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The Fugees. photo credit: Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Dwindling readerships be damned. It still amazes me the power of the newspaper, and more specifically, the front page. Editors wield their power, choosing what to put on the front page, driving what we read thanks to the fact that few of us are going to read an entire newspaper, especially one with the girth of the Sunday New York Times.

It should be no real surprise where I am going with this. Sunday morning found soccer front and center. I got seven e-mails alerting me to Warren St. John’s story by noon yesterday. Would I get those e-mails if the story was buried in the sports section? Would anyone read the story if it wasn’t on the front page? I’d argue the answer to both of those questions is no, although maybe one e-mail might still have arrived – John from Soccer-Training.com beat the others to my in-box by several hours.

These were my thoughts looking at the large spread. Then I read the story.

For those in the know, it is anything but a surprising tale - you know the one about the immigrants finding solidarity from soccer – but it is a story that never gets old. The New York Times should know. Long before I spent a season with Manhattan’s Martin Luther King Jr. High School, the Times followed the city’s sports dynasty for years. Supplant the Clarkston, GA, refugees, or Fugees as the team is called, in Sunday’s story with inner-city ELA (English as Second Language) students, and the racist Clarkston residents for pompous public school politicians, and you essentially have the same story.

That’s not to say every story is not it’s own. Besides the stark contrast in coaches – MLK’s Martin Jacobson (Coach Jake) v. Ms. Mufleh (Coach Luma) – what struck me most was the geography. See, Clarkston, GA, is about an hour from where I grew up in Atlanta, and I witnessed scenarios not too unlike the one unfolding in Clarkston. I remember standing on the sidelines as parents complained about immigrants ‘without papers’ taking the places of their children on the field. Back then – circa mid-1980’s – it was more about ‘I paid so my kid plays’. Now, as evidenced by the Clarkston article, some clubs are paying to bring in talented immigrants. Funny coincidence: the club described in the article as “perhaps Atlanta’s most elite — and expensive — soccer academy,” is the one I played for. Although now called Concorde Fire, after two clubs Concorde (mine) and the Atlanta Fire joined forces, it seems little has changed – the well-to-do white kids from suburbs north of Atlanta, the weekend pool parties, the summer soccer camps, the spending in excess of $5,000 per player - except one thing:

“There is one other expenditure. The parents of the Fire collectively finance the play of Jorge Pinzon, a Colombian immigrant and the son of a single working mother. He isn’t from Alpharetta, but from East Gwinnett County, a largely Latino area outside Atlanta. Fire parents go to great lengths to get Jorge to games, arranging to meet him at gas stations around his home, landmarks they can find in his out-of-the-way neighborhood. Jorge is the best player on the team.”

The last year I played for Concorde, we had a Jorge – his name was Bruno - but it was the coach, not the parents, who went out of his way to ensure his presence at center midfield, which more often than not ensured a Concorde victory.

As my thoughts waft back and forth from southern memories to modern day models, I can’t decide if things have changed. Maybe they have; maybe it’s one of those ‘the more things change the more they stay the same’. The Fugees found some welcoming hands, but the under-reported racism of Clarkston works to bar the soccer team from better fields and keeps the team, its families, and coach at odds with ‘Old Clarkston’. In case you couldn’t connect the dots, ‘old’ means ‘white racists,’ which may or may not include the town’s mayor, Lee Swaney, who put on the same mask any small-town mayor does when Big Media comes muck-raking. The reporter left that part of the story largely untold, concentrating on wringing out his tear-jerking, heartfelt tale of kids whose “lives, after all, have been defined by bad calls.”

Sorry, but watching your father being gunned down, as at least one Fugee player had, is a bit more serious, don’tchathink, than a hand ball that isn’t called. St. John and his editor(s) had human interest gold and should have worked harder on the horrid sports-to-life metaphors - they had at least a few months to write this story looking at the timeline of the piece - and fleshing out the whole story, which no doubt means putting the entire town under the microscope as H. G. Bissinger did in his Friday Night Lights.

The story, without that side, is largely unfinished, further exhibited by the cut-and-run ending which seems to be the newspaper staple… but hey, Soccer is on the front page (with no mention of Beckham), so I’m not complaining.

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Update:

American Trifecta a first for EPL

Not much to say here except I love hearing two of my favorites - full disclosure we all share the same sponsor – making headlines in Europe. Dempsey started a movement that ended in a goal (and apparently did wind sprints after the game according to my man David Hirshey who was on the scene), while Gooch’s agent has admitted talks with both Chelsea and Olympique Lyon.