Growing up, I identified myself with soccer. And I used soccer to identify myself. I’m from Ecuador and I used to be good at soccer, so at some point I began telling myself that I was good at soccer because I was from Ecuador. I believed this despite the fact that I hadn’t played soccer while living in Ecuador—not any more than I played any of the universal kid inventions like sockball or “throw a rock on the roof”—and my only connection to the sport was that my older male relatives, my grandfather and his brothers and their sons, were known to like soccer. My grandfather had been living in Ohio for decades and you couldn’t watch games on TV back then, so even this foundational fact about him liking soccer was taken mostly on faith. There was no real evidence of soccer heritage in my life, except to the extent that I was able to make it up by saying that I was from Ecuador and my relatives liked soccer. It was a useful bit of self-invention, a lineage I needed to be true. All of this was taken at face value by my American friends, which made things easier for me. And it worked for me, being into soccer.
In the long run, being into soccer lasted way longer than being good at soccer. I peaked as a player around age 15, my freshman year of high school. I had played youth soccer in Northern Ohio, in Perrysburg, but when we moved to Bexley in Central Ohio it turned out that they didn’t have as much soccer culture there. I was seen as kind of a prodigy because I could control the ball and make interesting passes. People appreciated me, which was nice in a new school in a new town, and I got to play a few varsity games. I remember people’s parents talking about how good I was. Then, in my sophomore year, two brothers, Jason and Jeff Goggins, also moved to Bexley from Perrysburg. The Goggins boys were much better than me, so suddenly it was clear that Perrysburg was what was special, not me. I kept playing soccer and I kept enjoying it, but my level stayed flat and tendonitis eventually got the best of me. My senior year, I gave it up. (Jason Goggins went on to play professionally.)
But I kept being a soccer guy. It was a way of setting myself apart, of keeping the faint flame of my Ecuadorian identity burning, despite the fact that I no longer spoke much Spanish, hadn’t been back to Ecuador since childhood, and I walked around with a 100 percent Serbian name looking pretty Serbian, so people rarely guessed that I was Latin American, much less Ecuadorian. Back then, in the ’90s, being a soccer guy didn’t require much effort. Mainly you ignored other sports with a kind of unstated, and probably unnoticed, derision and, on the rare occasion that you could watch some soccer on TV, you did, and you mentioned that you did. There was no way, really, to follow a league the way you can now. America was a pretty bad place to be a soccer guy, but I stuck with it, I think because I liked being different. I liked being from Ecuador.
When I finally went back to Ecuador, having saved up some money the year after college, soccer came back to me. I had been estranged from my father. I hadn’t seen him since I was 8. He had been violent and threatening with my mother, so I didn’t see him much at all in childhood. In a way, it was my first decision as a college-graduated adult to go to Ecuador and make some kind of peace with him. I was there for a month, and I went into it with a simple plan: For the first two weeks, I would keep it light and friendly with my dad, feeling things out and seeing if I could establish some rapport. Then, once I was feeling comfortable, and hopefully he was too, I could start asking him the hard questions: Why didn’t he talk to us all those years? Why didn’t he send us money? Why was he the way he was?
My father lived out in San Antonio, very close to Mitad del Mundo, the equatorial monument that all the tourists visit. I was staying with my cousins in Quito, and each day they would drive me out to talk to my dad in the morning and then pick me up in the evening. I would call my father when we left, so he would know our general arrival time. On the day that I was intending to start asking the hard questions and figuring out some basic facts of my life, my father answered the phone and started talking to me in German. He spoke a lot of languages and generally liked to show off and fuck with people, so I initially thought it was some kind of joke. But pretty quickly I realized even his German was halting and garbled and he was probably having a stroke.
You see, my father had fought the Nazis when he was a teenager. He was 14 when he went to the front as a machine gunner, trailing after his older sister, who was a devoted Partizan. Later, after the allies won and Yugoslavia was formed, he was called up for military service at the age of 18. He thought he would have been exempt since he had already fought in the war while underage, but apparently he needed a full year of service for the exemption, and he had only fought for eight months. He visited his sister who was still in the military to plead with her to intervene on his behalf, but she could not, and in a fit of pique he stole her pistol and fled the country, going first to Vienna, then to a displaced persons’ camp in Naples, where he eventually got a spot on a boat to Panama, and another one to Chile, and finally, a few years later, he landed in Ecuador and never left. He never got a passport and generally refused to do anything official, including going to the doctor. A few years prior to my visit, he had let an infection in his leg turn gangrenous and was only saved because a bunch of his Serbian friends came to his house and literally dragged him to the hospital, where a Chilean doctor amputated his leg. Hence the blood clot that was manifesting as broken German.
