One Goal Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Amy Bass

  Jacket design by Mandy Kain

  Jacket photograph © Amy Bass

  Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: February 2018

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  ISBNs: 978-0-316-3964-7 (hardcover), 978-0-316-39657-8 (ebook), 978-0-316-51101-8 (large print)

  E3-20180125-DA-NF

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Why Not Us?

  Chapter 2: We Have to Go Back

  Chapter 3: Welcome to Vacationland

  Chapter 4: Many and One

  Chapter 5: I Still Say Somalia

  Chapter 6: Grind Mode

  Chapter 7: I Live My Thank-You

  Chapter 8: 1-2-3 Pamoja Ndugu

  Chapter 9: Lewiston Pure

  Chapter 10: Saints, Martyrs, and Summer Soccer

  Chapter 11: Many Nations, One Team

  Chapter 12: Inshallah, We Got This

  Chapter 13: Our House

  Chapter 14: Straight Red

  Chapter 15: Do Not Retaliate

  Chapter 16: Everyone Bleeds Blue

  Chapter 17: Make It a Good One

  Epilogue: The Devils that You Know

  Lewiston High School Blue Devils Soccer State Champions 2015

  Postscript: Soccer is Life

  Acknowledgments

  Photos

  Newsletters

  For Sundus and Miles and Saaliha and my Hannah.

  May they ensure the future welcomes all, everywhere, always.

  When you have a football at your feet, you are free.

  —Ronaldinho

  Introduction

  Master of the front handspring flip throw-in, Maulid Abdow held the ball and surveyed the vast field before him under the gray November sky. His teammates spread in a sea of blue across the green pitch—Karim and Moha, Nuri and Q, Maslah and Abdi H. White-shirted Scarborough defenders multiplied by the second. Scarborough’s goalkeeper, Cameron Nigro, stood out among the scrambling traffic before the box, his black-and-gold adidas flame shirt mirroring his shocking blond Mohawk. He towered above the fray, a human roadblock before the net.

  If Sid Vicious ever thought about playing soccer, he would’ve looked to Cam Nigro for style tips.

  Maulid knew that his parents, Hassan Matan and Shafea Omar—neither of whom spoke much English, but both could talk soccer—were somewhere in the stadium amidst the cacophony cheering the Lewiston Blue Devils. Women, heads covered by colorful hijabs, sat next to students with faces painted blue and white. Men in koofiyads cheered beside those in baseball caps and ski hats.

  Some 4,500 fans—the highest attendance ever for a high school soccer game in Maine—made their presence known from the stands of Portland’s Fitzpatrick Stadium on November 7, 2015. They gathered to watch the undefeated Blue Devils finish their season on top, which they had failed to do just one year ago against Cheverus High School. The 113 goals that brought them to this moment didn’t matter anymore. Their national ranking didn’t matter anymore. The goal they had scored earlier, the one a referee took away—“offside” was the call—didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was this moment, this game, this team.

  Maulid glanced at the clock: just over sixteen minutes remained. Funny and charming off the field, his deep voice often gently ribbing his friends before descending into rich laughter, he now stood deadly serious. His slim legs fidgeted back and forth, his hot-pink-and-blue cleats making dizzying patterns as his right foot pushed out in front, ready to take the lead.

  “Ohhhhhh, this isn’t the jungle!” he heard, followed by what he assumed were monkey noises. “Stop flipping!”

  Maulid had no patience for racist trash talk, but Scarborough fans had a reputation. There’d been an incident about a year ago when Scarborough played Deering. But Coach drilled into them that putting points on the scoreboard was the best response, something he intended to do right now.

  “We play,” Coach McGraw said in one of his legendary pre-game speeches, “the right way. You rise above everybody else. We play hard. We play fair. Because winning without playing fair is a shallow victory. You let other people play those games. Those games take energy, energy that they waste.”

  Just beat ’em.

  Everything the coach said corresponded to what Maulid’s parents told him about living in Maine: ignore ignorance. His parents were very happy to live in Lewiston. They appreciated the schools, health care, and jobs. Those things were important. But it was more than that. They felt free in Lewiston; something his mother had realized when she traveled back to Africa on a U.S. passport for the first time to see her family. Compared to what she saw there, she could never say that life in Lewiston was hard, no matter what it threw at her.

  But it wasn’t perfect. She understood that no matter how long they were in Maine, not everyone would be okay with it. Her kids told her about the stuff people wrote online, in response to the many newspaper articles over the years about Somalis living in Lewiston. She heard it herself when running errands or heading to her job at Walmart or to babysit. “Why are you here?” they asked, sometimes swearing. “Why are you taking money from our government?” Worry about yourself, she told her children. Yes, it hurts, but they can’t hurt you. They have no authority to do anything to you.

  On the field, Maulid heard it all, especially when the game turned rough, as it often did against Lewiston. Years ago, when he first came to America, he had no idea what kids were saying to him, but he knew it wasn’t good. Now he understood those kinds of words all too well.

