deemed a curse. We know this because a large man in the back row rises from his seat and makes several trips to the bathroom, cupping water in his hands and flicking it at us, trying to free us of our demons. We smile apologetically, pat them on their shoulders, yell Grazie, and head home.

Three days later, we're on our way to Innsbruck, Austria to see EURO 2008 up close. It's the Spaniards against the Swedes and we harbor a fledgling size hope of getting tickets.
As hordes of colorfully dressed fans pass us by, we hold a small sign: We need tickets. This prompts lots of pats on the shoulder, ''Ha, don't we all.'' One smug couple walks by and asks us how much we'd be willing to pay for a ticket. We say, "150 euros?'' and they laugh in our faces.

So when a round Spaniard in a Peter Pan hat tells us he's got two tickets in Category 1 but that he wants to sit with his friends--and that he'll sell them to us for 150 euros a piece--we can't believe our luck. It is still a load of money, but it's about face value and we think, how many chances do you have to go see a EURO game?

I pat Peter Pan's arm in enthusiastic thanks and let out a small, happy squeal.

We find some leftover yellow face paint laying on the street and spread it across our cheekbones. We haven't decided whether which team we want to win, but yellow is a crossover color that can be read as support for either side. Groups of fans parade in front of the camera, making faces, singing songs, shouting game predictions.

A half an hour before game time we make our way through the stadium gates. We are laughing, giddily excited, aflush with success, when the woman examining our tickets says, "Just a minute,'' and begins to talk into her walkie-talkie. She points at some very small print. She laughs and says something in rapid German to the other ticket attendant, then turning toward us. ''It should say 'Coke Side of Life.' This says 'Cake Side of Life.' These are quite fake.''

We look toward each other in embarrassed, disappointed horror. We are thinking of our euros and the game that will happen without us...when we see a fleet of German police officers coming our way...and it occurs to us that scalping tickets isn't entirely legal. We're not sure which part of the process is against the law--the buying or the selling--but when we ask if we are in trouble, the German officer, says, ''Oh yes,'' seemingly surprised we didn't know that immediately.

We are led through the stadium into a small police station, where we hold our yellow-painted faces in our hands, listening to the sounds of game above us and imagining what it would've been like to see Fernando Torres make a run up the wing...and what we would do if we came across Peter Pan.

The police speak in fast German and apparently decide we are not in trouble. We tell them we have the guy on tape and their undercover cops snap photos of our LCD screen. They escort us to another police station and as we exit through the restricted section of the stadium, we see a field covered with dozens of guys and girls in fluorescent uniform playing in a pick up game, fifty or so ambulances lined up behind them. It's the red cross against the paramedics and our escorting cop allows us to stop and watch for a minute or so before we are whisked off to the other station. Until their walkie-talkies summon them out to rescue an injured player or a drunken fan, they sprint across the field in their heavy black boots, just as taken with the EURO football fever as everyone else.

Two hours later, the Spain/Sweden game is over and we are still in the station. Not only have we not gotten to see the game live, we have not gotten to see the game at all. As our policeman drives us back to the center of the city, we call out the car window to the passing fans: Who won? When a group of Swedes tell us to fuck off, we have a good idea of the outcome.

Later, we receive a magic phone call: able to identify the green hat on one of the cams set up all over the city, they nabbed Peter Pan. While we never got to see the game we railed for hours to see, at least we got our money back, and at least they got Peter Pan.

Priests on mopeds, heels on cobblestone...and other paradoxes

2008-06-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

We want to play in the Vatican. We have the slightly illogical rationale that if we can get inside a Bolivian prison, we should be able to get inside a church.

This desire sprang from the discovery of something called the Clericus Cup—where priests-in-training from all over the world play each other on a field overlooking St. Peter’s Basilica. For weeks now, Luke has been reading up on these player-priests: even Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone—the Vatican’s Secretary of State—is a calcio devotee who recently bought a Serie C team and hopes one day to have a professional team representing the Vatican.

Though Luke sent a barrage of emails to everyone from the info desk to the Pope himself, we’ve arrived in Rome and no one has responded. But knowing that somewhere within the walled city, the clergymen play pick-up games raises a whole host of questions in our minds: do they play peacefully, or do they exalt in their one opportunity to let loose? Are there dirty tackles, cheap shots? How competitive do these guys get?

So—hoping we’ll have more luck in person than via the Internet—we head out in Rome, walking past women with high heels wedged in cobblestones and priests who fly by on mopeds, robes billowing in the wind. We wander into and around the Vatican carrying a soccer ball, asking any particularly sprightly-looking priest, “Excuse me Father, do you play?” We also talk to policemen, Swiss Guards, and official looking men in suits and earpieces; while one suit rainbows the ball and one priest dribbles the ball with his hand as though it is a basketball, telling us how much he loves football, everyone is pretty clear about the fact that we’ve got no chance of getting in. One Swiss Guard tells us with a small smile, “It is quite impossible.”

We are redirected to the seminary schools, where we are told, “Oh yes, they play all the time, all the time.” Once we find a seminarian to escort us to the field, we arrive at a large dirt area with several accompanying bulldozers. The old grass field is being replaced with turf. “This is Italy,” our seminarian tells us. “It will take a long, long time.”

The next day we give the Vatican one more try, this time carrying an “official” letter—composed at an Internet Café an hour earlier—requesting permission to play with the Swiss Guard. We walk up to very friendly men in puffy blue pants who hand off our letter to a guard named Ruben who comes out of the tower and tells us that he does in fact play on the Swiss Guard soccer team. He takes our Italian cell phone number and tells us he will call us after he talks to the captain of the team.

We have no idea if he will really call and are surprised when our phone starts ringing and the Swiss Guard is on the other end. Ruben tells us the field they usually play on is in the seminary school—the same field we stood on earlier among the bulldozers.

We ask if by chance there might be other playable fields in Rome. He says oh sure, and tells us he will call us once they figure it out.

He never calls. We try his number several times and give it ten or so rings before we hang up and relinquish hopes of playing with anyone in or around the Vatican.

We take off for a road-trip through the Tuscan countryside. It is good to be outside the city and away from our failure—we zip past vineyards, red wildflowers, and endless hills until we reach a small town at the base of the Appanee Mountains.

In Italy, priests are not the only occupational group to form teams; there are national teams for most professions, from lawyers to singers to writers. We've come to Casola because the 2900 person town has two writers on the national writers team.

Claudio is a traveling jewelery salesman who's published an avant garde style novel, as well as some soccer articles in the Italian GQ. Cristiano is a well-known Italian writer who still works every night in his uncle's pizzeria--because no matter how famous he gets, he still sees himself as nothing more than a pizzaiolo. Both Cristiano and Claudio love to play--telling us about what the game meant to them when they were kids and what writing means to them now: a chance to say something, to mean something, a way to make your own small world where things make
sense.

(They also tell us that Holland wins the writer's tournament every year, adding, ''They've got a guy who played for Bundesliga...wrote one very small children's book.'')

Marseille

2008-06-12T05:16:00.000-07:00

The taxi drops us off in the center of a large square in the Old Port. There are boys riding bikes through a fountain, fisherman with crossed legs drinking Pastis, and pigeons dive-bombing from window to window.

Our window is on the seventh floor and after we’ve hauled our bags and equipment up a skinny, winding staircase, we open the peeling shutters and lean outside, looking out at the masts of the sailboats—hundreds of them docked at what used to be France’s main port.

The people we are renting our apartment from invite us to a neighborhood party in a small fishing harbor carved into the side of a white cliff. There are row boats bumping up against each other and street lamps reflecting off the water. We eat goat cheese, tabouleh, and birthday cake as the neighborhood tells us about their city: “In Marseille, we have the music, the football, and the fish. And we have all the people of the world—you will see every culture walking down the street.”

By the end of the night, I have two pages of scribbled names—while it was very clear to me at the time which name referred to a large grass park and which named referred to a neighborhood with cheap ethnic food and which name referred to a beach, it’s all less clear as I’m looking at the scribbled notes the following morning.

