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forget everything you knew about hawaii. remember everything you love about soccer

That’s a picture of Hawaii. Looks cold, no? Maybe you knew maybe you didn’t: you can snowboard on Mauna Kea – that’s ‘white mountain’ in the islands’ native language – the 13,796-foot volcano on the big island which shares its name with the state. This blew my mind the first time I heard about it. Stop and think about it, and it makes perfect sense. Same goes with the time I ran into a protest near a popular beach on Oahu and learned that there is a nationalistic secession movement in Hawaii among the native community calling for the islands’ independence and the return of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which was toppled in 1893 by businessmen and politicians looking to control the booming plantation economy among other interests.

These surprises – the fact that I never learned these facts in or out of school – go to show it’s dangerous to just accept the postcard perception. It’s always good to take the time to look around; you never know what you might learn, what you might fall in love with. I think that’s something every soccer fan knows a little something about. You have to want to find soccer. And when you do, it has to be about you; while the atmosphere is changing, the likelihood remains that the great majority could not care less.

Which is why I was ecstatic to learn that filmmakers at Stryker-Indigo are working on a documentary about the history of soccer – more than 100 years of it - in Hawaii. The film, Pele’s Children - more than halfway finished and looking toward a 2009 release - is if nothing else an act of love. It is being made because the filmmakers want to make it. It’s a story both personal and universal. That combination represents the best of art and the best of sport.

I sat down over the phone with one of the project’s leaders, George Fosty, to get the story behind the film. Our conversation is after the jump.

I thought we would start with how you came to this project.

We’ve been working on a hockey documentary called Black Ice, and there was a lull in production. This is over a year ago, and we didn’t think it was going to get made quickly, so we said lets do something we want to do – we had been working on Black Ice for a long time – and I looked around and said you know I’ve always wanted to do a soccer documentary because I had played college soccer here in the States and I thought we could look around and track down some of the guys I played soccer with 25 years ago and see what has happened to them. No one was doing anything on soccer so we went with it and started tracking down some of the players that had played college soccer on the mainland and out in Hawaii. And in the course of getting together with these guys and talking we discovered there was this great story that had not been written or even researched about the history of soccer in Hawaii. A year and a half in were about halfway finished with about 45 hours worth of footage that we are now working to build storylines around. And we have about 1200 photos going back to the turn of the century.

We realized early on that Hawaii had a hundred year soccer history but there is no place keeping anything, so what we thought we would do is rebuild that soccer history and merge that in with the story of the state, the culture, the Hawaii people, and the beauty of islands to create something that has never been done before.

How did you first come to settle on Hawaii? I know from reading your short bio on line that you attended school in Hilo on the big island.

I actually played soccer at the University of Hawaii at Hilo from 1983 to 85. Though my career ended right after that, I kept an eye on some of the guys I had played with, and some of these guys played for twenty years out there. I stayed in contact with them and even though I had gone on to other things, working in history, I found it curious that these guys had continued to play soccer.

Robert Holt and his son John with George Fosty
Spring of 1985; University of Hawaii at Hilo.

It started as just a go-back-say-hello-see-what-everyone-is-doing. At the time I was at the University I had access to some old historic documents and I had seen things that I knew was the from the pre-1950’s period. So I had kept that in the back of my mind and as we got further into it, we kept pushing it deeper to the late 1890’s to the period when the British and the Scots and others had teams in Honolulu and out in Maui.

That influx of the Europeans was the first seeding of soccer on the islands?

It appears that way. Somewhere around the 1880’s when the English and Scots had their own clubhouses and societies on the island is in all likelihood where the first games appeared. However the first record of games, the first written account in a newspaper, appear after 1897. We’re digging through old diaries to see if we can take it further back because we know that beginning in the 1860’s is when organized sports started to take off in England and other places, so we think that there is probably something out there because you had such a large English population on the islands back then. Things that have been missed by historians. We’re still looking.

You said you are about halfway finished, where exactly does the film stand?