When I got to my father, he couldn’t talk and refused any help. I don’t know if he wanted to die, but when I tried to carry him to the car to go to the hospital, he bit my shoulder and I dropped him. When I called my uncle, who ran the main private hospital in Quito, he explained that agitating stroke victims isn’t worth the risk, so we had to find a way to get my father to accept medical care willingly. I called his Serbian friends. They said that my dad had come to trust the Chilean doctor. We called the Chilean doctor, but nobody answered, so we went to his apartment building and waited for him to come home. When he did, we all drove back to San Antonio and my father agreed to take some oxygen and go in for some tests. By that point, the damage was done. He had lost all his languages and only retained some basic Spanish, not full sentences, but a few words.
I still went out to see my father every day, but the idea that I would learn something from him, that I would finally get some answers, had obviously vanished. Now I was mainly trying to get him to take his medicines and agree to go to some therapy for his stroke. He did those things. His friends implored me to stay in Ecuador and take care of him. His wife was a much younger woman and between them there was a clear, if unstated, arrangement that she would take care of him until he died, at which point she would inherit his property. She gave him the wrong dosages of medicine and my cousins and I were convinced she was trying to kill him. I asked my father what to do about it and he told me, in the few words he had, not to get involved. In the evenings, I would go back to my cousins’ house shattered and exhausted.
Perhaps you have had some kind of experience like this, some kind of slow-motion catastrophe or family nightmare. So you would know what kind of a balm it is in that moment, when all the pain of life has consumed you during the day, when there is nothing left to do or to understand, how necessary it is to do something meaningless and inconsequential in the evening. For me, this was watching soccer. My cousins had some subscription that meant some soccer game, a Mexican game or an Argentinian game or a domestic game, could always be found on their TV, and they left me to it. I stared at the screen, glowing green and watched the little men kicking a ball, and the fact that I couldn’t do anything but watch gave me some relief. It was like a homeopathic version of what I was going through—pure witnessing—except all of the consequence was gone, so it could even feel pleasurable. More than anything, I took comfort in the beautiful, saturated color of the field.
Until then, I had never really watched soccer. I had played soccer, and I had referenced the fact that my family watched soccer, but I hadn’t done it myself more than a few random times. Then suddenly, immediately, it became a religious practice for me, something I needed and gave myself over to completely. It was a simple way to accept life as it unfolded in front of me. Equally, it was a way to reject life as it unfolded in front of me. I needed that, and watching soccer gave me what I needed.
In the decades that followed, I became a devoted spectator of televised soccer, riding the waves of distribution on occasional network-TV programs, cable broadcasts in pubs, and illegal and then semi-legal streams on the internet. Currently, I am on my friend Ricardo’s YouTube TV family plan, which means I can project the feed onto a screen and watch games as they are meant to be watched: horizontally, on a sofa. The setup works great for evening games but during the day, when the grass looks somewhat washed out. But it doesn’t matter, I’m not picky. I like the ritual of it, and I like the way my mind can wander in and out of the game, floating above the projected green of the field. I don’t know if it has been therapeutic or merely narcotic, but it is certainly a habit, something that anchors my week. Even when I spot this green rectangle glowing from inside a sports bar, it speaks to me and calms me.
I have watched games in stadiums—in Florence, in London, in Chicago, in Nebraska—but the truth is, I find the stadium experience to be annoyingly corporeal. You have to deal with parking, you have to sit next to other people, you are fixed in your own limited point of view. Sure, it’s fun, and I do it for special occasions, but I don’t really prefer it. I was talking about this with my mom because Ecuador was going to play Curaçao in the World Cup’s group stage, in Kansas City. This was drivable for me from Nebraska, so I was curious about the ticket prices and checked in to see they were rising from $400 to $500 and then $600 for the cheapest seats. That wasn’t something we could realistically contemplate, I told my mom, and she agreed it was a lot to pay just to watch a game.
So, I was astonished when she texted the next morning saying she wanted to pay for me and my brother to go to the game—“Once in a lifetime oportunidad!” I spent my Tuesday making the arrangements on her card, first overpaying for the tickets, then overpaying for the hotel, and finally overpaying for my brother to fly in from Columbus. “You have ten minutes to complete the transaction.” “One seat left for this itinerary.” “Please download the FIFA app and create a profile. The tickets will be sent to you on the day of the match.” My mom said I should spring the news on my brother myself, and when I did, he just said, “What?” My brother didn’t have Real ID on his license so he had to look for his passport. Would he have to drive to Missouri from Ohio? It crossed my mind that for the money we were spending we could go all the way to Ecuador, but I kept that thought to myself. We were really fucking excited. My mom said my grandfather would be happy. It was a multigenerational project, I knew that much, but I didn’t realize we were convening with the dead. Of course we were convening with the dead, that was the whole point.
