“Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does…It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.”
– Nelson Mandela, May 2000.
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My dreams of soccer stardom came to a screeching halt during my senior year in high school just an hour before our first playoff game. Growing up, soccer was the center of my life and social universe. I played for my high school team and was captain for two years. I went to soccer camp. I played in indoor and outdoor leagues in the off-season. I loved it. So why were we being thrown out of a run for the state championships literally an hour before the first game was set to start?
Well, we had an exchange student from Germany on our team. Apparently our soccer coach needed to apply for some type of waiver allowing this student to play, and he didn’t do that. For some still unknown reason, this came out an hour before the playoffs were meant to start. We loved Bernard from Germany, but he was not a particularly good player and was sidelined on the bench most of the season. He even scored an “own goal” for the opposing team, causing us to tie that game instead of win it. None of this made sense. Me and my teammates felt dejected. We all looked at each other after a hard fought season, and me and my fellow co-captains realized that due to a technicality, this is how our high school sports lives would end.
Not so fast…
That next weekend, I saw an ad in the Providence Journal inviting people to enter teams to compete at a new sports arena that had just opened in Milford, Massachusetts which was about an hour away from Providence. The arena was called the John Smith Sports “Bubble.” It was opened by John Smith, a former soccer player from England who immigrated to the US and ended up having a very successful career as a placekicker for the New England Patriots for almost 10 years. The entry fee was a little steep, but a plan started to take shape.
I knew who all the best players were in Providence as their names were published in the all-state rankings by the local newspaper. Most of the athletes were spread across 4 public high schools. And the quality of play was quite high in the city given the mix of players brought in from different countries where soccer (football) was more ingrained as a sport at childhood – Portugal, Cape Verde, Laos, Vietnam, Liberia. So for about two weeks, I showed up at the soccer fields at each of these public schools at the end of the day, with a list of names and asked if “Val Kamsamphou” or “Paulo Neves” or “Manny Brito” was around. I laid out my pitch. I’m putting together a team with the best players from Providence to compete in a league in Massachusetts. Just about everyone I talked to was interested, despite game time being Friday’s at 8 PM after a one hour drive. Everyone would have to give up a weekend night to dedicate themselves to this.
There were a few problems to solve: There were about 10 of us on the team, with 8 who consistently showed up. Many of the players did not have the money to chip-in for the team entry fee. Plus we needed uniforms, and that would cost money too. None of us had ever played together before so we needed a place to practice. We also needed a few folks with cars who could pick up other players who lived all over the city and could drive them to the games and then back home.
Problems identified and solutions found. I put together a budget and went door to door down the two main streets on the somewhat wealthier East Side of Providence to raise sponsorship money. If local businesses would chip in, we would print their name on the back of the uniforms. We went with royal blue Umbro checker board shorts and matching T-shirts with numbers. Emblazoned on the back of different shirts were names like “Montana’s BBQ” and “Stereo Discount Center.” I then asked the football coach at my high school to stay late and let us use the gym for practice every Wednesday evening for 2 hours. He agreed to do that out of the goodness of his heart. (Thanks Mr Winuk. What a stand up guy). Some of the kids had cars including me, and amongst us, we came up with a ride share schedule to pick up and drop off player for practice and games. The “Providence Blue Devils” was born.
I liked the color blue and wanted to pick a name that sounded fierce. We practiced every Wednesday and played every Friday. We competed in 3 indoor seasons and won the championship in the final season.
We came perilously close to getting kicked out of the league due to a bench clearing brawl that ensued one night. It’s worth noting that the make-up of our team looked very different to that of other teams. We played against largely all white teams from the suburbs of Boston. Our team was incredibly diverse, with a few white kids like me, and the rest coming from a range of countries across Africa, Asia and Europe. Most players lived within immigrant communities around inner-city neighborhoods in Providence. We certainly stood out. And there were never any issues other than this one night. We played against a team of high school football players from Framingham who were competing to stay in shape during their off-season. They played a much more physical game than us. I seem to remember comments being thrown around like “wouldn’t it be nice if you could speak English like the rest of us”
Tensions flared between our Liberian goalie Philip and a forward from the other team. Philip was an incredible athlete and was also all-state track. He could leap like a cat which made him an awesome goalie. Philip got body checked one too many times, likely with some trash talking that egged him on. Before we knew it, Philip ran at the player, leapt into the air parallel to the ground and flagrantly smashed his forearm into the side of the other player’s head, cracking it into the wall and knocking him out. Chaos ensued — with a bench clearing brawl that followed. I got punched in the face and ended up with a nice shiner. Referees and parents broke it up. We all left for home, and I got word the next week that both teams had been kicked out of the league. That was a bad night.
John Smith, the owner of the Sports Bubble, decided to give us another chance. I wrote a letter to him explaining how hard the team had worked to pull ourselves together, including all the challenges we overcame just to show up. Most of the players were first-generation immigrants who were incredibly talented and from working-class backgrounds. John himself was an immigrant from the UK which perhaps made our story strike a chord. My mom drove with me to meet John, where I thoroughly apologized and assured him this would never happen again. I think it might have also helped that he heard the same message from my mom, whose South African accent could give the queen of England a run for her money. He agreed to give us and the other team another chance. We were back in business. And we won the championship.
Even writing about this now, 35 years later, I get fired up thinking back to this whole experience. The sadness of losing our play-off birth, then coming up with the seed of an idea to start a team. Then the team coming together with unexpected friendships forming. All the practice and play. Then getting kicked out for un-sportsman like conduct, getting re-instated, and then a final championship win. We celebrated the victory with a big ‘pot luck’ dinner at my parents place where everyone brought their favorite home cooked dish. I’m not sure what was in that “cachupa”, but it made me a fan of Cape Verdean cuisine.
Sports gave me a window into the lives of other immigrants who came to the same city as my family looking for a better life. It made me grateful. Despite some of the struggles my parents faced emigrating from South Africa, which included a flirtation with financial ruin at one point, it made me see how lucky we ended up relative to others who had less and, in some ways, harder challenges.
One of the best players on the team was Emanuel or “Manny” Brito who was from Cape Verde. He was living in an attic in a relative’s home, as his mother worked in the diplomatic corps somewhere overseas. You could see the loneliness in his eyes. Soccer was his outlet and his way out. Through a family friend, I got an introduction to the Brown University varsity soccer coach (Trevor Adair). I took Manny to see him, and Trevor agreed to watch Manny play. His academic scores and English were not good enough for Brown, but Trevor agreed he was really talented. Trevor introduced Manny to the varsity soccer coach at Choate Rosemary Hall (a fancy boarding school in Connecticut). The school agreed to give Manny a full scholarship to do a gap year at Choate to play soccer, learn English and prepare for college. Manny didn’t end up going to Brown, but through that experience, he ended up getting a full soccer scholarship to St Lawrence University in upstate New York, where he went on to have an incredibly successful soccer career. He’s a Spanish teacher at a middle school in the suburbs of Boston now, teaching others to speak one of his native languages. I wonder if he has taught Spanish to any of the children of the parents of the opposing team from Framingham with whom we got into that bench clearing brawl.
There are multiple vignettes from this experience I could recount. As I reflect, I’m struck by the power of sports to unite people. Same uniform. Same team. Different life stories. Just play.
(Article below from April 25, 1991)
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