We think we have the footage we need to recreate most of the history. We have contacts with about 120 people across the US and Canada. As we shape it more and more we think by the end of the spring we should begin editing and have it out [sometime in 2009].

Working with you on this is your brother Darril. His bio mentions a stint as a writer with the Seattle Sounders.

Yeah. That is one reason we keyed on soccer. Darril has a lot of knowledge of the NASL and the sport on the west coast in general. And I had played soccer, so we came at it from collegiate levels, so we complemented each other. We’re originally from Canada, so it was natural for us to work on something that we knew which was western soccer, including Hawaii. We knew the communities and a lot of people all over, so it just kind of fell into place.

A little serendipity.

Yeah, well, they say do something you are comfortable with. It’s funny though, when we started this people were like, why are you doing a soccer documentary. Soccer is going to make you any money; its not going to have a great following. Well, we said we wanted to do it and we’re going to have fun doing something. It’s not all about money. It’s about enjoying yourself along the way.

It’s always interesting to me - and maybe I’m biased – but soccer always seems to pull people back at some point. Where did your love for soccer develop? Did you guys grow up in a soccer family?

No, I grew up near the Alaskan panhandle in a community called Terrace, in British Columbia. When I was a kid in grade 3 and 4 I played soccer on my lunch hours at Clarence Michael elementary school. Those were my first experiences with soccer. I enjoyed it so when I moved to Skeena secondary school, I played on one of their developmental teams for a year before I gave up the game and moved south into the Vancouver area. I then moved to Wyoming when I was 21 for school and I was walking across a parking lot one day on campus and some Pakistani soccer players were kicking a ball around. The ball rolled over to me; I stopped it; kicked it back and kept walking. And one of the guys said to me, ‘where you from.’ And I said what do you mean? He said, ‘you don’t kick the ball like an American.’ I said I’m not, I’m Canadian, and he kicked the ball back to me, and I just kicked the ball again at him and kept walking. He then asked if I wanted to play soccer on his team, and I said no I don’t play soccer. So he kicked the ball back to me and I kicked it back to him and he said, ‘yes you do.’ For about two months after that a few of these Pakistani guys would come into the dormitories to try to get myself and my brother Greg who is a year younger than me to come and play. One day we just finally decided we would, so we walked out with them, started playing and that is how our careers started. We played four years in the States. Two years in Western Wyoming on the 21 Nations soccer team and then we moved from there with part of the team and formed the nucleus of the college club team in Hawaii.

Western Wyoming International players out of Rock Springs, Wyoming.
Charlie Egwanwor (Nigeria) and Amir Behjani (Iran) moving up field
in a game against Central Wyoming College in 1982.

Tell me more about this 21 Nations club.

It was called Western Wyoming International. That’s the team that initially started the project, following up with that team of guys, made up of players from 21 countries. My brother and I were the two Canadian representatives on the team. So we went back to try to see where these guys had ended up, back in their home countries or wherever. Once we got into Wyoming and got into that story, we decided to then go into the Hawaii stories. What you have really is two documentaries being put together simultaneously. The story of the 21 Nations team is called White Buffalo Rising, and the other is Pele’s Children about the Hawaiian stories and that state’s soccer history. Pretty complex stories.

Pele, speaking of the Hawaiian Fire Goddess not the soccer god?

It’s more ironic than anything, because when we came up with that name we weren’t thinking of the links between Pele and Pele, but then we got into the NASL’s Team Hawaii portion of the history – a section we’re calling Two Gods One Name, so it definitely fits pretty good.

The scope of the story, mainly I guess because of the history components and the various cultures coming together on the teams, is enormous.

It’s interesting because when you combine the two stories you have the history of players from 45 countries.

Which much like the sport on the whole reflects the unique history of the United States, your two stories are a microcosm of the greater story of American soccer.

