November 2, 2008

A Beautiful Game
Soccer connects first-generation Americans to their traditional roots

By CORY ELDRIDGE
of The Chronicle

     The goal takes so long to unfold it seems to be in slow motion.
     The Dalles Wahtonka had controlled the game, moving the ball well, pressing, attack, attack, attacking, and now, suddenly, they’re scrambling.
     A Summit High School Storm defender clears the ball from the penalty box and the ball sails past the midfield line to his striker who makes one neat move.
Now it’s a footrace between the striker and the sweeper, the last defender before the goal keeper. The keeper, Jose Luis Manzo, hesitates, waiting for another defender to catch up before he comes out of the box. No chance there. Luis rushes out, slides into the striker and deflects the ball.
     That’s as much as he can hope for.
     It’s not enough.
     The striker, stumbling, kicks a bumbling grounder into the far corner of the net, under the sweeper who can’t stop it.
     And just like that, the team’s season can end. Sixty-five minutes remain in this game, but no The Dalles Wahtonka soccer team, boys or girls, has ever beaten a Bend school and if that doesn’t happen today this team will not make the state playoffs.

     Luis Gamez, the team’s head coach, calls to Angel Ortiz to get onto the field as the first substitute. Ortiz springs off the bench, rubbing his hands together to warm them up, and runs to the substitute box at the midfield line. He hops in place and twists his shoulders side-to-side, loosening up and getting the adrenaline to flow. When play stops and he goes in, he sprints to his forward position.
     For most players, an even match is basically 80 minutes of 40-yard sprints with short breaks. It’s gut-busting, and no Eagle Indian can claim to work harder than Ortiz. He bolts on his runs like a rabbit, long and lithe, looking for through passes, looking to score. Coming home from away games, he passes out on the bus’ hard, plastic seats, exhausted.
     He kills himself out there, and he doesn’t get much for it. Ortiz is one of those players who threatens a defense, makes them pay attention to him and then, in the confusion, another player scores. His goal count this year doesn’t touch the top shooters, but, as he sees it, to give any less would be disrespectful to the game.
     And disrespecting the game would mean disrespecting himself.
     Ortiz was born in Stockton, Calif., but grew up in The Dalles. He played soccer here as a kid, but his passion for the game (the passion that causes him to say, “It really is a beautiful game — the beautiful game”) ties directly to a dirt field in front of his grandmother’s home in the Mexican state of Guanajuato.
     When he visited, Ortiz and his cousins would set two rocks at either end of the field for their goals. Lengthwise, the field ran from a wall along a road to an uncle’s home. The pitch was flanked on one side by a row of his uncles’ semi trailers and on the other by his grandmother’s home and store, where she sold tomatoes, chilies, cilantro and other produce.
     He learned the game there, playing for cans of soda from the store — losers pay. Compared to his cousins, who played the game constantly, he was a late-comer. Ortiz played on youth teams in The Dalles in grade school, but only for two years. When he visited his family and played on the dirt field, younger kids beat him.
     He was teased. He was put down for being from “up there,” for playing like an American instead of a Mexican.
     “You’re from here but you feel connected to down there, but when you’re down there they say you belong up here,” he says.
     Playing well turned into the proof that he hadn’t given up his roots — the evidence that he was from America but was still Mexican. Though when he looks at it another way, being a good soccer player, whether he is playing here or in Mexico, negates any other identity.
     “In soccer there is no color, there is no race. There is just 11-11,” he says, and what matters is if you’re a player.

     The half is almost up and the boys are pushing into the wind again, pressuring Summit.
     Fransico Morales, a small, quiet guy who doesn’t look like he can be as good as he is, bolts down the sideline with the ball. Ortiz makes a run into the penalty box, looking for a pass. A defender marks him and the Summit keeper rushes to cut Ortiz’s angle. Morales, approaching the corner of the field, swipes the ball with the inside of the left foot, sending the cross-pass into the goal box. The keeper, trying to deny Ortiz a header shot, dives at the ball and misses. The ball lands right in front of Luis Flores, streaking in on his own run, and he shoots at the open net.
     Coach Gamez snaps both hands above his head, yelling congratulations to his players. Then he folds them across his chest, under his arms, and continues pacing the sideline while Paul Beasley, his assistant, yells at the guys to get over the goal and get back on defense.

     Gamez couldn’t sleep the night before the game. He woke up at 2 a.m., his brain skipping through different lineups. Should he keep Jonatan Moreno at center-midfield or drop him back to defender; should Ortiz start or come in as a fresh pair of legs; should Isaac Bailey or Melchor Nuñez or Alex Gamez play sweeper? He laid awake for hours.
     This is the stress that makes him say, every year, that this is his last year.
Gamez began coaching the high school team eight years ago and became the team’s first Latino head coach six years ago. His first year as an assistant was the year the number of Latinos began to increase, but he didn’t have much to do with the initial wave.
     That year, his nephew, also Luis Gamez, entered high school. As a freshman he made varsity, and even the all-state second team, and was one of four Latino players on the team. During the 15 years before then, only one or two, if any, were on the squad. Along with Gamez, the player, came a group of four or five friends who made varsity their sophomore year. That class, which graduated in 2004, created a critical mass of Latino players.
     With them on the team, it was more comfortable for Latino players to join and the numbers grew. Even more, with Gamez coaching, guys who weren’t fluent in English didn’t have to worry much about that. This year’s varsity team has 15 Latino players on a team of 19 — more than were on The Dalles’ teams from 1985 to 1999 combined. It’s as if, after two decades, the ratio of Latino players caught up with the ratio of Latino students in the district, and then overshot it to make up for lost years.
     “I would like a 50-50 blend and I would feel really good about it,” Gamez says. “I’ve had a lot of great Anglo players, and I’ve had a lot of great Latino players.
“Soccer is the No. 1 sport in Mexico and throughout Latin America, South America. In the U.S., it’s football. Soccer, nationwide is growing, but it’s still football. And it will probably always be football. One of the factors why the team is mostly Latino, at least on the boys’ side, is because the Latino community has grown so much and soccer is No. 1 for them.