  “Get outta my side, nigger,” a defender might taunt. “Go back to your country.”

  “I can’t go back,” Maulid says of such incidents, understanding that Lewiston is his home because it has to be. “And if I could, they can’t make me.”

  Ignore them, Maulid thought as Scarborough fans continued to bait him. He didn’t have it as bad as Mohamed “Moe” Khalid, who played in the backline on this side. They were relentless to Moe, but he could take it. Moe played lacrosse in the spring and was no stranger to the n-word.

  At least they’re watching, Maulid thought. He looked back at the bleachers and grinned just for the hell of it. They could say whatever they wanted. He wasn’t going to stop.

  He squeezed the white-and-black ball tighter, pressing it harder between his palms. It no longer felt slippery. He hoped a little spit on his dark fingers would be the magic glue that gave him the pinpoint precision he needed.

  In a battle such as the one unf
olding on the field, Maulid understood how a set piece—a moment when the ball returns to play after a stoppage, usually by a corner kick, free kick, or throw-in—could make all the difference. In the game against Bangor just a few days earlier, Maulid had made it happen. Indeed, he felt like he’d done it a million times before, but every second of this game felt like the first. At the half, McGraw had emphasized they had to find one chance, one play, to get that one goal.

  “Let’s see what kind of conditioning we’ve got,” he’d said to his huddling players as they bounced on their toes. “Let’s take advantage of the one break we’re going to get, and we’ll see what we’ll see.”

  Watching Maulid from the sidelines, Coach Mike McGraw knew all too well that the longer Scarborough held down his offense, the more one play could make the difference. They hadn’t been held scoreless for an entire half all season. This was unfamiliar territory.

  No, he assured anyone who asked. He didn’t need a state title. He wanted one. More than anything. In the classroom, on the field, he was a patient man. But he’d waited a long time for this chance. Thirty-three years, to be exact. One would be hard-pressed to find a more experienced high school soccer coach than McGraw, who first took Lewiston to a state soccer final in 1991. Then, his roster had names like Kevin and Steve, John and Tony. Now he coached Muktar, Maslah, Karim, and Abdi H. For many reasons, this was not the same team.

  All but one on the starting varsity roster were refugees.

  The meteoric rise of the Lewiston Blue Devils to the top ranks of U.S. high school soccer shows what happens when America works the way it is supposed to; the way it reads on paper. On the surface, the Blue Devils are a simple feel-good tale: refugee kids playing soccer. But theirs is more than just a great sports story. The Blue Devils made their championship run in one of the whitest states in America, in a city that didn’t talk about hope for a long time. They played soccer while politicians debated Syrian refugees and American security, and the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump generated headlines about the prospect of building a wall to keep out immigrants, illegal or otherwise.

  But the world’s 60 million refugees are not mere immigrants. Theirs is almost always a story of war, of people fleeing—by foot, by water, by any means necessary—a dying country toward a life of limbo. The families of these soccer players arrived in Lewiston to mixed receptions and created a community with soccer at its core, the players translating tight-knit family and community connections to success on the field. As they learned to deal with language barriers, racial slurs, and new cultural norms, they played soccer in city parks and recreational leagues. In winter, they gathered in the parking lot of the Colisée, the local hockey arena, sky-high snowbanks marking the goals. Once the boys were playing for local legend McGraw in high school, they built a team with one goal: the first state soccer championship in Lewiston history.

  A small, Catholic, French-Canadian city on the banks of the Androscoggin River, Lewiston isn’t the Maine of blueberry pie and lobster boils, sailboats and the Bush family. For decades, the former mill town’s postwar economic downturn saw its abandoned redbrick factory buildings begin to crumble into the river and canals. By 2000, more than half of the city’s families with children under five lived at or below the poverty line. Residents of Auburn, the “twin” city across the river, refer to “Dirty Lew” with a scorn usually reserved for thieves and murderers, both of which they claim Lewiston is filled with.

  But in 2001, Lewiston changed. Thousands of Somali refugees knocked on the city’s door, drastically altering its sense of self. In about a decade’s time, the city of 36,000 welcomed approximately 7,000 African immigrants. Never in modern U.S. history had a city of this size taken in so many newcomers so quickly. The new residents shifted Lewiston’s demographic landscape, halting the population decline that had plagued the city for the last three decades.

  According to U.S. census data, before the Somali influx, some 96 percent of Lewiston identified as white; almost a third spoke a language other than English at home, primarily French. Within a decade, the city’s non-white population surged over 800 percent, seven times higher than the state average of 1.2 percent. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the high school, one of the largest in the state. Of its 1,300 or so students, approximately 25 percent are African immigrants, the majority of whom are Somali.

  The soccer team represents a coming of age for Somalis in Lewiston and a blueprint of sorts for a global future. The team’s success embodies a negotiation between an immigrant community and its chosen home, an often difficult conversation about language, religion, culture, education, and family.

