BOOK OF THE DAY: CONOR O'CALLAGHANreviews Outcasts Unitedby Warren St. John Fourth Estate, 307 pp, £14.99
IN THE early 1990s Clarkson in Georgia was designated as a site of refugee settlement. Since then, thousands of broken families from the Sudan and Kosovo and Afghanistan and Liberia have sought to make Clarkson their new home amid native hostility and imported tribal rivalries. It is an unlikely setting for what New York Timesjournalist Warren St John argues to be most ethnically diverse community in the US.
Outcasts Unitedis St John's moving account of one year spent among the city's refugee community, trailing the 2006 season of its junior soccer team, the Fugees. The Fugees is a kitless assortment of languages, complexions and pasts ravaged by civil war. Its players are uprooted children who have seen loved ones arrested or murdered, who fend for themselves while their mothers work night shifts in battery farms and factories.
At the heart of the story is team coach and founder, Luma Mufleh. A Jordanian national and Iveagh League graduate, she had drifted aimlessly to the suburbs of Atlanta by 2003. Disowned by her family for staying in the US, working all hours to keep a doomed cafe solvent, Mufleh happened upon kids playing football in a municipal park and asked if she could join in. Since that afternoon she has made their passion her life’s work.
Mufleh is a difficult heroine. Her fostering of certain kids and families and her scrapes with hostile city councillors to find a safe home for her team are undoubtedly heroic. But hers are the kind of coaching methods that give disciplinarians a bad name. She makes her players do laps and push-ups immediately before each game, peppers half-time team-talks with accusations of idiocy, and sulks in the bleachers when the cause is lost. One Liberian, her best player, is ejected for refusing to have his braids shaved off.
Every good story needs its villain. Here that role is filled by Mayor Lee Swaney, self-made champion of “old Clarkson”. Swaney dreams up various schemes to keep the Fugees off a lush field owned by the council. Ultimately, the field is spuriously designated for U-12 baseball in a city with no Little League.
The best football stories have almost nothing to do with football. Outcasts Unitedis really about America's uneasy relationship with the global village as symbolised by soccer. While Swaney and his pale-faced constituents cling doggedly to their nostalgia for picket fences and yellow buses and softball diamonds, the age of "super diversity" and the beautiful game passes them by.
St John has every good journalist’s gift for getting out of the way of the narrative. Only gradually does the author’s presence encroach. In one bizarre incident, he has to mediate between his employer and a Burundian cleaner who has a large bill for a New York Times subscription she never ordered.
Outcasts Unitedgrew out of reports that St John wrote for his paper, resulting in a flood of angry letters to the office of Mayor Swaney.
Where once the lead striker played competitive games with one boot on his kicking foot, the Fugees’ kit is now sponsored by Nike.
Feel-good movie is written all over this this story but it would be too easy to be cynical. The book says a great deal about our world at the beginning of the 21st century and makes for immensely enjoyable reading.
Conor O'Callaghan is a poet , who has also written widely on sport. His book, Red Mist – Roy Keane and the Football Civil War, was published by Bloomsbury in 2004