You are correct. The foreign elements in the stories are just tremendous. In Wyoming you have stories of Pakistanis and Iranians playing along side Americans and you talk about the complexities of more than just a game. When we write our histories, we don’t just do a sport’s history. We bring in the social aspects and the political and economic and the religious aspects of the storylines to show the multi-dimensional level of the game. Or to the histories. Forget statistics, scores, and games played. It’s going to be “who are these guys, why did they do this, what was the outcome of their actions, and where are they today?” I think when you see it on a social level you can relate to it. It tells you who you are and how you fit in correlation with these people. You have to remember a lot of us have more in common than we realize. When you get into the lives of people and when you see that they are very similar to you even though they are leading an entirely different life, I think it’s very profound. And when you add the element of sports and history – American history – with a foreign tinge to it, its even more powerful because the American media doesn’t concentrate on that element of our history of our society of our sports. They always play up the stars and make it as American as apple pie, but lets face it, we are a montage of cultures and groups. We’re an immigrant nation. When playing on a soccer field, the chances are good you are on a field with players from at least a half a dozen or so countries on one given day on a soccer field in America. People don’t realize that. People don’t see the patchwork that explains our game and explains our country. And it shows that we have so much in common with each other and that we can form teams and build cohesive units even though culturally, historically, and maybe geographically we have had very little in common. Soccer is a great transition.

That takes us back to Hawaii, which brings in its own unique culture.

The United States swallowed up two separate countries – Texas and the kingdom of Hawaii. People forget that or at least its not a big part of the story of the U.S. Hawaii had its own king and queen and was actually tied closer to England than the States. That element has always been there. I noticed when I was playing soccer in Hawaii that there is a certain undercurrent of Hawaiian nationalism that doesn’t often appear in history books. There is a fierce pride in their history and culture and they fight hard to hold onto that. People go over for a vacation and they see the hula dancers and the palm trees but there is another much more complex side to that. That aspect can be magnified on sports teams over there. You will, for example, have an all-Hawaiian team playing in a league, and its not a form of segregation or racism, it’s a form of self pride and I don’t think people recognize that sometimes that for what it really is. It’s a preservation.

I spent a few months bouncing around Hawaii after college and the nationalism you speak of really struck me during my time there. I saw protests and marches, all relatively small, but definitely present. That Houle outsider aspect definitely presented itself to me in certain situations. I did a bunch of research on it because I was considering it for my Masters Thesis project – kind with your ethos that it was a story no one was telling.

I’m glad you saw a lot of that. Because it is there and people don’t know it. The anger was something that struck me, and the raw animosity that you sometimes see directed toward outsiders. That is interesting because you don’t see that mentioned in the history books. Its glossed over. First you can be shocked by it but if you really look at it through the history you can understand it. You had the plantation economies that were in place for a hundred years. You have to remember that the Hawaiians only became free after the attack on Pearl Harbor when the U.S. forced military law on the islands and took control. Prior to that it was run by the plantations and those families who owned them. It was basically fiefdoms, where each island was an economic block of sugar cane companies and such. This wasn’t a democracy, this was a form of exploitation. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Government took over, and after WWII there was no going back. The Hawaiians weren’t going back to the plantation system of justice and economic and political control. So there were only two options. Go independent which didn’t seem like an option because the strategic positioning of Hawaii as we entered the Cold War, or they became part of the United States which they did in 1959.

They chose the United States but there has always been that element in Hawaii that they should have become their own country. Because there is a proud and strong history, and lets face it, they were victims of a coup de tat. Dole (think pineapples) and his followers when they overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani in 1897 basically put an end to Hawaiian rule.

One book I came across in my research was Kiana Davenport’s novel Shark Dialogues, which weaves the native history of Hawaii around the story of several generations of a fictional family. It’s an amazing book partly because the history of Hawaii is so amazing.

I haven’t read that, but we have obviously been reading a lot about Hawaiian history. Even writings from Mark Twain. Or Samuel Clemens as he was called when he traveled to Hawaii and kept a travelogue and diary.

Ah, yes, The Grand Canyon of the Pacific, as Twain dubbed Kauai’s Waimai Canyon. One of my favorite places. I backpacked through it and the Na Pali Coast that summer I was out there and carried some of his work with me.

