Raphael Stevens

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    in Football

    A Son’s Future, a Father’s Final Down

    BEFORE THE EVER AFTERBy Jacqueline WoodsonZachariah Johnson Jr. (ZJ) is living a 12-year-old boy’s dream: His father is a star professional football player, he lives in a comfortable home in the suburbs with a half basketball court upstairs, he has a trio of friends who always show up at the right times and his budding songwriting talent seems destined to take him far.He is also living a nightmare.Jacqueline Woodson’s new novel, “Before the Ever After,” is not a work of horror (despite the haunting title), but a creeping, invisible force is upending ZJ’s world and slowly stealing away his father — known as “Zachariah 44,” for his jersey number — before his and his mother’s eyes.The father’s hands have begun to tremble uncontrollably. He stares vacantly. He forgets basic things, most achingly the name of the son who bears, and at times is burdened by, his name. He’s prone to angry outbursts, to the point that ZJ’s friends no longer want to come by the house.He is suffering the effects of a degenerative brain disease that, while not named, bears a strong resemblance to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which has been found in scores of former N.F.L. players. Until 2016, the league for years denied any connection between brain trauma on the field and hundreds of players’ crippling neurological ailments and, in many cases, deaths.“My dad probably holds the Football Hall of Fame record for the most concussions,” ZJ says, relating how his mother has grown bitter about the game. “Even with a helmet on.”Although you can envision fretful parents handing this book to young boys eager to play, it’s not a stern lecture. It’s an elegiac meditation on loss and longing told, like Woodson’s seminal memoir, “Brown Girl Dreaming,” mostly in verse.This approach, and Woodson’s evocative language (“the night is so dark, it looks like a black wall”), helps pull us through the foreboding and gives us much to contemplate; leitmotifs such as trees and song deepen the story and provoke reflection on childhood, change and remembrance.The story is set in 1999-2000, when the cost of brain injury in the sport was just starting to come to light. The uncertainty over what has happened, and what might be coming, bewilders ZJ and his mother.“Sitting there with my mom and my dad snoring on the couch and the doctors knowing but not knowing,” he says, “I feel like someone’s holding us, keeping us from getting back to where we were before and keeping us from the next place too.”This is largely a father-son tale, leaving ZJ’s mother in the background, revealed in the occasional tender scene — Zachariah 44 drapes his arms around her in a moment of clarity — but mostly in quiet anguish.“I think they’re not telling the whole truth,” ZJ overhears his mother telling a friend. “Too many of them —”ZJ is so disillusioned that he gives away one of his father’s coveted footballs to his friend Everett, in a scene that reminds us of the staying power of the sport: “Everett’s eyes get wide. This is Zachariah 44’s ball? I nod. For real?”ZJ finds solace in the music, literal and symbolic, that he and his father have made together. “Until the doctors figure out what’s wrong, this is what I have for him,” ZJ says. “My music, our songs.”Woodson has said she seeks to instill optimism and hope. ZJ’s patient and supportive mother and his group of friends who are always buoying him up serve that purpose here. Yet at times this striving for hope feels strained, given a condition that so often offers no Hail Mary. ZJ may not fully realize it, but we all know what’s coming. The nightmarish, seemingly irreversible decline of the once mighty and strong has broken the hearts and wills of football families. A lyrical portrayal of a player’s fade and a boy coming to terms with it doesn’t change that. More