There is one accompanying sketch—it looks a little like someone started a game of Hangman in my notebook, but when I show it to a taxi driver he reads it as a street map and drops us off at a large stretch of grass along the water.

We walk out along a rock jetty and get a shot of the bright Mediterranean water. There are guys fishing off the rocks and when we talk with them about football, a guy with slicked black hair and shiny sunglasses says, “Espere ici…” He wedges his fishing pole between the rocks and takes off, hopping from boulder to boulder until he disappears into the parking lot. When he comes back, he works at the bow tie of a plastic bag and unfolds a long-sleeve Olympique de Marseille jersey—Drogba written across the back. OM was Drogba’s first club and when interviewed, he still says things like, “This is for the people of Marseille.”

“It is real,” the fisherman says as he passes it to us. He holds it so fondly and carefully and we all wonder how long he has kept it with him in his car, so there’s never a chance he won’t have it when he needs it.

We walk back to the grass and join one of the five or six games happening across the grass. In South America, you don’t wear shoes if you are playing on grass or sand, but when Luke and I throw off our flip-flops and walk into the game barefoot, there is a sudden flock of men expressing concern over my toes. (No one seems to care about the welfare of Luke’s toes.)

Ten minutes after the game is over, there are six of us crammed into one small Fiat. Fares and Lamin—who we’ve just met—want us to hear the music of Marseille, so we are apparently on our way to a rap studio.

Luke is submerged beneath me, my head’s hitting the ceiling, and Ryan is trying to film without elbowing Ferg’s face. Lamin, a Gambian who has taught himself French in the one year he’s been here, is in the passenger seat. In the driver’s seat is Fares, who tells us as he weaves through cars, “I’m Algerian, like Zidane.”

We meet a group that plays with Soprano, the most famous rapper in France. “This city, our heart beats for football. When the football is good, the people are happy. Zizou is from here, Drogba played here, this is the center of French football.”

They freestyle a few songs for us—one of them juggling as he raps—and then they start a game of two-v-twos that ends after we dislodge two ceiling-panels.

That night, we have dinner with Fares’s family. Because we’ve played soccer with their son, they take us into their home and feed us a giant meal—fried dough filled with aged cheese, roasted chicken, homemade Algerian bread, and French pastries. “This is how we are in Marseille,” they say, shrugging off our thanks. “Everyone is welcome.”

Back at Le Pointu, the bar beneath our apartment, Ryan’s bag has arrived, only seven days late. Ryan has spent the last week wearing Ferg’s warm-up pants, Luke’s green t-shirt, and plaid whitie-tighties purchased at the French Quick-Mart. So it is a big moment to see his bag propped up against the bar.

***

We play one more game before we leave the city. We come across a group of sixteen and seventeen year olds lounging on a soccer court, taking turns attempting to chip the ball at the cross bar.

Some games have a life to them that others don’t and there’s no telling when you’re going to find it and when you’re not, but these teenagers have it—there’s a jazz to their game, a kind of intense exuberance, lots of joking, lots of sudden rage, lots of dancing, with and without the ball.

When the game ends, they take out a cell phone and use the ring tone to dance one at a time before the group. One kid has giant diamond earrings and a Gucci purse—he is ridiculously good at both football and dancing. The kid who speaks English tells me, “It’s a kind of African dancing—they are always inventing new stuff and bringing it back to Marseille.” As they move from dancing to freestyle rapping, he tells me, “Music and football are what matter here.”

Museum Football

2008-06-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

When my sister graduated from high school, my father took her to Paris, but the only details that emerged from the trip involved him snoring so loud she slept in the hotel hallway. So my image of Paris was a faded runner rug and my sister, curled in a ball at the foot of the door.

Ferg, Luke, and I arrive in Paris at 8am. Ryan, who'd gone to Spain for a family wedding, would meet us later in the afternoon.

We take the train to the metro to the basement level apartment we are renting for two nights. It is close enough to the sights to be convenient, and far enough away to feel like we are seeing the Parisian's Paris. We drop off our bags, buy bread and cheese from the supermarche, and force ourselves onto the street, even though we are thinking, at home, it is 3:30 AM and I think I'd like to be in bed.

Several people have told us there are games in the Champ de Mars, the grass stretching out from the Eiffel Tower. Ferg herself had gotten into a game in the grass with a mix of tourists several years ago. We're hoping to stumble upon something similar but when we get there, the main lawn is closed for repairs. When Ferg attempts to talk to the maintenance men, they ask her out for coffee but know nothing about the football.

On the side lawn, the only game is a swarm of French seven-year-olds who look like they're on an Eiffel Tower field trip. While Luke and I love to play with anyone from old men to fat men to first-time females, we do not love to play with seven-year-olds. Something about sprinting past small children feels wrong. So Luke and I lean back against the bench and just watch. There's an occasional game-ruiner who snatches it up with his hands and makes a break for it, the other kids tailing him until someone is able to knock it from his fingers and back down to the feet.

There is one drunk man with a Polaroid camera who wants to juggle the ball and kiss my cheek, but we opt out of a game with him. The only people left are either dozing or fondling lovers beneath umbrellas. Luke rolls the ball out in the grass and waits to see if anyone will take the bait but when no one does, we call it a day. It is not our mission to force people to play with us.

The beauty of pick-up is that it happens anywhere, with anyone, at no given place or time. This is also what makes it hard to find. When you are planning your trip, you go off the things you hear and the places people tell you games happen, but when you arrive, there is no guarantee that the Mennonites still play in the Bolivian jungle or that the lawn of the Eiffel Tower won't be temporarily closed.

We walk six or seven miles home, soaking wet but warm, passing the Musee d'Orsay, the Champs Elysees, and the Louvre. We sit down at the Bataclan cafe on the corner across from the alleyway that leads to our apartment. The directions we gave Ryan are vague, and we are hoping to intercept him before he has the chance to get lost.

In South America, every bug, calamity, and illness found Ryan, so it's no surprise to us when
we see him walking towards us, three hours late and without a bag. We hold up our hands and he mumbles, "They canceled my flight and lost my bag." Bag contents included both eyeglasses and disposable contacts so our cameraman is now blind.

We regroup over dinner, heading to a restaurant Antoine, the man whose basement we are renting, recommended: "It is good, cheap, and you will like it." The restaurant has soft light, stone walls, and photographs of memorable tombstones. The tables are close together and the menu is written on a rotatable chalkboard. We order two entrees to split--beouf de bordeaux and some sort of very good fish. As we wait for the food, I pull out my notebook and attempt to write out sentences in French I think we'll need: Ou est le football? Nous faisons un documentaire sur le football de rue a travers le monde. Peuvons-nous jouer football avec toi?

When our waiter, Fabrice, comes over, he sits down with my notebook and re-conjugates my verbs, changes my articles, and adds accents. Before long, the whole restaurant begins to brainstorm on places we could go. The man to our right spends half his year in Chicago, and half his year in Paris. He tells us, "You are very lucky to have found this restaurant." Fabriez sighs and sits down, "But Paris is like a museum, you cannot play football inside a museum. I think you will need to go somewhere else."

The next afternoon we head back to the Eiffel Tower for one more try. The weather is better, the mood is lighter, and we know by now that what you find one day does not dictate what you will find the next.

The Champs de Mar has five or six squares of lawn and we decide to head further and further back, until we can see all of the Eiffel Tower in our camera lens. As Rebekah shoots a scenic and Luke and Ryan head to the bathroom, I scan the lawn for prospective players. I glance to my right and say, "Soccer."

It seems too good to be true so I jog closer to make sure it is real and not some kind of mirage. There, to my right, is a soccer court, the Eiffel Tower shooting up directly behind it.

The guys to the side of the court waiting to get on look like French school boys--shaggy hair, reading glasses, dark jeans, backpacks. One of them looks like a gruffer version of Leo DiCaprio. He speaks English and explains to us that you play until two goals, winner stays on.

We collectively roll up our jeans and play. The guys are as good as anyone we played with in South America, and this comes as something of a surprise. In all honesty, we didn't think the Europeans stood a chance.

