Soccer, race, and one spring afternoon at Princeton

Author’s Commentary:

I hesitated to post this personal memory of a single day in my life because I’ve questioned its significance to anyone but me. At times when I think about it, it seems worth telling, but other times it seems fleeting and slight. It happened four decades ago, and while it is about race, it does not have the urgency of the life-and-death situations we are grappling with today. No one was brutalized. No police were called. No one’s right to be present on an Ivy League campus was questioned. I can’t even state with certainty that the action described came from racist intent, or caused emotional or psychological harm, which is also why I am not using any names.

I did want to write this down, and first I tried to use it as the basis for a longer short story about the fickle nature of memory. I have written most of that short story, but I’m not happy with it, so I set it aside and took a stab at telling the story directly as nonfiction.

So here you are. I still have my doubts, but who knows, maybe the outcome speaks for itself.

April 1978

“You two, over here. You and you, over there. Stand together in your corners so we can do this quickly.”

The two Princeton soccer captains running the spring practice looked thoughtful and businesslike as they motioned the players one by one to gather around one of four cones spread out in a square. They were longtime varsity starters who commanded respect and went about the task with an air of authority.

The varsity head coach was never at these spring training sessions, perhaps because NCAA rules at the time forbade his presence. I can’t recall how word got around about the practice, but most of the players associated with the varsity program knew about it. Most of us had already played for the varsity “A” or varsity “B” squads. Others would come too, especially if they had at least tried out for the team and/or had friends who had played. There must have been at least 35 young men at the practice that day, enough for four teams and two simultaneous scrimmages.

For several minutes I barely noticed how the teams were being divided up; I was just anxious to play. As a walk-on, I was never really in the coach’s varsity “A” plans, but I had been a top scorer on varsity “B,” and I always tried to be optimistic and work hard on the field so one day I might be told to dress for an “A” game. That afternoon, until we were assigned teams, I stood and chatted with a friend who played with me on the “B” squad and also was not likely to move up.

At first I assumed the captains were simply trying to divide up the talent fairly. They would pause between each selection, murmur to each other, and then one would point to a player, motion to a cone, and say, “You, over here.”

Even when the teams were nearly complete, there appeared to be some sort of calculus at work in creating balanced matches, as the captains would consult briefly and then one of them would ask two players to switch.

During my years at Princeton, the varsity “A” squad was always almost exclusively white. I’m looking at the team picture from my senior year, and there is one player of hispanic origin, one Asian-American, and one Iranian. Whatever the reasons for the overwhelming whiteness of Princeton soccer, the team makeup mimicked the color lines of top youth soccer programs across America as the sport steadily gained in popularity. Unlike in most countries in the world, where many successful players come from poor or working-class backgrounds, the United States soccer development model favored affluent suburban familes who could afford the pricey fees of the best clubs and the tournament travel that came with them.

Not pictured in my yearbook are the many black players—some American, some native African—whom I remember playing with, in varsity “B games,” in pickup games, and in spring training sessions. In my first “B” game as a freshman, a quiet young man from Ghana scored two stunning first-half goals from 35 yards out. At halftime, he left the field, never to return. I don’t know why. But others stuck it out. Maybe they thought the coaches might one day notice their talent; maybe they just liked to play. A bunch of them were there that April afternoon.

The sorting process took less than 10 minutes, and only when it was over did I realize that the captains had created two teams of almost all white players (plus the exceptions noted above), and two teams of all blacks; both of those teams were sent to play each other on an adjacent field.

While this moment from many years ago remains poignant for me, it was a fleeting moment, and (as I noted in my opening comment), I hesitate to make too much of it or speculate on any lasting memory for anyone else but me. That said, I have two personal memories, one clear as if it were yesterday, one fuzzy and thoroughly unreliable. And I have a modest regret.

I’ll never forget the faces of the black players as they trudged up the little hill to the other field and looked around at the unfolding scene: a clean separation of black from white, almost as if we were chess pieces being sorted after a match and pushed back to our respective sides of the board. While I can’t speculate whether the looks on the faces displayed barely concealed anger or hurt, I can say they carried a knowing, been-here-before look of indignity.

The regret is that I never asked any of them, that day or later in the spring, how they felt about it. The journalist in me wasn’t quite out of the bottle yet.

The fuzzy memory is whether my varsity “B” friend and I played in the “black” game. We were assigned to the “white” game, but years later when I thought about that day, I had a memory of me asking my friend if he would join me if I walked up the hill. And he agreed, and one of us turned to the captains and said, “We’ll play in the other game today, if you don’t mind.” But memory is fickle, and I don’t know if we really did that, or if I just wished we had. And since false memories are as easily etched into the brain as real ones, I can’t tell you which is the truth: the action of solidarity, or the inaction of going along with the status quo. And I guess it doesn’t matter now.

Copyright 2020 Stephen Leon