Home and Away: One Writer's Inspiring Experience at the Homeless World Cup

by Dave Bidini

Overview

In 2008, Dave Bidini accompanies Homeless Team Canada to the Homeless World Cup—an annual street soccer tournament with goals unlike any other: the most important of which is to create life-changing opportunities for the millions of homeless people worldwide. In Melbourne, Australia, Bidini watches team members play and shares the disappointments, frustrations, joys, and triumphs of forty-five-year-old Billy, who is a former addict; the quick-footed twenty-four-year-old Moroccan immigrant Juventus, who refuses to talk about his past; and most of all, the endearing teenaged Krystal, who carries a photograph of her long-dead mother and dreams of a better life.

Bidini begins to understand what this tournament means to all those involved. He sees firsthand the power of sport to transform the lives of those on the edge—how the decision to play this game can mean the difference between survival and heading down a road of addiction, poverty, or crime. Home and Away offers a powerful look at the poor and dispossessed, from the barrios of Mexico City and the shanties of West Africa to the streets of North America and Europe, illuminating the renewed meaning that these players find in such an inspiring game.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626369962
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	07/01/2011
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Dave Bidini is the author of nine books, two documentary films, and one play. He is a columnist for the Toronto Star and the National Post. His first book in the sports genre, Tropic of Hockey, was named one of the Top 100 Canadian Books of All-Time by McClelland and Stewart, and his baseball odyssey, Baseballissimo, is currently being made into a feature film. Bidini is a board member of Street Soccer Canada and has attended two Homeless World Cups, traveling with Team Canada to Melbourne and Milan. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his wife and their two children.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

WHAT TEAMS DO

I ACCEPTED PAUL'S INVITATION and flew to Calgary for the national summer tournament. There, I walked into an argument between three homeless men stalking each other on the steps of the grey building that housed the event's gymnasium and indoor soccer fields. First, Devon — a nearly toothless Jamaican Canadian who suffered from mental health and addiction issues — called Billy, the recovering OxyContin addict, a douchebag. Then Eric — the team's goaltender, who moved about like a willow sagging after a long rain — called Devon a cocksucker. Then Devon chased Eric around the parking lot, hucking an orange at him and growling "Man, don't call another man cocksucker." Devon skulked behind the rear of the building, looking out occasionally to see if the goalie was coming back for more. But Eric had returned to his pre-championship pickup game, which is where the argument had started: Devon wanting to play, being rebuffed by Billy, swearing at Billy, then being sworn at before Eric called him a cocksucker, at which point Devon grabbed the orange, then a can of Coke, which slung inside Devon's trouser pocket.

The Calgary tournament had been staged to give Paul, the manager, and Cristian, the coach, a chance to survey all of the homeless players in one fell swoop. While neither Devon nor Eric were eligible to play — they'd already competed for Canada in previous world tournaments; Homeless World Cup (HWC) rules stipulate that players can only represent their country once — the coaches were considering naming Billy to the national team, as well as Krystal, who'd recently moved in with her brother, Jason, in Toronto. After the argument played itself out, I went inside the gym, where I found Krystal sitting on a set of metal bleachers, eating a granola bar and staring at the court.

"I was adopted when I was two," she told me from the stands. "My mom dropped me off at my brother's friend's house — his name was Soldier — and that was when Children's Aid got involved and helped me find a home. I don't know who my dad was, but I kept in contact with my mom and grandparents. Sometimes my adopted parents would drive me back to Regent Park to see my mom, and I remember being so excited going through the hallways of the building waiting to see her. My only two memories of her are the day I found out she'd died, and visiting her one time when she was standing in the doorway of the building telling me that she loved me. I didn't really know what her life was about until years later. When I was 16, my grandmother gave me a box of letters that our social worker had written to my family, describing how my mother was a prostitute, how she was addicted to drugs, and that she'd died of AIDS as a result of being a sex worker in Regent Park. She'd been born in Trinidad and came to Canada, but because my grandfather lived in the States, she went back and forth from country to country. Things were bad where my grandpa was living, and she got drawn in, overwhelmed and tempted by things in the big city. There were rules at my grandma's house, but not so much in the States. Sometimes I think that if I were a little bit older — that if I wasn't just a baby when the problems started to happen — I might have been able to help her, to make a difference. If I could go back in time and change it, I would. But the way I look at it, everything happens for a reason. Maybe I'm able to do all of the things because she never got to. She's in my heart. She'll never leave me."