My impression of the Eiffel Tower on our first day was rather underwhelming--swarming tourists, gray sky, and a giant metal structure around which no one played soccer--but today it is different: the sky is pink and the sun has fallen directly beneath the tower, giving the impression that it is lit from within. There are people all around, lounging in the grass, sitting on the steps, kicking soccer balls, walking hand in hand, living happily within the Paris museum.

On our way back to the apartment, a well-dressed French man mistakes us for Parisians and asks us for directions. Excited by the opportunity to say the one sentence I remember from French class, I say, "Je ne parle pas francais" and we continue walking. One hundred yards later he is still behind us, apparently heading the same direction we are. When he asks where are you from and why you are here, we tell him about our football documentary. He takes the ball from Luke's hand and says, "Ah? You watch this."

In his gray sweater vest, knit pants, and black shiny shoes, he starts juggling in the shadows of the cobblestone street.

Leg Two: Europe and Africa

2008-05-19T14:02:00.000-07:00

We've spent the last five months in the States, editing down 120 hours of footage from South America and finding the funds to continue the trek. On May 28th, we take off for Europe and Africa. We'll hit England, France, Italy, Germany, and Hungary, and we'll watch Spain play Sweden in Innsbruck, Austria. We'll spend a week in East Jerusalem before heading to Africa, where we'll visit the Pyramids in Cairo, the slums of Nairobi, the World Cup stadium in Cape Town, and the rural coastline of Ghana.

We are very, very excited.

Playing in the Prison

2007-12-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

San Pedro Prison sits behind San Pedro Plaza--a bustling square in the center of La Paz. Couples sit on benches around a fountain, kids chase futbol pelotas in the grass, and women set up stands for the Thursday through Sunday bread market. Our hostel is on the side of the square opposite to the prison.

At the infamous San Pedro Prison, the inmates are in charge. Though the guards patrol the outside, they do not enter the inside. Within the high walls, San Pedro inmates run their own society. There are wives and children, market stalls, and men selling ice cream, toy trinkets and cocaine. Like the outside world, you need money to get by. Even cells must be bought--if you have no money, you sleep beneath the starry sky.

Our first morning in La Paz, we sit on a bench and watch the gate of the prison and the guards who surround it. It’s hard to find the nuances of language to convince an armed guard to unlock the gates for you and let you wander in with your video camera.

Carrying our snazzy postcard, we stroll up to the men with green uniforms and guns, attempting to explain the merits of our project and why the San Pedro inmates would want to be a part of it.

We are not outright sent away--we feel encouraged. Speaking enthusiastically, he points us to a side door where we are to talk to a director. A man at this door does outright send us away. He chases us out as he speaks in fast Spanish we can’t fully understand…though we do make out something about the US Embassy.

Dispirited but not defeated, we take a cab to the US Embassy. While things are often closed on Saturdays and Sundays, sometimes even Mondays or Fridays, nothing is ever closed on a Wednesday…except, we discover, the US Embassy. Apparently, if you lose your passport or have your child abducted on a Wednesday, you must wait until Thursday.

So we return to our hostel and continue to gaze at the prison across the square. We wander downstairs to the Internet Café and spend enough time researching to make good friends with the owner. He shows us pictures of himself dancing in traditional clothing and we tell him about our desire to play futbol inside San Pedro. At this, he walks to the doorway, whistles at some men in uniform, and gestures them toward us. Five minutes later, we are being escorted by soldiers to the director’s office.

The director writes down directions to the Bolivian Ministry of Prisons on a pink piece of paper. “You need to speak to Alejandro. If he gives you permission, you may talk to the prisoners.” He tells us, “It is difficult, but not impossible.”

At 8am, we sit at a long conference table and find out Alejandro (who has an awesome scar running the length of his face) is an avid futbol player. Within fifteen minutes, we have permission. “But,” he clarifies. “You must talk with the prisoners--they decide.”

The following day, three elected prison leaders listen with rapt attention as Rebekah and Luke explain our film. They are enthusiastic and make insightful comments about the connectivity of the world’s game. They nod with approval and then they say, “And now for the painful part…what it’s going to cost you.

“We want fruitcakes for one-fourth of the prison.”

Luke and Rebekah are puzzled. “How will we carry 300 fruitcakes?”

“You give us the money and we buy the fruitcakes.”

So by “fruitcakes” they mean cash. We do some tallying in our heads--if we continue to eat bread, ham and bananas, if we buy the cheapest bus tickets to Peru, if we don’t have any unanticipated expenses, we’ll have enough to shell out $400 so we can play with the prisoners. This is how San Pedro works.

The following day, we hand over an envelope of cash and walk through the prison to the futbol court. We walk by throngs of men who send up a chorus of low whistles as we pass.

Over the court, there are double balconies that hold an audience of men who voice both approval and disapproval. On the court, there is no excessive dribbling--they play it to each other in sharp, quick passes that show how well they know each other and how often they play. It is the best soccer we’ve seen in South America and it also the most intense.

To finish our tour of the continent, we head to Peru, where we play on the floating islands of Lake Titicaca; in the high mountains in the Andahuaylillas district, where cholitas play in long layered skirts and bright hats; and on a concrete court along the shoreline in Lima.

And on December 18th, we headed home, dreaming of clean clothes, Christmas cookies, and squishy pillows.

Thank you to everyone who has helped us--from the families who donated to the families who took us in, from Rancho Alsaciano in Brazil to Casa Andina Hotels in Peru, from those who fed us to those who carted us around, from those we played with to those we played against.

For the next three months, we’ll be in Durham, editing, finding money, and planning for leg two: Africa and Europe. If you know of a story or a city that can’t be missed, send us an email at info@thesoccerproject.com.

Adventure in Bolivia

2007-11-30T17:27:00.000-08:00

In 1984, Jorge placed fourth in shooting at the Los Angeles Olympics. He's a Colombian living in Bolivia who owns a cattle ranch and a dove-hunting lodge. In and around both places, everyone-- but him--plays futbol.

The cattle ranch is twenty minutes outside of a village of straw-roofed homes in the basin of the Amazon. Every afternoon the men play and the village of San Fermin gathers around the tree to watch. At half-time, the women dip coffee mugs into a utility bucket full of corn water and pass them to us. Someone else pushes out a wheelbarrow full of neon soda pop for the kids who are wrestling on the surrounding grass.

After the game, Chichito drives us out to the cattle ranch. The next day, while we are out on horseback, rounding up cows in the jungle, Gwendolyn shoots a rifle at an alligator. This makes her very, very happy, even though she is closer to hitting the parrots in the surrounding trees than the alligator.
Afterward, we leave for the lodge, driving down dirt roads that cut through the Bolivian jungle, stopping occasionally to let buffalo pass. After a day of rain, the roads are mud and we slip and slide from one side to the other as Rebekah and Gwendolyn hold their breath. Luke says ¨What, haven't you ever done doughnuts before?¨ Rebekah says, ¨Sorry Luke, swerving around in a car isn't usually a girl´s rite of passage.¨ When we nearly lose control of the car, fishtailing off the road, we hear a loud thump on the roof. Ryan, who is up top filming tracking shots, has narrowly escaped being thrown off the Landcruiser and into the trees.

Eight hours later, we arrive at the hunting lodge. There´s a crocodile skull in the fire place, giant anaconda skins stretched across the wall, and bright, rare hammocks knit by an Indian tribe in
Colombia. Jorge tells us stories about free diving in the Amazon among the piranhas and catching a grouper so big he could fit his five-year-old inside of it...there´s that picture, plus the picture of his daughter Daniela making friends with a jaguar.

At 6pm, all the workers take off--Ryan´s back on top of the Landcruiser, filming the two players hanging onto the back and the motorcycle behind us hauling a cart full of players out to the field. When we arrive, there are approximately three giant mud puddles. One guy takes a bucket and begins to scoop out some of the water. Luke, trying to be helpful, grabs a soup can from the trash and begins to go at the water as well, like someone using a thimble to scoop up the ocean.

