The
Posted on February 3, 2007
On the soccer field, he was alone, but he was never lonely. Like a monk deep in meditation, a Buddhist perched beneath the Bodhi tree, he crouched between goalposts, an 8 foot by 8 yard sanctuary that no one could violate. Every step an opponent took inside the box, even a toe across the 18, was a threat that had to be warded off by any means necessary.
He’d been described, by various terrible writers, as a whirling dervish, an unstoppable force, a madman in a technicolor dreamcoat. He’d been an inspirational story, a cautionary tale, and a flash-in-the-pan, sometimes all at once. The pain of loss, one writer said, was etched on his face, carved into the premature wrinkles around his grey eyes and evident in the military set of his jaw as he assaulted a sailing corner kick.
Eventually, the terrible writers from the local papers were overtaken by mediocre writers from the national papers. They flocked to Northeast Philly to pimp his pain and fill the void of human interest stories, left by a lull between runaway brides and dead American girls in Aruba. For a week, he was the human interest story, the kid whose father had stabbed himself in the thigh during a meth binge and bled to death on the couch, and whose mother was dying of AIDS in a prison cell. A great story, a real American tragedy—the confluence of drugs, violence, and sex in a crumbling city. If only he were black; then they could really push it to the next level.
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