  Soccer has been a microcosm of Lewiston’s transition from former factory town to global host. These players, McGraw says to anyone who asks, are seeds that can grow into something new for Lewiston. It’s not a Hoop Dreams story, where kids use sports to escape something. These kids aren’t trying to escape—that part already happened—and they aren’t problems to be solved. They are classmates, teammates, and neighbors, forging relationships for a community to emulate. Soccer is how these kids live where they landed.

  Chapter 1

  Why Not Us?

  When Lewiston lost its first state championship—a 2–0 shutout by Brunswick—in 1991, Mike McGraw didn’t know when, or if, he’d get another chance. Many hoped the next year would be it, but it wasn’t. Despite scoring fifty goals—the most yet in Lewiston history—players such as Dan LeClerc, Earl St. Hilaire, and Swedish exchange student Per Kiltorp did not get back to the final. But eventually, some twenty-three years later, November 8, 2014—a year before Maulid tried to figure out how to get the ball over the heads of Scarborough’s defense—McGraw got another chance.

  The 2014 Maine Class A Boys Soccer State Championship had all the hype of a Hollywood movie. As the Lewiston Sun Journal explained, the game pitted Lewiston’s fairy-tale season against the Cinderella run of Cheverus High School.

  Seeded seventh entering the playoffs, Cheverus was delighted just to be at the ball, filling its Twitter feeds with the hashtag “#WhyNotUs?” as it worked through the playoff bracket. Not only were the Stags there to win, they might actually have the chops to make it happen.

  Why not them?

  Lewiston’s team rode into the championship game confident about the outcome. Despite some battles along the way, they had a nearly flawless record. In early October, after a hard-fought 2–1 win over Bangor, even the usually reserved McGraw admitted they could go all the way, peaking at exactly the right time, playing like a championship team. But the Blue Devils had a lot of baggage to deal with, coming up short in heartbreaking fashion year after year.

  In 2012, a second-seeded Lewiston squad faced top-seeded Mt. Ararat in the regional final, the last stop before the state championship game. Even now, Lewiston Athletic Director Jason Fuller can’t talk about it without grimacing.

  “Still painful,” he says.

  With forty-six seconds of regulation play left on the clock, Lewiston tied Mt. Ararat 1–1. Excited Lewiston fans spilled onto the field, creating chaos and merriment despite Fuller’s best efforts to keep them in their seats. He knew the refs weren’t going to like a horde of cheering kids running over the sideline. When junior midfielder Abdullahi Shaleh ripped off his shirt, a once-popular move that FIFA outlawed in 2003, an official quickly raised a yellow card.

  The call? Excessive celebration.

  From the stands, Denis Wing, whose son Austin was then a freshman goalie, shook his head at the call. He wanted to be surprised that the ref had booked the kid, but knew all too well what some officials did when Lewiston was on the field. He had once played soccer for Lewiston.

  Wing grew up on Chestnut Street. It’s a neighborhood where many of the Somali players now live, in the rectangular triple- and quadruple-stacked apartment houses of Lewiston’s “tree streets.” Upperclassmen at nearby Bates College are known to warn freshmen to turn back if they ever hit Walnut, Chestnut, Ash, and so on. Bu
t Wing only knew it as his old neighborhood, bristling whenever he heard someone talk badly about Lewiston’s “downtown kids,” code words for Somali. He was once a kid who lived downtown, back when the phrase described French-Canadian kids like him. From sunrise to sunset, he played next to the Colisée parking lot in Drouin Field, kicking balls through a set of rusted goalposts.

  The Wings—Denis and his wife, Kathy; Austin and his younger brother, Dalton—now live in a house with a pool on the outskirts of town. Denis and Kathy liked helping out with their sons’ teams, becoming increasingly involved with soccer’s Booster Club, and were sideline fixtures on game days. Denis Wing knew soccer well. But today, he was confused. He watched as Mt. Ararat’s goalie talked to the official. After a quick back-and-forth, the goalie walked back to the box. The referee brought out a red card. Taunting.

  Down on the field, McGraw stood stunned as Mt. Ararat fans cheered. Taunting? How could Abdullahi taunt fans who were on the other side of the bleachers? Taunting who, exactly?

  Wing couldn’t believe it, either. The red card was bad enough, but the way it happened seemed absurd. The goalie talks to a ref, and a red card comes out? The ref was going to take the word of what the goalie said happened? If it was excessive celebration and taunting, why didn’t the red card come out in the first place?

  For generations, Lewiston athletes knew all too well what other schools thought of them. Even before the Somalis started playing, before questions of racial bias threatened every time a ref pulled a card, Lewiston got a bum rap. When teams played Lewiston, McGraw says, they tended to “junk it up a little bit.” The “Dirty Lew” has long resonated throughout the state as a city filled with broken homes, cars, and people; not the stuff of tourism brochures. McGraw remembers once, long ago, when one of his players got a yellow card in a game against Westbrook. Baffled about what the player had done, McGraw asked for clarification.