The game revolves around two objectives: 1) score goals, and 2) do everything you can to avoid the mud puddle. There is much sliding, skirting, and screaming, but there is only one total capsize into the mud. There´s a Mennonite colony nearby and they crane their necks to watch as their horse carts pass by.

After our adventures in the middle of nowhere Bolivian jungle, we decide to head to the middle of nowhere Bolivian Salt Flats. We book a 26-hour bus to Uyuni, with a one-hour layover in Sucre. The city of Sucre, however, goes on strike. Jorge will not let his daughter´s friends head for the danger. So we take an all-night bus to Cochabamba. There is no air-conditioning and it is pass-out hot. We are sweating as though we´ve just been thrown into a pool or just played a ninety-minute summer game in Texas. Luke, the only one with access to a window, switches seats with Gwendolyn so she can have a turn sticking her head out to the world, desperately gulping in air. She wakes up to a thunderstorm in her face. She whips her head inside, fleeing pelting raindrops. Ryan, who is sitting beneath an apparent leak, is also in the middle of the rain. All night, we watch the violent storm, the lightning, the cracking thunder, wondering if the bus ride will ever be over.

Eventually, we arrive at our next bus station. Ferg eats an empanada filled with suprise beef stew that makes her sick on the next bus ride. It is her turn to have her face out the window. In Oruru, we have a ten-hour layover. We scout each bus to Uyuni and choose the company with the friendliest ladies and the prettiest posters. We go watch a terrible Evan Almighty that is dubbed in Spanish, then return to the bus terminal. We listen to the jukebox that plays both Enya and Ja Rule and watch the Cholas who've wrapped plastic bags around their top hats to protect them from the rain. When we are about to board, the friendly lady who no longer looks friendly briskly takes our tickets and switches them out with new tickets. The Uyuni bus companies have apparently consolidated and there are ten or so people who have to stand in the aisle as we take off for our all-night bus ride. We head to the city described as ¨climatically-challenged¨ in our guide book...without heat and with the sudden realization that the window in front of us is broken and won´t close--we clutch the jackets we bought at a secondhand market in Santa Cruz tightly around our throats, pull our handwoven beanies down over our faces, and try not to die.

A man gets off the bus and one of the seatless Cholas sits down next to Ryan. She touches Ryan´s cheek and says, ¨Frio?¨ Ryan nodds vigorously and she says, Poor Child, nuzzling his face into her bosom. She wraps him into her blanket and drapes her legs across his. We are all very jealous of Ryan.

At 4am, they drop us off in a deserted town. While they told us there was a nice, bright bus station with always-waiting tour guides, there is absolutely no one around. They kick us out of the bus company office and we walk through the streets. It is colder than South Bend. (It is the close of Gwendolyn´s birthday, and the three bus-rides from hell have made it memorable.)

The next three days, we drive past flamingos, red lagoons, volcanoes, Salvador Dali's desert, and cactus islands. We play a game in the Salt Flats: miles and miles of blindingly white salt. When the ball is shot wide, it rolls forever. It´s a surreal world and we love it in that foggy, mystical way that happens when you have not slept.

When the trip ends, we head for La Paz, one of the highest cities in the world. We have our hearts set on playing in San Pedro Prison.

Mendoza: Playing in Wine Country

2007-11-28T13:57:00.000-08:00

On the grassy area outside the bodega, between the Malbec grapes and the Cabernet Sauvignon, where Emilio's sister got married and where the ducks come when they are tired of the pond, we play a partido as the sun sets behind the Andes.

Emilio and Antonio unwind the garden hose into one sideline, the vineyards serving as the other. Overturned buckets act as goals. When they pick teams, they tell us, "This is our tradition." Raul and Miguel walk towards each other from about twenty paces apart like they are on a tightrope or in some kind of reverse duel. With every step, Raul says, "Pan" and Miguel says "Queso." Pan, Queso, Pan, Queso...until Raul's foot lands on Miguel's and he gets first pick.

When Luke rockets a ball into the grapes, they joke, "Dont worry, it´s only a couple thousand pesos worth of Malbec."

They are a group of guys brought together through wine: Emilio is a landscape artchitect and grape consultant, Raul is an economist and professor who analyzes wine tourism, Antonio is a bodega architect, and Lucas and Paulo develop vineyards. Some grew up on vineyards, learning the art from their grandfathers, others came to it on their own. Together, they want to one day make their own wine. For now, the play futbol, have post game asados, and tell us, "It is better to drink wine after the game than before."

Buenos Aires - A Love/Hate Relationship

2007-11-18T15:37:00.000-08:00

This is why we love Buenos Aires: The men hum tunes to themselves as they whisk by us on the sidewalk and the women wear leather high heels in distinctive colors. Bookstores and trees line the sidewalks. There´s the corner bakery where we buy a bag of french baguettes for two pesos and there´s the old cafe where Jorge Luis Borges came to write. When we wake up, we sit on our balcony and drink cafe con leche while watching boys hang out the windows of the school across from our apartment.

This is why we hate Buenos Aires: we get robbed on the Subte (Ryan´s wallet deftly removed from his pocket); the trees spit on us (yellow gunk plopping onto the side of our faces); the bookstores boast of novels in English but only carry Sweet Valley High; and worst of all, we can´t find any futbol.

But it´s only a wallet and not a camera.

And we eventually stumble into a bookstore with shelf upon shelf of English novels (Jack Kerouac´s On the Road, written on the original scroll, a photo series of Hemingway in Africa, plus Charles Bukowski, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Michael Chabon, and Truman Capote). Gwendolyn and Rebekah, who have not read much since we´ve left the country--studying Spanish and logging footage in any downtime--return to the boys and the apartment with guilty faces and books there won´t be time for.

And, after a few days of showing up to empty fields even though it is the prime soccer hour when work is over and the sun is soft, we learn the way of the portreros...

We are walking down the sidewalk, feeling disheartened, grumpy and ready to expose the giant country that is supposed to be a futbol fiend as the least pick-up oriented country in South America. Then we see a cluster of men wearing shinguards and turf shoes and giving every sign of having been recently engaged in a futbol game. Rebekah asks, ¨Donde esta la cancha?¨ and they sling their thumbs behind them and say ¨Aqui.¨ We look in the direction of their thumbs and see only a restaurant. We look again and see a court hidden behind tables.

Instead of dance floors, Buenos Aires restaurants have futbol courts (except for the tango restaurants, which have both). There are clubs throughout the city and we wander into them. In Club Eros, the court is a checkerboard and the tables in front of it have white and green tablecloths, candlelight and bife de chorizo. Unlike Brazil, where you play for your right to stay on the court, in Argentina you need a hundred pesos to rent it out for an hour. Luke and Gwendolyn are aghast, ¨100 pesos? For the two of us?¨ No, no, they tell us, you need eight or so friends. We dont´t have eight friends; we have two, and they´re both behind the camera waiting for us to make something happen. When Gwendolyn asks to join in a ensuing game, a group of guys tell her, ¨Sorry--we´re full.¨ She doesn´t know whether this is because they assumed she´d be bad--in which case she hates them--or because they don´t want to give up any playing time--in which case she respects them. Again and again, Luke and Gwendolyn fail to get into games. ¨Well, where do we find games then?¨she asks, annoyed. ¨Surely there is some place you dont have to pay." (And places where having friends isn´t a prerequisite.)

¨Well the real futbol happens in the villas. But you can´t go into the villas.¨

We go into the villas. It feels like the favelas in Brazil, but this time, we know nobody on the inside. They´re not as organized and there is no non-profit group we can email. We know it´s not an intelligent decision but we want futbol, real futbol. We ride the blue Subte out to the last stop and we don´t take much. We ask the banana man where Villa 31 is. ¨Very, very dangerous,¨he says, while pointing out how to make our way. We walk down the train tracks into the shanty town that sits directly beneath a major highway into the city. It´s a Sunday, and it´s the neighborhood championship, so most of Villa 31 is piled around the sidelines of the villa´s main road that is doubling as a field. There´s the smell of barbeque, a man selling a parrot who is plucking at his buttons, kids playing with stereophone--it feels friendly, we watch futbol and make a friend who tells us we can play with him the following day.

