Don't Forget to Write

Practice Demographics

       Bruno and I walked into the center of campus to the benches where some of our teammates were waiting. We swapped our groggy good-mornings and whispered hellos before sitting on the bench and returning to the quiet of the morning. Two vans pulled up in front of us, one was driven by the head coach; Armando, the other was manned by the two assistant coaches; Mustafa and Dante. Moose was pale white and skinny, Dante was dark black and thick.

I rode all the way in the back of the mostly empty van, laying myself out across the row and napping as we made the trek through Manhattan, over the bridges, and onto our Randall's Island practice field. Randall's Island was mostly filled with fields, parks, courts, and other outdoor facilities. It just so happened that the field we were using was across the street from a historical building that also served as a mental institute. Most of the people there were older, sometimes they would sit out on the front stoop and watch us play while calling out nonsensical things like "watch out for the lions!" (there are no lions in the city) but mostly they just sang loud and out of pitch songs that none of us knew.

We brought the equipment and water out onto the field and got our cleats on, passing around and free-styling with the ball in the air to see who could do the fanciest tricks. Two brothers, Matt and David, both immigrants from Nigeria, were messing around, dancing with the ball balanced on their head and telling stupid jokes. "How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh?.... Ten-tickles. HAHA" some of us laughed but most of us shook our heads.

"Enough with the dad jokes. You guys are awful." Bruno said, so David walked up to him and started rambling them off. "What do a dog and a tree have in common?... BARK." He smiled, Bruno walked away but David followed him. "You know Bruno, I used to hate facial hair... but then... it grew on me. HA. Grew on me."

"Excuse them," Sammy said through his thick African accent. Sammy was also a Nigerian immigrant. He was also the captain of the team, and more muscular than a body builder. "The Bronx Zoo forgot to lock up their cages, these two monkeys escaped from confinement. HA-HA-HA!" He let out a deep laugh from his washboard-belly and everybody around me laughed, but I wasn't sure if I could or not since I was the only white-ish person there at the moment. "C'mon keepah," he said to me not pronouncing the "R" in keeper as he slapped my back with a hand so heavy I felt my insides jump. "This is no classroom. We make jokes. We don't care what colah your skin is, as long as it is thick."

Once everybody else had filed in from various modes of transportation; buses, trains, cars, etc., we started practice. It was an hour of running, followed by a half-hour of goalkeeper fitness exercises for me and the other keepers; Nuno and Deco, followed by another half-hour of shooting drills in which the goalkeepers essentially slammed our bodies into the ground over and over again in futile attempts to reach pinpoint shots by coaches Moose and Dante as they taunted us. Then we joined the rest of the team for scrimmages. By the time we were done it was a little after 9 AM, the sun had finally warmed the air to that comfortably warm temperature of a late August morning.

With aching muscles and sore sides, I got into the van, riding in the back again, which was full on this return trip now that everybody was together and needed to get back to school. As you might imagine, it smelled damn awful in there. We were about 10 to 12 sweaty young men stuck in each of the tiny vans. Sammy and David were talking about David's science project. He was in a national competition for biomedical engineering and was working on designs for a 3-D printed heart, which would catch anybody who met David off guard, because David was an idiot. At least, that's the way he came off. He had no social skills (other than those atrocious dad jokes, if you can call that a skill) didn't understand anything you told him the first time, often requesting three or four repeats of even the simplest sentences, he constantly looked lost and confused, as if somebody had dropped him off in Harlem when he had expected to be on a farm in the south of France, and he generally did not seem to be in sync with the rest of the world. His main methods of communication were bad jokes, dance moves, and weird noises. But I guess the man understood something about the human anatomy, enough to get him national recognition as one of the brightest young scientists in the country, anyway. But I bring this up only because I thought it was funny, Sammy and David were speaking in English, but at some point in the conversation they had slipped into their natural tongue of Hausa, the most fluent of the many African languages each of them knew. That happened a lot on this team, there were a lot of people from a lot of places, so often conversations would blend from English to Arabic or Hausa or Spanish. We were a prime sample of New York City demographics.