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    in Soccer

    In a Reversal, Lionel Messi Says He Will Stay With Barcelona

    Lionel Messi is still angry with Barcelona. He is still frustrated with Barcelona. But, in a sudden and dramatic reversal, he said Friday that he is not prepared to go to war with Barcelona and, so, will stay after all.In a decision he announced in an interview with the website Goal, Messi said he had withdrawn a letter announcing his intention to leave Barcelona and would stay with the soccer club that he has called home for his entire professional career.The decision is an abrupt about-face for Messi, who on Aug. 25 informed the club in writing that he would exercise a clause in his contract that allowed him to leave the club unilaterally. It also spares the team the embarrassment of losing its most beloved, and most valuable, asset without receiving a transfer fee.But it may do little to resolve months of turmoil at Barcelona, a downward spiral that has involved coaching changes, boardroom intrigue and public bickering. The club reached a nadir with a humbling 8-2 defeat at the hands of the German champion Bayern Munich in the quarterfinals of the Champions League last month.The announcement that he would stay came hours after Messi’s father and agent, Jorge, had appeared to double down on the player’s stated intention to leave, and after the Spanish league had declared a €700 million release clause in Messi’s contract was valid. That set the stage for an ugly legal fight between the player and the club, and Messi, in his interview with Goal, appeared to back away rather than face Barcelona in court.“I would never go to war against the club of my life,” Messi said.But the manner of Messi’s decision and the contentious language he used even as he confirmed his decision to stay at Barcelona piles yet more pressure on the club’s embattled president Josep Maria Bartomeu. Messi said Bartomeu, already under pressure because of a spate of ugly boardroom dramas, reneged on a promise to let him leave at the end of last season.“I wasn’t happy and I wanted to leave,” Messi said in the Goal interview. “I have not been allowed this in any way and I will stay at the club so as not to get into a legal dispute. The management of the club led by Bartomeu is a disaster.”He added: “I thought and was sure that I was free to leave; the president always said that at the end of the season I could decide if I stayed or not. Now they cling to the fact that I did not say it before June 10, when it turns out that on June 10 we were competing for La Liga in the middle of this awful coronavirus and this disease altered all the season.”It is not the first time Messi has reversed course. The forward caused hysteria in his homeland in 2016 when he quit the national team, citing his frustration with the federation. But less than two months later, amid pleas from teammates, fans and even the country’s president, Messi changed his mind.In the current situation, Barcelona and Messi had agreed upon a clause that would allow him to walk away without commanding a transfer fee as long as he communicated his desire to leave before the end of the season. But the havoc wrought on the soccer schedule by the pandemic meant the Spanish season did not finish until months after the date stipulated in the agreement. Messi complained that Bartomeu did not keep to the spirit of the accord and insisted Messi stay unless suitors pay the full buyout clause, which Messi called “impossible.”Messi said that given his relationship with the club and its supporters he could not continence the idea of pursuing a damaging lawsuit to force his way out of the club. Instead, he will remain to help pick up the pieces as Barcelona prepares to rebuild itself after a catastrophic year on and off the field.A new coach, Ronald Koeman, has already been hired and several senior players, including Messi’s close friend Luis Suárez, have been told they have no future at the Camp Nou.Koeman, appointed in the wake of the humbling against Bayern, had spoken to Messi shortly before the player stunned the club by announcing his intention to leave. News reports in Spain at the time suggested that the new Dutch coach, a former player with Barcelona, had warned Messi that he would no longer receive special treatment — a threat, it was suggested, that made Messi more determined to leave.Instead the two will have to form an uneasy alliance for at least a year and try to shake Barcelona out of a slump that had been building in recent seasons. The surrender to the German champion came after similar capitulations in the Champions League against Roma and Liverpool in recent seasons. Messi said those failures drove his decision to seek a new challenge in the final years of his career. Messi was 28 when the team won its last European Cup.“I looked further afield and I want to compete at the highest level, win titles, compete in the Champions League. You can win or lose in it, because it is very difficult, but you have to compete,” he said.There was growing speculation that Messi would be joining Manchester City, backed by the brother of the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the English team — managed by Messi’s old mentor, Pep Guardiola — is one of few in world soccer that could both afford to hire Messi and provide him with the platform for the success he still craves. But for all the talk of an exit, Messi’s inextricable link to Barcelona meant a departure, whatever the circumstances, would have been shocking.Messi has been with the team for 20 years, since he moved there as a 13-year-old from Argentina.His rise, in that time, has mirrored that of his club. Messi’s list of honors extends to 10 Spanish championships, four Champions League trophies and six world player of the year awards. His tally of individual records, if anything, is more remarkable.He has scored more goals than anyone else in La Liga history, and holds the assist record, too. He has won more Ballons d’Or — the trophy awarded annually to the world’s best player — than anyone else, played in more victories than any other Barcelona player, scored more hat-tricks and doubles than anyone else.As Messi developed first into the best player of his generation and then, possibly, into the best in history, so Barcelona was transformed into arguably the most popular sports team in the world. For almost a decade, the club represented soccer’s gold standard.But as many of the stars — such as Xavi, Iniesta and Puyol — that lined up alongside Messi during that glorious run started to age and eventually moved on or retired, the club made a series of errors, seemingly spending more and more money on talent while getting weaker season upon season. The club is now left counting the cost of those errors, and in Messi has a star player who is a prisoner of his gilded contract. More

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    in Soccer

    Paris St.-Germain Star Neymar Tests Positive for Coronavirus

    Neymar, soccer’s costliest player, is one of three Paris St.-Germain players who played in last week’s Champions League final to test positive for the coronavirus, becoming the latest high-profile soccer star to contract the virus ahead of the new season.Neymar suffered heartbreak last week when P.S.G. lost in its first appearance in the Champions League final, and now faces missing the start of its latest campaign because of strict local protocols that require players who have tested positive to isolate from the rest of the roster.P.S.G., which paid a record $263 million for Neymar, a forward from Brazil, in 2017, confirmed that three of its players had tested positive without identifying them. But people familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity because the player was not identified publicly as having tested positive, said Neymar was among the three.A spokeswoman for Neymar declined to comment. Media reports identified the other players as Ángel Di María and Leandro Paredes, who accompanied Neymar on a vacation to the Spanish island Ibiza.The cases at P.S.G. follow a pattern of star players, like Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba, testing positive after leaving the restrictive environments set up by their clubs to go on vacation. League officials at the top leagues in Spain and England said recently that they expected a spike in positive cases as players return for preseason training.“When people come back from vacation there will be a number of people who come back with coronavirus, but I think it’s going to be manageable,” Víctor Manuel Martín Ortega, a vice president of La Liga, told The New York Times in a recent interview.The positive cases put in doubt the availability of the three P.S.G. players for its first league game in defense of its French league title on Sept. 10. The coronavirus has already disrupted the start of the French season, with the opening game between Marseille and St.-Étienne postponed after Marseille reported four positive tests.P.S.G. said it would carry out further tests on players and staff over the next few days.The virus has also played havoc with preliminary games for next season’s Champions League and Europa League competitions. Teams have been forced to forfeit their places in the events after reporting positive cases. More