We go back the next day, feeling a bit more confident, like maybe the banana man is an exaggerator.

While we are filming under the watch of Gustavo, a policeman stops us, warns us, and then says, ¨It´s your life, not mine.¨ Another policeman tells us to leave. Gustavo still says it´s safe. A third policeman tells Luke, ¨Last week, channel two came and they stole their cameras and bashed in their heads.¨ This statement carries the most weight. We hope it is just the policeman telling us lies that will scare us enough to leave. But the fact is confirmed an hour later by the sister of one of the guys we played with. Another guy calls out to us, ¨They´re going to rob you.¨ But we´ve made friends with the guys we played with and hope their presence will be enough. We film and then get the hell out of there--heads still in tact.

(While in Buenos Aires, Gwendolyn also decides she wants to play with Maradona. Luke, the only one obligated to humor her, accompanies her on her search. Having read in a 2006 online article in The Guardian that Soul Cafe is his favorite bar and Eh Santino is his favorite restaurant, they go, to the poshest part of the city, saying, ¨Excuse me, do you happen to know Maradona?¨ It´s an unsuccessful mission.)

Finally, we take an all night bus to the wine region of Mendoza. On the ride, we´re offerred sherry, an appetizer, two glasses of wine, dinner, dessert, and a glass of Tia Maria or scotch. Totally confused, we press a button that converts our chairs into beds and fall asleep.
.

Uruguay: A Search for Gauchos

2007-11-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

Uruguay---the country that seems small enough to fit in your hand. We decide to rent a car. Like Cuba, Uruguay is filled with old-timey classics---we imagine ourselves driving through the countryside in a 1960s Ford or a muted-color Fiat. We drive away from the rental lot with a bright yellow Euro box.

We take off for the interior of Uruguay, listening to the tribal music Anderson gave us. We have no idea where we are going. There´s Route 5, Route 7, and Route 31 and we can go anywhere. We head north, down dirt highways, past cows and more cows. When there is a town, we drive through it--along the tree-lined square, past the church and the school. Every few miles there is a field, a horse often framed by the goalposts, cows grazing near what would be a sideline if there were any sidelines. We play with fifteen year olds and a church group and keep moving. We want to play with the cowboys...the gauchos...the legends.

We are not quite sure what a gaucho is. Our guidebook tells us they wear sombreros or berets and baggy pants tucked into high boots. Our Uruguayan family friends tell us they used to roam the countryside, getting in shoot-outs over land until the goverment made them put up fences. With the fences came the end of a certain type of gaucho and we´re not sure what we´ll find.

We drive past an agricultural school where there are two handfuls of twenty-something-year-old guys wearing berets and sitting on benches. (We find out later that they are actually seventeen and eighteen, but this is hard to believe as their confident, sun-worn faces look so much older than our own.) They all have their legs crossed like intellectuals and they hold thermoses of Mate tea: a green, grainy drink that looks like someone emptied out a lawnmower bag. Something a witch or a hippy would drink. They pour it into glasses that look like sanded-down coconut shells.

We roll down our windows and Ferg asks, ¨Juega fútbol?¨ They give us a kind of snort and point to the field. ¨Claro,¨ they say. We play in a game that involves lots of beret throwing and guys chewing on the tips of corn husk cigarettes. It´s forceful soccer, when tricks fail, they are still able to power the ball through the mess. The game ends with a rainstrom and we return to our room above a bar. It´s a giant building with high ceilings and hallways that face each other, like an orphanage out of a film. We sit on four identical cots, listening to the rain pound against the roof, water coming through the shuttered window by Ryan´s bed.

The following morning we meet the cowboys at 7 am. They wear v-neck wool sweaters, berets, and what look like old-fashioned baseball pants tucked into brown boots. At 7:30, they push an old Mercedes work truck and hop in two at a time as the engine kicks over. We follow them deeper into the countryside through a low, thick fog that hides the cows and the trees, everything except for the truck in front of us and the dirt it kicks up.

Twenty kilometers out, we turn down a private road into a farm. All the guys in the back of the truck laugh and point as they watch our mini car leaping through water and taking the punishment of big rocks.

None of the four of us have ever seen sheep shaved. Ryan and Ferg film, Luke and Gwendolyn stare.

Every so often a sheep makes a break for it, turning suddenly and scampering in the wrong direction. The four of us lean against the wall and root for it secretely, the voice inside our heads saying, ¨Go, go! You can make it.¨

For lunch, we eat lamb chops.

In the stretch of grass in front of the barn, we play 5 v 5, each team occasionally going down a man when someone had to sit and pick the thorns out of his feet. Our goalkeeper is a true gaucho--the fifty-something-year-old who knows the sheep, fattens the pig and teaches the agricultural students how to work the land. He wears a sombrero, an unbuttoned flannel shirt--big belly out and about--and pants with rips up both sides tucked into leather boots. He looks like the legend.

For the weekend, we head back to Montevideo and play in the games that fill the city. Our favorite spot is in the Old City--the beautiful buildings forgotten and ghost-like, soot in the crevices and carvings of stone. Cement blocks filling in the great windows so no one can find their way inside.

After we play in games up and down the Rambla, we take the overnight ferry to Argentina, arrive at 7am, and walk through downtown.

The Day We Found Paradise

2007-10-29T08:14:00.000-07:00

All of a sudden, we found ourselves standing on top of a sand dune. There were mountains, a winding shoreline, and a harbor with fishing boats lilting to the right. The water was teal and there were islands in the distance. It was as picturesque as the Virgin Islands or any other top tourist destination, only it was empty--except for the horse cart in the distance and the dog at our side.

We'd taken an all night bus ride to Curitiba, a four hour bus ride to Floripa, and another two hour bus ride on a local bus down dirt roads, stopping every so often to pick up school kids. We knew we were headed for a pousada in a fishing village where they have pick up games on a sand bank formed where the diverging river meets the ocean. We did not know it would feel like paradise or that a small tan-colored dog would follow us everywhere: when we went to the grocery store, she patiently waited outside the door; when we played and filmed within the yellow goalposts further down the beach, she sat beside our camera bags; when we returned from a day out, she ran down the beach to greet us.

Our second day, Anderson--the musician and pousada manager who took us in--drove us the five minutes to Guarda do Embau, the beach that was even more scenic than the one we were on. As we pull up, there is a man sweeping in the road. Ryan turns back in his seat to watch him and says, "I'm pretty sure we know him."

While in Santos, a man who looked like Jesus with a short hair-cut approached us on the beach and handed us fruit that looked like kumquats. (Though we aren't quite sure what kumquats look like.) Luke engaged in pleasant, friendly conversation, we said good bye, and never expected to see the man again, certainly not sweeping on cobblestone streets in a 500 person village a good ten hours away from Santos.

His name is Ilson and he tells us he's a shaman. He strolls over to us, as though seeing us is an ordinary thing. He offers to take us out on his fishing boat. We walk around fifteen steps to the beach, climb into a yellow wide canoe and Ilson uses a bamboo stick to guide us across the river to a beach. He and Anderson then lead us as we climb over rocks, up a hill, and pause at the top of a cliff. From our viewpoint, we can see three or four different landscapes--there's the green grass/boulders of New Zealand, the teal water/islands-in-the-distance of the Caribbean, and the sweeping-sand-dunes of the Middle East. Ilson randomly starts doing capoeira moves and trying to engage Luke in battle. Luke, who took a few classes in Rio, shocks everyone and actually looks like he knows what he's doing. Gwendolyn compliments Ilson's leather necklace, forgetting that if you compliment someone in Brazil, they automatically give it to you. She now owns a necklace that once belonged to a shaman.

We then continue our hike, following Ilson as we repel along the side of a cliff in our flip-flops. He tells Gwendolyn to climb onto the King's throne: a rock suspended in the air, waves crashing against boulders twenty or so feet down. (The King also has a boat that only Ilson is allowed to go on.) We return back to New Zealand-scape, hike through a herd of cows grazing above the beach, head up the sand dunes, climb through some jungle, dislodge thorns from our heels, all while listening to Ilson talk about his parents abandoning him on the beach as a baby. Luke scratches his head and tells us, "Uh, he's feral. The wolves raised him on the beach until he was four." Ilson also tells Luke that Jean Claude Van Damme is his brother's father.