Arriving at the hotel in Kansas City, I realized I had never been in a hotel full of Ecuadorians because in Ecuador, the hotels are full of tourists. It was a sea of bright yellow soccer jerseys. “Vamos, carajo!” Everyone was singing, walking around wrapped in the flag, greeting strangers warmly. It was more Ecuadorian than Ecuador. In the hotel elevator, at random bars in town, at the vintage clothing shop, there were clumps and clusters of people in yellow. It was a homecoming, but in the diaspora. Everything was inside out.
When I came to the US, in 1981, I didn’t know anyone Ecuadorian who wasn’t in my family. We had some cousins in Cleveland, the Sandovals, and that was it. I tell my daughter that I went decades without tropical fruit—“Even mango?” “Yes, even mango”—but the deeper, more painful truth is, I went decades without Ecuadorians. We were on the early side of the migration, and landed in small-town Ohio; I didn’t know about Jackson Heights or the Consulate in Chicago. Even now, when I encounter an Ecuadorian neighborhood or even a restaurant, it is like an oasis in the desert—I either laugh or I weep.
It was like that at the hotel. On the cute little world map in the lobby, into which you’re supposed to stick a pin to indicate where you came from, Ecuador was piled up with pins. Everyone was Ecuadorian. Normally you have to suss this out through an accent or search for some other subtle behavior, but here everyone was making it easy, wearing yellow, painting flags on their faces, braiding their hair with ribbons. I noticed my own yellow shirt was marking me out, too. In the warm greetings and nods of the Ecuadorians, yes, but also in the careful, slowed-down enunciation of the cashiers and hotel receptionists and shop owners we encountered.
Slowly, a few hours before the game, all of these little yellow clusters began to stretch into little yellow tributaries. Everyone started moving in the same direction, piling into minivans, getting on big chartered busses, flagging down rideshares. As we approached the stadium and entered the now enormous yellow river of people moving towards the entrances, we had the best security-line experience of our lives, everyone just singing and laughing. What struck me most was the old people. This was not your usual young-hoodlum clientele, nor was it dominated by middle-aged dads like most sporting events. Here, it was about finally being recognized, finally achieving something and doing it, like all immigrant families, intergenerationally.
At the game, there was a further reversal. You see, Ecuador is a perennial underdog. We are almost always the smaller country, up against the likes of Argentina, Brazil, or even our neighbors Colombia and Peru. But here we were playing Curaçao, population: 156,000. Would it even be fair to beat them? We will never know. We did dominate possession; but, from our perch high above proceedings, at the tippy top of the stadium, my brother and I looked on as Ecuador unfailingly shot right at the keeper, and he saved every time. In the end, that’s what people would remember about the game, if they remembered it at all. It wasn’t physically pleasant, either. My brother and I were at the sun-struck side of the stadium. I hadn’t put on sunscreen, because the game started at seven. But of course, we arrived at five and were scorched from then on. And since we were at the very apex of the stadium and very thirsty, every time we needed water, it was an expedition.
Because the match was against Curaçao and because our next match was against Germany, the 0–0 result was received like a huge loss and, more than that, like the end of our tournament. The loud, enthusiastic chants at the end were simply for the coach to be fired. Streaming out of the stadium, all of the diasporic joy was converted back into diasporic sorrow. This was compounded by the enormity of the exit chaos. Cell phones weren’t working, people couldn’t meet up, traffic was absolutely jammed. I imagine for a Chiefs’ game people are used to this and know the drill, but that night we saw tens of thousands of people drudging around in the dark, trying to find a way out.
It just so happened that for the next game I was in New York City, so I decided to take the bus out to Jackson Heights. All of the regular bars and restaurants were filled to capacity by the time I arrived, so I ended up at an extremely fancy place, the kind of place that made me feel like I had forgotten my cocaine. The waitresses were model types, Instagramming themselves and barely watching the match. The rest of us were transfixed, barely believing what we were seeing: Having given up a goal very early, Ecuador was now ahead of Germany, and actually outplaying the famous European powerhouse. In the end, we managed a famous and redeeming upset. And when I got out on the streets, everyone was still Ecuadorian, hanging out of their cars, leaning on their horns, waving from buses. I got myself a pastry in celebration and texted my cousins. We were through to the next round. It felt good to be home.
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