We sat in silence for a moment as a few players began drifting onto the court. Then Krystal clasped her hands together and said, "I really hope the coaches choose me for the team. I mean, Australia. It would be my dream to go to Australia." She paused and then she said: "Actually, it would be my dream to go anywhere in the world. But Australia. Man ..."

At the end of the three-day event, Krystal made it easy for the coaches to select her. Before the tournament's final game — which Toronto lost to Vancouver in a thrilling shootout (there were also teams from Calgary and a three-person representation from the Old Brewery mission in Montreal) — the players were asked to talk about their experiences in Calgary. Cristian — who, because he was young and track-suited, talked shit with the players, if in a tone measured with a smile — told them that if they had anything to say, now was the time.

At first, they were quiet, but you could tell what they were thinking. By this point in the event, Eric, the goaltender — a tempestuous, six-foot-two crack addict whose gaunt face was drawn with the perpetual charcoal of a person too defeated to groom himself — had begun to wear on his teammates, and they'd frozen him out after the final game. During the meeting, he was the first to speak, telling his teammates in a low voice how disappointed he was that they hadn't congratulated him after many of the games. "Every other team does it," he said. "The first thing they do is congratulate the goalie, but all you guys do is walk away."

The players rolled their eyes. They may have been exasperated with Eric's popgun temper, but the real issue was about more than just Eric. Their lives were so difficult and complicated that together those lives produced an entanglement of fear, self-doubt, sadness, neurosis, and anger, a powder keg of suffering that was defused only when the players were working together on the court. Once the games had ended, their endorphins flattened and their bodies — which had tasted a natural, physical high for the first time in ages — sought to continue the tourney's competitive stimulation. The result was anger and revolt and confrontation. And really, because it had already been a huge struggle — and a great triumph — for these players to simply make their flight to Calgary, they lacked the emotional reserve to deal with the massive issues in each other's lives. So when Eric bared his heart, there was little energy or impetus left to console him.

After Eric finished talking, the coach moved to send the team back to their hotel. But Krystal turned to her teammates and said, "Eric's right, guys. No matter what happens in the game, we should go up and thank our goalie. We may not like what we have to put up with — and not just with Eric; we can all get on each other's nerves — but we're a team, and we should be able to count on each other all the time."

Nobody else had anything else to say.

"I mean, it's what teams do," she added.

"So, you know, let's start doing it."

CHAPTER 2

COLD TUR KEY SOCCER

FOR THE ORGANIZERS, putting together Homeless Team Canada was never easy, not with a modest budget (all of Team Canada's funding comes from private donations) and the responsibility of obtaining the necessary documents from homeless men and women. When Paul first discovered that the tournament would require travel to Australia, he remembered past times, when even a seven-hour journey had proven nearly impossible for some players. There was a fellow from Toronto named Angelo Variano, who was nearly penniless, living on dumpster scraps and shelter broth. But because the fall tournament came on the heels of one of the street person's annual bounties — Toronto's million-strong Gay Pride Parade — Angelo paid for his ninety-dollar passport to the 2007 Copenhagen event after gathering bottles strewn about the city. Emboldened by his efforts, he decided to use the team's transcontinental flight to Denmark to quit methadone, cold turkey. For the eight-hour flight, he sat bathed in a terrible sweat, coiling, then uncoiling, next to his manager, from whom he'd kept his airborne rehab a secret.

There was another player, Max, who, on the journey to the Homeless World Cup in 2006 in Cape Town, locked himself in the airplane's bathroom, driven to isolation by the voices he was hearing in his head. Max lived on a floodplain in the Don Valley in Toronto, a great mohawk of trees that cleaves the city's north-south parkway. He subsisted on whatever food he could scrounge, and every now and then, when his food supply grew scarce, he was forced to come into the city. Paul found him greasy and bearded on the streets, so he invited him to John Innes, where he mentioned the homeless-team program. Paul was certain he'd be rebuffed, but Max accepted the invitation and was eventually chosen to play for Team Canada. Although he never spoke about his mental condition, Paul said, "I knew there were issues there, I just didn't know how severe." Paul sat outside the bathroom door along with the flight attendants and murmured to Max, helping him get through the ordeal. Max competed in the tournament and competed well. After he got back to Toronto, he thanked Paul, headed back to his tarpaulin home on the floodplain, and was never heard from again.