In the next couple days, we boat across the river to play in games on the island with the fishermen. Two look like Fabio and wear teeny-weeny bikinis. At one point, we look up and discover that the sky that was brilliant blue had suddenly turned black. As other beach goers flee, we continue to film, not wanting to abandon our most scenic game yet. Ferg keeps panning the camera, trying to capture the lightening bolts, until Ilson says, "We must leave." We listen to our shaman, board the boat, and fly across the water as we begin to be pummeled by bullet-like rain drops. Like everyone else, we take cover in the hut-bar-restaurant. It begins to madly hail. The bar owner uses the ice from the sky to make caipirinhas in a pail. As the fishermen play, "No Woman, No Cry" in Portuguese, the pail gets passed around the bar. It is the best caipirinha we've had. When there is a lull in the storm, we walk back to Pinheira, Ilson acting as our protector. Halfway there, thunder begins to boom loudly. We are racing the storm, lightening all around a purple sky. Gwendolyn, who used to run fitness on the beach for Santos during storms, wonders why she's always on a beach when there's lightening in Brazil. As the wind makes howling noises, we make it back to our pousada and our dog.

Our four-days in an ethereal utopia comes to an end and we head for another all-night bus ride...this time to Uruguay, home of the first country to win the World Cup.

Sâo Paulo: Nenê's Court and Pelé's Supermarket

2007-10-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

In São Paulo, we search for Nenê, who played with Gwendolyn for Santos Futebol Club. We take a ten-minute taxi to the metro station, ride for fifteen-minutes, change lines, take another thirty-minute ride, exit at Jabaquara, have an hour-long bus ride to Ferrazópolis, meet Nenê at the station, and catch a bus to her house. "If this were Europe, you'd have gone through three different countries," Nenê's mom says. "Here, you are still in São Paulo."

Her family--mother, father, eight brothers and sisters, and a dozen or so nieces and nephews--live in the two houses next door to each other. When they ask about our families and we convey that they are spread out, they ask us, puzzled, "Why?" We all feel kind of stumped.

From the roof of her house, you can see down on a small enclave of São Bernardo and the concrete futebol court. Growing up, she'd come up here to see if there was a game going on. Now, 25 years-old and having quit professional soccer two years ago for a steadier job to support the family, she comes up to the roof to scout a game less often. As we watch people play, she tells us a violent personal history that makes us feel like boring, sheltered Americans.

In the morning, we follow her to work at a toy factory. Wearing hair nets and ear plugs, we film...the visuals are so interesting it's hard to pull Ryan and Ferg away. When her shift ends, she goes out to the concrete court and checks to see who is playing before giving us the okay to pull out the cameras. The translation of the graffiti on the side of the wall: "Who is alive always shows up." At times she still has it, flipping rainbows over the younger guys' heads. At other times, she hangs around in the back, watching the game from a distance and looking like her mind is somewhere else. As we congregate in the kitchen after the game, her mother tells us, "I was always against it. She should live for God, not futebol. But I was at work, what could I do?"

On Sunday, we leave for Bauru, the small city Pelé grew up in. (Wikipedia will tell you otherwise...born in Minas Gerais and groomed since he was sixteen in Santos, Bauru's often forgotten, but not to those who live in Bauru.) We meet an old man who was close with Pelé's father. "He never did the same move twice. Even back in the days of peladas they'd carry him off the field."

"I'll drive you by the spot the legend used to play," Antonio tells us. He brakes in front of a construction site for a large super market. He turns around in his seat and gestures angrily. "No respect for history." Soon, you'll be able to buy dishwashing detergent and cheese in Pelé's old stomping ground. (The supermarket swears they'll have a commemorative corner.)

That night, we drive out to a game on the outskirts of town. "The best peladas are where the poor people play," our friend tells us. It's one of those schizophrenic, Florida-esque kind of skies: lightning and thunderheads to the right and sunshine to the left of the field that would look forgotten if it weren't for the thirty-odd people playing on it. There are sporadic clumps of grass and trash dotting the orange clay. Some men wear shoes, some wear socks, some wear one sock, some wear one shoe, most play barefoot. It's fifteen against fifteen, the type of game where you play against the other team as well as your own--everyone fighting for the ball. This game, like every game so far in Brazil, they call Luke "Alemão," which means "German." "Vai Alemão! Boa Alemão!" The goal is a foot-by-foot metal box and there are three guys standing in front of it. There is pretty much no chance to score. We play for two hours, nobody scores, and nobody seems too upset.

Our Brazil time is dwindling...Luke's consoling himself with rumors that Portuguese to Spanish is an easy transition, Ferg's studying her 501 Spanish verbs, Ryan's saying meekly, "I got an A in Spanish seven years ago..." and Gwendolyn has just resigned herself to being the language dummy.

Santos: Long Walks and Old Men

2007-10-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

In Santos, we worry our movie will be about us getting fat around the world: here we are in Trinidad, all fairly lean, here we are in Brazil, showing signs of being fed extravagantly by unbelievable hosts. To combat the massive intakes of food, we nix taxis and buses and go on 6 or 7 km walks between destinations. Santos is divided into regions by seven canals and we count each of them as we walk along the beach garden, ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest of its kind. Gwendolyn steps in wet concrete, literally leaving her footprint on Brazil. Ryan's stepping-in-something story is worse: as Rebekah starts shooting a game, Ryan walks off to scout out a wide-angle shot. He stands there for some time, pondering different angles of the quadra, questioning the inclusion of a tree, studying the light. He turns to walk back, feels his foot slip, and realizes that for the past ten minutes, he'd been standing in a pile of dog poop, the only pile of dog poop anywhere around.

On Monday, we're given press passes to watch the Santos men: we note that there are way fewer tricks in a professional pactice than a pelada. When a coach who decides your fate is watching, people are less keen to try and rainbow their way out of the back.

The following day, we play with the Santos women on the beach. While Gwendolyn is usually the only girl playing with guys, this time Luke is the only guy playing with meninas. None of them played on organized girls' youth teams. All of them learned their tricks na rua, on the street. You can see other games up and down the beach--goals made out of anything from upside-down bicycles to flip-flops, sidelines drawn into the sand.

***
On the field beneath our window, the old men play on Sunday mornings. At 6am, they begin to show up, sitting on the ledge of the canal. At 6:30, they walk through a fruit and vegetable market to a corner cafe, stirring sugar into their coffee and arguing over the Corinthians game. At 7, they walk through the gate to the field and sit at plastic tables at the not-yet-open bar. At 7:30, they head for the locker room. We wonder how many locations they can squeeze into pre-game. At 8am, the game finally begins.

They play well, they play hard, and they fall frequently, making wild hand-gestures and fighting over whether the tackle was clean. When Gwendolyn comes on, they laugh and smack their thighs, as though she is the unusual sight, when they are the seventy-year-olds shimmying down the field, their knees only occasionally buckling. They shout in each others' faces: "You just passed it to my knees," "He's a trashcan, he's a trashcan, pass the ball to me," "This game will be shown all over the world and that's the ball you play?" They're highly opinionated, as they all have over half-a-century of playing experience.

In the locker room after the game, there are many wrinkled butts and they are not at all camera shy. Ryan does his best to avoid full frontals. We don't want a senior-citizen schlong to leave us with an NC-17 rating. They talk trash and tell Luke that it's time for the third half--cervejas and a barbecue. We share toasts with the veterans and leave for São Paulo...

Brazil, Part 2: Nicknames & The Never-Ending Cab Ride

2007-10-02T19:39:00.000-07:00

For the next three days, we go in and out of Rocinha. A gunman greets us at the entrance one day in English. “Hello my friends. Welcome to Rocinha, the most beautiful place in the world.”