Waimea Canyon

Then you understand what he was saying. I was over there filming last October, and once you get beyond the tourist meccas, there is still elements of the past sitting out there and you can see what these guys were reflecting on. But everything has changed in 100 years. Even though the past is there, you can stare it straight in the eye and not know it. You have to take the time to look. Luckily in Hawaii, it works at a slower pace so you do have that option. In New York for example, we’re always on the run. You never see anything right? You will walk by 100,000 people in a day and don’t recognize a face, and you walk by some of the greatest landmarks ever built in America and never recognize them or take a minute to check them out. That’s not Hawaii, and we’ve taken the time to look around and try to get it right.

We’re excited about it. I think the film will be in six parts and hopefully quite stunning for what it stands for in regards to the complexities of the lives we live. There is a fine line between the past and present.

For me, soccer represents that complex American reality better than any sport. That truth – soccer as an immigrant game and accepting it as such in the States – is the most important thing to me. There is a lot of talk about our version of the game and putting limits on foreign players in American leagues, but that’s not what it is supposed to be about – not for me. My new mantra is that it has to be about you. As everyone says, you can’t make money from soccer, etc, etc. While that’s not exactly true anymore, for the national consciousness it is.

It is totally under represented. Americans have such an unfortunate perception of what soccer is. They think its only a foreign game or a foreign implant, and there is that element…

Like there is in all of American society whether anyone wants to admit it…

There is 120 years of soccer history in the United States at least. And that tradition is what we built upon playing in these tiny communities in Wyoming or Hawaii or wherever. We might not have known how it started or why it started – they didn’t have their histories written – but they knew they had this tradition.

So its fun to go back and find it. In Wyoming for example, we’ve dated soccer back to the 1860’s when it was a cowboy state. You certainly would not have guessed to see soccer in a place like that. It’s fascinating to contrast our assumed perceptions with what really occurred.

Having done all of this research, have you learned anything about soccer’s reality today?

I think soccer today is too commercial. Not in the professional level, but the developmental level. I’ve coached soccer out here in Levittown on the weekends and I’m stunned at the serious nature of the business. How they are trying to create boot camps for 6-year-olds. I’ve talked to plenty of old coaches who are also stunned, because we know you can’t have the soccer stars without first having the love of the game incorporated into the practices or games. Standing on the sidelines screaming at a 6-year-old that they screwed up is not a way to teach kids in my opinion.

I think you let a kid play until they are 10, 11, 12, so that they develop that love and then they can get the structure. The Brazilians run around in the streets with a size 3 soccer ball for most of their youths before they find club teams and structured competition.

In the U.S. you could argue it’s almost the opposite. Older adults are the ones playing for fun – for the love of the game.

That’s one of the things we want to focus on – how soccer is being manipulated into a sport that isn’t necessarily healthy for young minds. Its not an attack on soccer, the positive elements far outweigh any negatives, but we want to address how the game is changing and not always for the positive on certain levels.

In terms of how the game has changed, are there any plans to cover the MLS games and the Pan Pacific tournament that is happening in Oahu in February? Seems like that could be a nice bookend, not to mention the inclusion of Brian Ching, a Hawaiian on the defending MLS champion Houston Dynamo.

You know I just heard about it a couple of days ago, and coincidentally, I’m planning on being out there at that time to do some filming, so we are going to try to line something up. And I have done a bit of a back and forth with Brian, and he said he would share some home movies and stuff. We are definitely going to interview Brian, and I think we have eight Team Hawaii players from the NASL days, so there will be stuff in there no one has ever seen.