Another of the national team's organizational complications came from having to work with regional managers who were responsible for clearing players from their respective programs. Paul and Cristian had chosen two Vancouverites for the team — a Mexican immigrant named Manny and a Aboriginal Canadian named John — but much to their chagrin, the West Coast homeless chapter proved to be wanting in the manner in which they processed — or didn't process — their documents. Despite a barrage of emails from Toronto requesting information about how things were proceeding, they instead found their inbox filled with press announcements and invitations to upcoming fundraisers. Cristian had warned Vancouver of the Aussies' and the Homeless World Cup's organizational vigilance, but they responded with tumbleweeds. The Team Canada managers grew livid at Vancouver's unresponsiveness, not only because losing their invitees would burn their budget and gut their roster, but because it would mean a return to the bedbugs for two of their hopeful charges. If there had been excess cash, which there never was, Paul might have been able to rally the correct documents for new players at such a late stage, but Australian immigration laws — and resulting HWC protocol — required almost double the paperwork of past tourneys, 60 pages per player. Cristian received a terse email from organizers claiming that Team Canada's inclusion in the event was in jeopardy. Things were eventually resolved, but the coaches lay awake at night wondering whether almost $15,000 worth of plane tickets — a large portion of the team's budget — would go to waste, to say nothing of denying Manny and John the opportunity to join them on their journey to the bottom of the world.

At one point, Paul and Cristian had considered bringing another Vancouver player to Melbourne, a small, grey-haired, fiftysomething Arab man named Sam who wore 1970s highschool gym shorts and carried around a shopping bag filled with shoes, socks, jerseys, and three sets of daily newspapers. But Sam's papers were incomplete, the result of having lived like so many other refugees, a man without a country to call his own.

I'd met Sam on my first day in Calgary, and after I asked him about his life, he took me by the elbow and paraded me to a set of empty bleachers, where he unfurled the story of his life. Sam was born in Palestine, where his parents once owned a large tract of land — eight million dollars' worth, he said — on the disputed West Bank. But they'd been forced to scatter as a result of the war in the Middle East. Because his family was able to retain at least a portion of its wealth, his parents sent him to school in California, where he studied world literature. He finished school with a degree and a book idea, which eventually became American Triumph, the story of a young American woman who helps Afghani rebels turn back the Soviet war machine. People liked the book; it sold a few thousand copies. For the next year, Sam toured America, talking about his work, his life, and the legacy of his family.

Then came 9/11. One afternoon in California, Sam was sitting at a Denny's eating breakfast with three newspapers spread open at his table. Two men approached his booth: thugs wearing sunglasses, cologne, and silk socks. Can we have a word? I wrote 80,000 words. Pick one. Hands to shoulder, they walked him across the restaurant into the daylight, where he was bagged and thrown into the ass-end of an unmarked van. Thugs. Thugs with a pension. They threw him into the piss and murder of the Laredo County jail, where the author of American Triumph languished for eight months.

Sam wrote. He wrote to judges, attorneys, counsellors, journalists. Then, one day, the guards delivered him a note, unchaining the cell door as they passed it to him. An immigration judge had granted his release. While being processed, the plaid shirt that he'd worn to his arraignment hung loose at the shoulder, his pants barely hooked to his hip. A policeman in plain clothes stood at his desk, quilted his fingers at his waist, then looked Sam in the eye before looking away at the photograph of America's commander-in-chief hanging beyond the writer's shoulder. Then he told him that he was sorry.