Around 9pm on Friday night, Ferg and Ryan take establishing shots of Rocinha while Gwendolyn and Luke wander over to the field. Luke scratches the back of his neck and asks the group of guys sitting by the fence if they are about to play. One burly guy in a green and blue striped t-shirt seems to be the center of the show. He wears a long gold chain and a bright pink stopwatch around his neck and everyone calls him The Boss. This guy, Anderson, is the leader of Família Valão. Valão, which means both “big sewer” and “common grave” in Portuguese, is the name of the street in Rocinha they all live on. Anderson divides the guys into three teams by tossing out red pennies, blue pennies and jerseys that say Família Valão in a font made to look like dripping blood. We play until midnight. The lights are dim and it is too dark to film.

The following night we pursue the story of the waiters. We film and eat at Pizza & Grill Gambino, which offers 180 different pizzas with toppings ranging from sushi to stroganoff. At 1am, when the garcons have put the chairs up on the tables, washed the floors, and taken out the trash, they change from yellow vests and bow ties into floral board shorts. As we pass other restaurants at closing time, they call out to waiters through the open windows and signal toward the field. On the benches beside the concrete court, they uncap jugs of homemade caipirinhas and pass out small plastic cups. We down the lime, sugar, and cachaça, Ryan and Ferg head to different camera angles, and Gwendolyn and Luke join the Pizza & Grill team. We can hear the waves.

At 4am, the game winds down and we sit. Gwendolyn asks the head-phoned waiter who watched from the sideline what he was listening to…he gives her his ear buds and takes her through the Rocky theme song and Kelly Clarkson. By 4:30am, we walk down empty streets and the waiters stay with us until they can put us in a cab.

By 7:55am, we are back in Rocinha, wanting the story of the street. We meet Anderson in a narrow corridor of Valão. His family—uncles, aunts, parents, cousins, and grandparents—live in a three or four story building, a different generation on each level. We duck into his room, the first level. He shows us a row of large futebol trophies and a corner full of kites. Our guide, Emerson, says, “The big man is a little boy. Always flying his kites.”

Anderson slings his knapsack across his chest and we leave, winding through the maze of narrow passageways. The morning papers are hung out on a laundry line. He shuffles behind a group of men until he can see the headlines: Marta, Marta, Marta / Brazil 4, Estados Unidos 0. Motorcycles honk as they weave through the crowd of people striding toward their mornings. Anderson stops into his grandfather’s bar. His grandmother is behind the counter, shaking coffee through a water filter. He eats a baguette, chugs down his cup of coffee, and we leave. As we turn our back on Valão, he points out words that have been painted over but which you can still see: Família Valão, good at futebol, funk, jiu jitsu, and women.

We part ways at the foot bridge—Anderson heads towards his job delivering hospital supplies and we head toward a beach game in Ipanema. As we leave, we know Família Valão won’t make it into the film. In the end, we weren’t allowed to pull out our cameras enough in Rocinha to tell the full story. We think about the Flannery O’Connor quote about having to kill your darlings. Rocinha is our first killed baby. In the next few days, we’ll also catch our first virus and have our first travel glitch…

The virus
While walking through the fields of Flamengo, we stop and watch a thirteen-year-old girl nicknamed Ronaldinha. The nickname fits: she’s got his charisma and flair both on and off the field. We drive an hour and a half to meet her in her favela in Nitteroí, where she’s played in peladas with boys since she was four. We play and film at the dirt field twenty or so yards beneath her house. Luke realizes he’s going to be that guy who got beat by a very small girl. She is very, very good.

Ronaldinha and her friends nickname Ryan “Michael Jordan.” As he is neither a basketball player nor black, we assume it’s because he is (kind of) tall. Ryan eats up the only time he’ll be called something that cool. Disappointingly, Luke garners the nickname of neither an athlete nor a handsome black man. They call him Macauley Culkin. (In Trinidad, they thought he looked like Bill Clinton—we’re not sure how these two mesh…)

We sleep on the floor of Ronaldinha’s house. At one point Ryan is told to go sleep at another house, wakes up there to a drunk man kicking him out in Portuguese, and promptly returns to Ronaldinha’s house. At some point in the night, in one of the two houses (which one we’ll never know), he acquires pink eye. Ferg, who shares the camera’s eye piece, has begun using the LCD screen more frequently.

The glitch
We calculate the price of four bus tickets from Rio to Santos and then try to find a taxi-driver who will drive us down the coastal route at the same price. Neco, who got out of our cab ride at one point to show us how tall his seventeen-year-old goalkeeping son is, decides he’s ready to see the coast for the first time. We see a whole lot of the coast…and realize that taking a cab driver out of his familiar terrain is not necessarily the best idea.

At 1pm, he glanced at the map, did a mini-samba, and told Luke that we were doing well and should be there within two hours. At 11pm, we pull into Santos. After four or five times asking for directions, we count: we asked twenty-one different Brazilians for directions. Neco wipes his head with a handkerchief about once a minute and tells us that we have taken him very far away. At times—on very dark roads—he turns his lights off. While we’d worried about the safety of our cameras on public buses, we now realizing driving a cab from Rio de Janeiro at night time could be a much worse idea. Finally, we arrive at our destination. Ryan’s sister has recently married a Brazilian and we are staying with her in-laws. Understandably, Neco wants a rest. Ryan wonders if asking his new family if the taxi driver can sleep over will affect his first impression. Luckily, Neco decides he’s had plenty of time with us already and gets on the road…leaving a contagious eye disease as the only thing that will mar Ryan’s first impression.

(Also, you never know how many barking dogs there are until you are trying to film.)

Brazil, Part 1: Rua de Lazer

2007-09-25T11:38:00.000-07:00

You hear about Brazilian soccer players from an early age—they are the inventors, the magicians. While Americans learn prescribed moves—the scissors, the stepover, the fake kick—Brazilians make them up, coming up with it as they go along. And while you know all this beforehand, nothing prepares you for seas of eight-year-olds who can do loop-de-loos over your head.

Arnaldo greets us at the airport and drives us to his father’s home Nova Iguaca, a ghetto suburb of Rio. It’s probably not where most tourists end up. The Brazilians look right in your face as they speak—like they are extremely considerate, wanting you to be aware that they are speaking to you, for you…even though you can’t understand anything they are saying. We nod and wait for Luke to translate. Arnaldo drives to the grassroots newspaper that tries to bring news to the million residents of Nova Iguacu. From there, a journalist and a musician take us to the small favela they both grew up in. We walk over an open sewer and into narrow corridors covered in bright graffiti. A mix of kids, teenagers and forty year olds play in the widest street—occasionally pausing for cars, old women carrying bags of groceries, and bicycles with soft horns. Construction cones serve as temporary goals—their real goals got run over by a drunken truck driver the previous week. The favela graffiti artist leans against one of his drawings—a woman with large red lips—sketching in his notebook as he watches the game. He gives Gwendolyn a drawing of a woman in very short soccer shorts. After the game, we duck into a neighborhood bar and drink Guaraná juice as a television plays highlights from the Brazil/Australia women’s game.

The following morning we play in Mesquita with old men. They are forty, fifty, sixty-year-olds who play on the dirt quadras every Saturday morning. After the game, we walk over to the outdoor bar and sit in plastic chairs, sipping on Antarctica beers as the men tell us about Brazil. We follow one player to his church kitchen where he chops meat for a barbeque. As he pulls massive shanks of beef out of a tub, he tells us about his life: his parents’ death, meeting his now-pregnant-wife when he was eleven, the hernia at age seventeen ruining his early professional career.

On Sunday evening we head back to Mesquita, where they block off certain streets for peladas (Brazil’s word for pick-up.) A sign hangs on a rope saying Rua de Lazer: street of leisure. Ryan has a posse of kids following him, regularly yelling into the microphone to watch him flinch. Another pack of kids is chanting Rebekah’s name: Hebekah, Hebekah, Hebekah. Gwendolyn is pulled through a doorway and fed chopped up hot dog (she thinks) and grape soda. Women—mothers, grandmothers—watch the games from patio chairs on sidewalks as they sip on beers and smoke cigarettes. They are the organizers of the closed-off streets; “We are old school,” they tell Luke in Portuguese.