     The referee blows his whistle for halftime and the boys are all chatter and excitement. Melchor Nuñez shouts, “Playoffs, playoffs, lets go,” to the team as they trot to the defunct baseball dugout that serves as their halftime meeting place. Usually Gamez and Beasley follow the boys in, but they hang back this time, hoping that the players will charge themselves. Maybe even a leader, which this team has lacked, will step up.
     The energy in the dugout pulses. They revel in each others’ accomplishments: the sweet passes, solid shots and sick stops. As usual, the talk is in English unless it’s directed to or spoken by one of three or four players. Then the banter shifts effortlessly into Spanish and flows right back to English.
     The boys are so hyped it takes 20 seconds for them to quiet down so Nuñez can say something. Looking like a leader for the first time and with the other boys only now looking to him as one, he steps in the middle of the group packed on the L-shaped bench.
     “These next 40 minutes,” he says to the bundle of dynamite sitting round him, “are going to determine our season and if we let anyone down.”
     It’s not “Hoosier’s” quality, but Nuñez is 16 and new at this. The point sticks, though. Looking at his teammates’ faces, it’s clear they know nothing exists after this half. Family, girlfriends, homework, college, church, jobs — their hearts are beating and their synapses are firing for this game, none of that other stuff.
Gamez and Beasley join the group and lay out the strategy and lineup for the second half. Then Gamez says, “A 1-1 game gets us nothing. We have to get a win.”

     Luis Flores Sr. missed his son’s goal in the first half, but is at the field for the second. At most games, the sideline during the first half is a sad sight. They begin at 4 p.m., before most parents can get off work, and it isn’t until the second half that the team has a real cheer section. Flores Sr., who first came to the U.S. from Michoacán as a child, stayed in The Dalles to raise his family and he works hard in the orchards so his son can stay in school. So he can play soccer. So he can do the things his father couldn’t.
     He says he’s not sure his children understand how hard he works for them and what it’s cost him to give them a better life. But he doesn’t worry much about that. He loves watching Flores Jr. and his daughter, Andrea, who plays JV, and he loves coaching his little kids’ youth team.
     Almost every father of the Latino players has a story like Flores Sr. Carmello Gamez, the coach’s older brother and Alex Gamez’s father, has worked since he was a child. It’s been hard agricultural work that he would rather his kids didn’t have to do.
     “Agriculture work is good work and you can be proud of it,” he says. “But if you get hurt, you’re not going to be able to do much about it.”
     Carmello didn’t finish third grade in Mexico, and he didn’t attend school here outside of a few migrant education classes at Dry Hollow Elementary. Two years ago, however, he aced his citizenship test. He says he doesn’t push his kids too hard on grades, but his oldest son, Luis Gamez, graduated magna cum laude at Seattle University last spring, and Alex has one of the best GPAs on the team.
He drove Luis to Beaverton twice a week to play on a club team in high school, he watches his daughter’s entire practices and he makes each of Alex’s home games. Alejandro Chavarria, the twins Hugo and Alex Chavarria’s father, drives his boys around the state throughout the year to play ball. And standing on the sideline at the Summit game he sees Alex Chavarria score the goal of his life.

     After about three minutes of back-and-forth ball on the midfield line, the Eagle Indians make a fast attack. They bring it down the sideline, past the bench and about 10 yards from the corner, before the Storm defender makes a nice play and sends it out of bounds. Andy Westhafer, who has a bookish look and deft ball skills, takes the ball for the throw-in. He catapults it into the middle of the goal box — perfect — where Ricardo Valenciano takes a header shot. The keeper, diving, deflects the ball right at Alex Chavarria. He kicks it into the net.
The bench freaks out. They’re beating a Bend team. Unprecedented. And if they can hang on . well, Beasley is yelling at them to stop worrying about hanging on and start worrying about scoring another goal.
     That doesn’t happen, but not for a lack of trying. The Summit goalkeeper does everything he can to keep his team in the game. Summit’s forwards keep Hunter Woods, the second-half keeper, stressed, but Muños, Bailey and Nuñez lockdown their marks. Late in the game, Summit gets three corner kicks in a row and one nearly ties it, but the header bounces off the crossbar.
     Beasley’s timer rings and the game enters stoppage time (the time a referee adds for delays). Summit knows time’s running down, fast, and they press, are denied and press again. Then the ball rolls out of bounds.
     “He’s got his whistle in his mouth,” Gamez says. “This is it. It’s over.”
Summit throws in the ball and the whistle blows once, twice and a long third time. Gamez falls to his knees, both arms in the air. Then he wraps his hands over his head and bends his face toward the grass.
     They beat a Bend team. They kept their playoff chances. They won the biggest game they’ve ever played. The boys can barely calm down enough to shake hands with their opponents.
     At the beginning of the season, Ortiz said, “Some people think that I take it too seriously. But this is our Champion’s League. This is our World Cup.”
     Today it’s their entire lives.