Sam got the fuck out of the USA. Like Ray Charles, he rode a bus to Seattle, then crossed the border through the forest. He came into Canada and found work as a paperless labourer living in a shelter. If he carried around a scythe of bitterness, you couldn't see it. Before leaving Calgary, he approached me and said: "I've written two more manuscripts. I'm proud of both. One is about Ireland. Will you help get it published?" He gave me his novel, but Sam never made it to Melbourne, nor did any of the other Vancouver players. Days before the team was scheduled to depart for Australia, Paul finally reached the managers of the West Coast program. They told him that they planned on marching with the men down to the BC parliament, where they would demand they provide papers to help them get to Oz. Of course, they came up empty. In a tournament where Canada would play against teams with eight to ten players on their roster (the game required four men a side, competing on a 16x22 metre court for two seven-minute halves), Paul and Cristian would be bringing only Billy and Krystal, plus two other players from Calgary. In the end, they decided that it was better to travel somewhere with half of a team than go nowhere at all.

CHAPTER 3

JOURNEY TO OZ

THE SKY WAS grey and wet with rain as the players gathered at John Innes on the morning of their trip to Oz. I found Billy sitting outside on the steps of the centre, a hood pulled over his head to protect himself from the wind and the rain. Billy was the only former professional player on the team, as well as the best and most experienced athlete. He also had the distinction of playing on both Team Canada and Homeless Team Canada, and when I pointed this out, he said, irreverently, "Hey, I just love to play the game. What happens outside of it is secondary." He was the same age as me — 45 — and Greek ("way Greek," said Krystal), sometimes even using his given name, Basile, instead of its Anglicized cousin. If the faces of the men around the centre bore the crust of defeat, Billy possessed at least the verisimilitude of a person who'd competed at an athletically high level. The first time I'd met him, his face was glistening with sweat, having just run laps on the centre's track. It was the first time in years he'd been close to his playing weight, his bullish shoulders and broad chest returning after a long descent into addiction. Only his face — which still carried the excess weight of his sedentary years — belied the fact that he'd once possessed a formidable athletic physique.

After years of playing pro soccer — both domestically, with the North York Rockets, and internationally, with Team Canada as well as club teams in Switzerland and Austria — Billy had retired so that he could take over the ownership of Uncle Harry's Fish and Chips, a restaurant that his father had started after emigrating from Greece. "The restaurant was my parents' place before I started running it," he said. "They wanted to retire, and I figured that it would be a good thing to do after my playing career ended. In 2006, I put over $100,000 into it, and it was a huge success. Man, I was living large. The casinos were sending limousines for me; I was throwing down huge bets, huge money. Then, in 2008, I transferred the place over to my father for a dollar because I was a mess. My parents had to come home from their retirement place in Greece to take it back. I was making $8,000 profit a week, but I was killing myself, pulling 100 hours a week and taking painkillers — OxyContins — which users call 'hillbilly heroin.' It all started while sitting around one night in a bar. I was complaining to my friends about my headaches, so someone said, 'Here, try these.' They worked; it was like a miracle. Pretty soon, there wasn't a day when I wasn't on them, and because I felt good, I got into other stuff, mostly cocaine, which I'd done before, but never in such quantities. After a while, I saw what this was doing to me, so I tried to quit. I had joint pain, and I was vomiting. When I was off the stuff, I couldn't walk more than three feet without feeling as if my life was about to end. So I went back to it. I went back hard and I stayed there.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Home and Away"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Dave Bidini.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
Epigraph,
PROLOGUE - SHADOW AND MUSCLE,
1 - WHAT TEAMS DO,
2 - COLD TURKEY SOCCER,
3 - JOURNEY TO OZ,
4 - WALTER MITTY AND A DILDO,
5 - THE SONG OF INDIA,
6 - 500 MILES,
7 - DOVE,
8 - VANNIE AND THE MOUNTAIN LIONS,
9 - OLE SOFT TITS,
10 - WHERE THE FUCK IS DENMARK?,
11 - THE SEARCH FOR STEVIE RAY,
12 - L'ALTRI AZZURRI,
13 - THE RUSSIANS,
14 - UP AND DOWN WITH THE USA,
15 - THE WORLD CUP FINAL IN A TEACUP,
16 - WHEN YOU'RE TOO TIRED TO RUN,
17 - FUCKED UP,
18 - KRYSTAL AND THE CAMBODIANS,
19 - THE WANDERER,
20 - NO DIRECTION HOME,
EPILOGUE - EXTRA TIME,