By Monday night we have moved into the city of Rio. We go to the field beneath the apartment Luke lived in while he studied abroad. It’s raining and it’s been three years since he’s played here, but when we show up at 7, nothing has changed: it’s the same group of faces, the same tri-weekly pelada, the same slow walk out to the field. “Lukie!” they yell, smiling. “Onde que tá o cabelo?” one guy says, rubbing Lukes buzzed head. (If you google Boughen and Notre Dame you’ll see a roster pic that explains why opposing fans called him Brillo pad.)

We walk up to the group of guys sitting beneath the shelter and Luke taps his belly and says, “Cadê o gordão?” Everyone laughs and Gwendolyn waits for Luke to explain that this guy, who gives no signs of being anything but stereotypical Brazilian beautiful, used to be fat.

Monday was also the first day we ventured inside Rocinha: the government-shunned slum built onto a hillside and somewhere in the narrow range of 40,000 to 400,000 people. The only time you’ll see police there is during a raid. We have to get ok-ed by the drug lords first; they are the ones who run the favela, providing medicine, paving roads, and keeping the crime rate low. One professor emails us that he could not get us permission to enter. We finally meet two guys, Rogerio and Washington, who grew up there and agree to take us in. We plan to meet them at 3:00 at the bottom of the footbridge right outside the favela, and we get there early to ensure we don’t miss them. Our promptness backfires: they aren’t there yet, and we are now four tourists hanging out at the entrance to a slum. Ryan and Gwendolyn—with their darker features—try to create some distance between themselves and the blonde hair\fair skin of the other two. Ryan is comforted by each elderly person that passes by—the rationale goes, “if she has lived this long, surely we won’t get murdered in the span of a few minutes.” At 3:15 Rogerio shows up and escorts us in. Rebekah walks beside him, wearing her I-have-some-place-to-go face. Gwendolyn walks behind them, wearing her I’ve-been-more-afraid-before face. Ryan and Luke chat in the back as they take in the place that feels like a movie-set, with exposed wires hanging over our heads. There are men on both sides of the road with guns so big they look like toys. They send Rogerio an inquisitive look—he returns a thumbs-up and a nod, and we file into the narrow alleyways.

T&T, Part 2: Trinbagodians

2007-09-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

While out on the Queens Park pick-up fields, we are introduced to Carlan, a steel pan player for the government. On slow days--days when there are no diplomats to play music for--he rides his bike out to the field, orders a snow cone with condensed milk and watches practices and pick-up games. On Friday night, his friend Andre picks us up in Chaguanas and we drive to meet the other drummers in Barataria. As we drive by roti huts, Stag beer stands, and swarms of people waiting to catch the next Maxi Taxi, we see people playing through a high chain link fence. Andre pulls over for us and we play with local street guys on one-half of a basketball court. The game is good, the guys hanging out in the run-down bleachers are loud, the lighting is right--it's the kind of pick-up game we think will make the final cut. On Monday, we head for the island of Tobago where we hear life is slowly paced. We rent a car for two days and Ryan is elected as our left-side driver, navigating the aggressive T&T drivers, winding roads, and absence of cliffside guard-rails. We only almost die twice - once when we barely squeeze between a semi-truck and a ravine, and once when our car, for reasons unknown, decides to completely shut off while driving at full-speed. We turn the car immediately back on, and head for Store Bay where we play with guys from Trinidad, Guyana, and South Africa. It begins with a juggling circle, but as the sun starts to go down, the Trini with Rastafarian dreads points to the sky and says, "The candle's going out." So we move quickly to playing, sticking driftwood into the sand for goals. Ryan and Ferg rotate between shooting the game and killing mosquitoes on their faces as the sun dips below the ocean's horizon. On the ferry back to Trinidad the next night, we run into some of the same guys and play Gin Rummy as the boat pulls into the Port of Spain. Port of Spain is a busy city and we feel proud of ourselves as we stride towards the City Gates terminal to meet the bus (as though we know what we are doing.) We buy tickets for the busride home to ChaGUANas, try to board the bus to ChaGARAMas, therefore missing the correct bus and having to take an alternate bus route home. Around 10 pm, we are dropped by the side of the highway. A black, tinted-window SUV pulls up behind us and we meekly turn around, wondering if we are about to regret doing exactly what our hosts have told us not to do: walking with all of our expensive equipment...by the side of the highway...at night. The window rolls down and we have an anticlimatic end to the story: it is Ian, our host, who'd somehow known to come retrieve the Americans who'd become a little too flush with self-sufficiency. The unknown SUV is apparently what he drives during his night shifts as a bank courier. He drops us off at the house, lifts the lids on the pots and heads back to work as we pile goat, coconut milk, and cornmeal onto our plates. With Ian's daughters we watch Digicel Rising Star, Trinidad's slightly lower-budget version of American Idol, with a little bit of gospel, break-dancing, and a new musical twist on Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings."

We pack up and get ready to head to Rio...

Trinidad, Part 1: Garlic Pineapple

2007-09-14T12:33:00.000-07:00

At 3:30 AM, we finish packing, Gwendolyn loses her passport, and Ryan thinks he's gone blind. By 4:15 AM, Gwendolyn found her passport, Ryan discovered he stuck two sets of contacts in his eyes, and Ferg is waiting by the car, worried about time.

By 4PM, we are eating okra and pig's tail in Trinidad, with the family of Gwendolyn's club coach. Louis, a cousin, takes us walking around the Burroughs of Chaguanas. He wears a beanie with a brim, a red wife-beater, and Lugz boots. We walk by fruit stands, bunches of bananas hanging from string, men with machetes cutting open coconuts. There's a troop of stray dogs following us. We buy salty, spicy, garlic pineapple, though we did not know it would be salty, spicy, or full of garlic. Luke, who doesn't like to waste food, keeps offering the plastic baggie to people who walk by. Everyone rejects him, like he is the creepy guy at Halloween who offers poisonous candy to children. Trinidadians drive fast and without fear--aggressively nudging their way into intersections. Louis has the same approach to crossing traffic when on foot--he slings his arm out to the side and the four of us follow like little ducklings into the middle of crossing traffic. Once it turns dark, Louis says, "Without me, someone will put you in a car and steal you. I'll protect your life." We smile and nod.
At home that night, Gwendolyn talks to a friend of her coach, and he tells us to meet him at the Royal Bank at 10am. We have no idea what for. He takes us to a training session of a team trying to qualify for the semi-pros. Training sessions are exactly what we're not looking for, but we don't have the heart tell our boisterous, gold-toothed host. The team has lost two games in a row, so they run sprints all practice--Gwendolyn and Luke don't want to be the Americans who are too cool to run fitness, so Gwendolyn is sprinting her face off to keep up with long-legged Trini men. After practice, we again explain what we're looking for.
At 4pm, we arrive at the Queen's Park Savannah, the giant park filling up the largest roundabout in the world, where we hear people play pick-up in throes. At 4pm, we see zero pick-up games...it's only teams in uniform. It's also raining, so Ferg and Ryan are hiding with the cameras beneath a large tree. At 5pm, right as we are starting to feel defeated, hundreds of people--old and young--show up to play. There are different pockets of games going on and every one of them plays until it is too dark to see your hand in front of your face.
In the middle of the roundabout, there are large trenches that used to be a horse track. Ryan falls knee-deep in the water-filled ravine. Ferg makes fun of him. Approximately thirty seconds later, Ferg tries to kick a ball back into play, slips in mud, and bites it hardcore. Ryan asks, "Is the camera ok?"

The Beginning

2007-07-23T19:54:00.000-07:00

We leave in September for our first leg: three months of playing and filming in Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, & Peru. We'll have a rough cut for you to see in March, provided we don't get robbed and shot for our equipment, arrested for filming in areas we're not allowed, or devoured by piranhas in the Amazon. (But if that last one has to happen to one of us, we hope it's Rebekah.)

In the meantime, we'll be honing our foot skills in Asheville parking lots, using youtube to track down South American tricksters, trying our best not to break ridiculously expensive equipment, and of course, raising more money.