A distasteful tale of soccer and possible institutional racism

I talked to a friend this morning. He’s a good dude who owns a few local restaurants and dotes on his employees. Big soccer guy, too. Took a bunch of his co-workers to the FC Dallas-Inter Milan match last month and had a killer time. “Fiesta, fiesta, no termina!”

Loose translation: “Keep the party going!”

Our conversation reminded me of a story he told me, a story that reminds us where our game (soccer, ‘course) sometimes fits in the complex societal structure.

It reminds me of why I’m proud of how soccer is like Weezie Jefferson – it just keeps “movin’ on up!"  It keeps spreading through the American fabric despite the (thankfully diminishing) legion of ninnies, xenophobes and fearful, the types who perpetually and anxiously wonder why things “can’t just be the way the used to be?”

It’s a story about soccer and institutional racism. I’ll try to tell it quickly:

My friend lives in a nice neighborhood with a nice-enough, nearby neighborhood park. There’s a big green space in the park.

Where I live, like so many urban areas, lack of quality park space is endemic. I coached a game in the suburbs last night.  I love living in the city but, man, if our parks are a raggedy 12-year old Honda, theirs is a slick, new model hybrid. Space is ample for league matches and pick-up games alike. It’s well-manicured, well-marked, well-equipped, partially lighted, etc.

Meanwhile, we fight for our little scraps of land down here for my under-12 team’s practices and for my own pickup games. Generally speaking, the places where we pass and trap have two types of grass: knee-high or non-existent. All the plush stuff in between exists only in my dreams. Well, in the suburbs, too.

So needless to say, adequate areas for pickup games or for youth practices are sparse. While that’s unfortunate on one hand, I’ve always been heartened at how so many open spaces, no matter how tattered, uneven or glass-strewn, turn into pick-up game space. And what could possibly be wrong with pick-up games?

I know that to a few folks from, uh, “the older side of town,” this notion of grown men running around in short britches playing “a children’s game” is troubling.  That’s the same group that bemoans as soccer is too slow – but they love baseball. That’s always a head-scratcher.

I say this: instead of going to a bar, people who understand the value of exercise gather up after work. They take to the athletic field to release the day’s stress, tension and desire to cold-cock the boss-man. Sometimes, family comes out. Kids, wives, girlfriends, grandmas, etc.

Stop me when you see something bad in all this, something to fear.

Yes, I do understand that garbage or parking can become issues for nearby residents. But these are relatively benign matters of enforcement, issue to be settled fairly easily through routine civic processes, or simply by devoting a little attention to the issue.

So, back to my friend and his nearby park: He told me the green space in the park played host to a weekend soccer game. Again, friends, families, shared weekend activity, that kind of stuff. They weren’t out there drag racing or worshiping the devil or pushing some other kind of nonsense. It’s families finding ways to spend time together without spending money at the mall. Besides, anyone reading this who believes kids should be inside playing video games all weekend instead of being outside, running, playing, spending time with other human beings, seeing the example of parent who value exercise, well, you can just stop reading now. (And go get some exercise, for goodness sakes!)

Well, it just happened that this was a mostly-Latino gathering. And it happens that this neighborhood was more or less white.  So, I think we can all see where this was going.

One day my friend drove by the park and saw … trees.

Trees had been planted right out in the middle of the green space. Not strategically, really. Just here and there, rather willy-nilly. Only a few. As a potentially thriving forest, it was a wee bit on the puny side.

Then he noticed signs. In Spanish. “Ningún futbol permitió”

“No soccer allowed”

As my friend said: “They should have just put up a sign that said ‘No Mexicans allowed!’ ”

So, the scourge of the Latino-dominated pickup soccer game, surely among the pressing issues of our time, had been crushed. Disaster and societal downfall averted. Praise be.

Outright, overt racism? Maybe, maybe not. More likely it could have been something they taught me in my liberal, namby-pamby, tree-hugging sociology class down at the University of Texas (where I managed to attend a lecture or two when I wasn’t manning the apartheid shanty or plotting my next move with that adorable Suzie from Media Law class): It was covert racism. Or, even more likely, it could have been something even less sinister but no less distasteful: maybe it was thoughtless, institutional racism.

Since then I’ve noticed a few other places in and around the city where pick-up games once happened regularly. Trees have been planted in some of these open areas, too.  Right in the middle! Coincidence?  Honestly, it may be.  I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist.  But who knows? At best, it was an example of thoughtless planning, of a hopelessly over-stretched parks department that can’t keep the grass mown, much less be persuaded to actually investigate how their parks are being used. 

One final thought on my friend’s neighborhood park. I just wonder: what if the pickup game of choice at this park had been baseball? Maybe if the “foreigners” choose to play a more “American” game, the ninnies, dopes and NIMBYs would grudgingly let them stay. Maybe.

(FYI: I have one more great example of possible institutional racism and soccer. But I’ll let you guess on that one … until I write about it some other day.)