Its funny because those upcoming games will essentially be a repeat of what happening with Pele in 1976-77 period with Team Hawaii when he played at Aloha stadium and had a tremendous impact on the sport in Hawaii. I think Pele showing up gave soccer in Hawaii a tremendous boost which carried it into the 90’s. So I’m curious to see what impact Beckham, MLS, and the Japanese teams have. Soccer in Hawaii is very complex, very developed. It still sits under the major American sports of football, baseball, and basketball, and then surfing, but soccer has some of the most dedicated athletes and some of the best well-rounded individuals you could ever hope to meet. Because for the most part they are out there for the love of the game. They are quite serious because they are committed to it. That attracts a certain kind of athlete – its the old-school athlete. Now athletes play for the money and the fame, but it didn’t use to be like that. Not even in football or baseball. Soccer has held onto that ideal for a longer time in America because of the backseat it takes to the other sports. Sport fans complain that that ideal has been lost but as with history, if you look for it, it is there. It’s that line – the beautiful game – when they play with passion and love you can just see it and you are stung by it because it can be such a positive influence. So if we can save this lost history, preserve it, capture that story, we’ve succeeded, and we hope there will be a legacy for the next generation coming up.

I can’t help given your subject’s geography to think of the term ‘soul surfing,’ again going back to my mantra that it has to be about you. Self motivated and satisfied to be alone with the soccer ball or with the wave or with your fellow travelers.

It’s a personal strength issue. I remember playing in Wyoming 20 years ago in blizzards with two feet of snow on the ground. It takes a special individual to go out there. no one is cheering you on. The only thing you hear is the wind, and a Wyoming wind at 20-below is not something that is comforting. To see a guy from maybe Pakistan, Iran, or Brazil with three layers of clothing on out there kicking a soccer ball in a couple feet of snow is quite profound. You can’t explain it other than to say That’s Old School sports. That’s the love of the sport. No credit, no recognition. You have to love it.

In a way, we can be thankful soccer has maintained that reality maybe better than some other more popular sports here.

American sports shaped people; it doesn’t matter the sport. There is something about our geography, our history, our culture. It shapes us. It shows itself through sports. Very few cultures are as dynamic in their history of sport. Sure they all have sport histories, but the level of development and structure across the board in the States is amazing to look at as a historian. There is a very complex element with hidden cultural traits. It just makes it unique and fascinating. You can try to analyze it, but no one has succeeded in explaining it. Our hope with the film is just to be able to show little aspects of who we are and the culture that we are.

Well, you’ve hooked at least one guy. I can’t wait to see what the final product looks like.

Hey, thanks. You know you are the first interview of any sort we have done on this project, so hopefully as it begins to leak out there more people will come forward with footage and photos and stories that even if we can’t include in the film we can include in the archives we intend to set up for public viewing on the websites for each of the films – Wyoming and Hawaii. It’s priceless history and we hope to be able to have it forever in one place for generations to come.
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epilogue:
Pele’s Children was brought to my attention by soccer video guru Dave Brett. Fosty reached out to Dave in search of film from the historic NASL game between Pele and the NY Cosmos and the very short-lived Team Hawaii (On April 13, 1977, the Cosmos beat Team Hawaii 2-1 at Aloha Stadium). At present, only one copy of this tape exists… in the hands of that feisty Cosmos former coach and present pallbearer Peppe Pinton.

From a press release Dave sent out this week:

“Pinton inherited the entire Cosmos tape library when the team folded in 1985. Now he wants at least five figures for a copy of this two hour tape. Stryker-Indigo can’t afford it, so it looks like it won’t be in their film. It’s a shame. The film producers came to me hoping that I would have a tape of Team Hawaii. I don’t. It’s not that I haven’t tried to find one. I’ve called TV stations, I’ve called people who played for the team, people who worked for the team, and fans of the team. I’ve even talked to Ward Lay, the man who owned the team. No luck. Perhaps someone will buy the tape from Peppe Pinton, and let the filmmakers use portions of it?”

TIAS addition: Maybe we could all send a few bucks to Stryker-Indigo in a fund-raising attempt to acquire the game film. Possibly they could set up a donation button on the website? Or maybe some sane person can buy out Pinton from all things Cosmos. For a guy who was barely in the picture, it sure would be nice to get him out. For those of you unfamiliar with the grand scheme of all things Cosmos, Here and Here is some of the recent history.