Field of Dreams

For years, the only place I wanted to be was on the shoddy grass soccer fields of Bayonne's 16th Street Park.

Photo by David Clark.

You know, we just don’t recognize the most significant moments of our lives while they’re happening. Back then I thought, ‘Well, there’ll be other days.’ I didn’t realize that that was the only day.

—Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, Field of Dreams

Note: This story was updated to its book version in October 2023.

Read or listen to “Picado,” a poem I wrote about pick-up soccer.

Three or four nights a week, I’d meet them at 16th Street Park to kick around a soccer ball. It was our ritual—men, young and old, known only by our nicknames: Chombi, Chele, Lupe, Guanaco, Jamón. And me, Batistuta.

The games were picaditos: informal gatherings of construction and white-collar workers, high school students, servers and line cooks—almost all immigrants or sons of immigrants. We arrived at the patchy grass field around 6:30 every night with our fingers crossed, all hoping that we’d be the ones to pull off a nutmeg or rabona and avoid being embarrassed by the few players who had played professionally in Honduras or Colombia before coming north.

We played 5-v-4 or 9-v-8 or 12-v-12 in the outfields of baseball diamonds, where there were no sidelines or out-of-bounds. The goalposts were two backpacks or pairs of sneakers and sweaters balled up and placed five paces apart. The teams were picked by veterans like El Viejo (The Old Man), who waited around beside the goals until the better players showed up so he could pick them for his team. His salad days long gone, he’d enjoy a brief return to glory by teaming up with young headliners like Tarzán, a long-haired Honduran who spoke like a Puerto Rican and broke ankles without ever touching the ball, and JP, an equally slick-footed Ecuadorian who was always decked out in a fresh kit from one of his favorite European club teams.

But everything changed on Sundays, when a veteran Ecuadorian named Armando—who we all knew as Rossi because of the Paolo Rossi Italy jersey he wore—showed up with two small training goals. His arrival brought a civility that was otherwise missing as players toed the line between toying with opponents and provoking them with a slight that could result in a retaliatory forearm across the jaw. When Rossi and El Hombre de Hierro (Iron Man), a 68-year-old who remains the measure for how long I hope to play this magical game, showed up with their crew of mostly older Jehovah’s Witnesses, everyone was on their best behavior. And the best news for me and my friends, who were usually the worst or quietest or most American guys on the field, was that Rossi always picked us for his team. 

Once the ball was kicked, Rossi would shout some variation of Los buenos contra los malos and, when we’d go down a goal or two, Van perdiendo los buenos—rituals I picked up on and repeat on the fields of Knoxville many years later. He kept the atmosphere light, gently ribbing players for missing a shot on one of his 6x4 goals, which everyone knew he’d take down and leave with if you misbehaved. One winter night, when the cold had frozen over the muddy field, we all drove out to an indoor facility in the suburbs. Halfway through the game, Tarzán was fouled hard by another Central American. They pummeled each other with fists until we could break up the fight. Since the goals were cut into the facility’s walls, Rossi couldn’t pack them into a bag and carry them to his car. So he took the ball away and sat everyone down on the bench, lecturing us like a schoolteacher who had caught his students shooting spitballs while his back was turned. The guilty parties embraced and pleaded with Rossi to continue playing. But he instructed everyone to go home and think about what they had done—which was easy for me and my friends to do, since we were riding in Rossi’s car.

From the time I was 14 until I left Bayonne eight years later, I spent hundreds of hours of my life kicking a ball around with these guys. Most of them were Hispanic laborers. Some, like Guanaco, whose real name I cannot remember for my life, were high school students who would later become laborers. (A guanaco is a species of South American camel; I also cannot tell you why people from El Salvador are identified using that term.)

I’ll never forget, in college, waking up early on a Saturday morning and stopping in a nearby Exxon with my dad before going with him to a plumbing job in the suburbs. I ran into Guanaco in the snack aisle, where I’d gone to grab one of those Bon Appétit danishes sold in every gas station in America. “Que hacés por acá hermano?“ I asked him. He told me he worked at the port, his eyes red from lack of sleep. That was the first time it hit me: once I graduated, I’d leave behind blue-collar work—probably even Bayonne—forever. But many of those guys, who were paperless and not fluent in English, were stuck working manual labor jobs they clocked in at before sunrise. Their escape came at night, playing pickup soccer at the park.

It wasn’t only Hispanic immigrants who showed up. There was a mixed bag of other characters, including Mohammed, an Egyptian computer science professor who drove golf balls he carried in a plastic shopping bag around the field until game time, and Robert Borowski, a Polish kid I’d played travel soccer with, whose dad taught us the proper technique for injuring an opponent’s knee from behind when we were 10 years old. I never thought about it then, but rarely were there any women. Those who did come were there not to play but to verify that their husbands had not lied about going to the field and gone to the bar instead. They walked laps on the concrete track that circled the fields while their kids entertained each other behind the goals. I wish I could travel back in time with Haley, a ponytailed white girl whose mouth, as much as her skills, would’ve left the guys astounded, as if an alien had just strapped on a pair of cleats. 

There is something I dearly miss about the freedom I experienced playing pickup at 16th Street, where time wasn’t kept and there were no yellow cards or VAR checks. When the ball was blasted from our pitiful patch of grass onto the red-dirt baseball diamond 20 yards away, someone would retrieve it and dribble in 20 yards alone—no throw-ins or set pieces. There were audacious moves attempted over and over that even Zidane could not pull off in a competitive game. Out there on the field of dreams, it didn’t matter if you’d missed a bicycle kick or a rainbow a dozen times if you pulled it off just once. Because scores weren’t calculated based on who put the most goals in the back of the net but who managed something they could brag about every night for the next week as everyone changed into their jerseys. Once Guanaco, who had a sublime touch and a knack for the unpredictable, rainbowed the ball over my head as I went to tackle him. I did the only acceptable thing, applying the lesson Nono had taught me: if the ball gets past you, the player mustn’t. I chopped at his knees with the fury of an axe striking a cypress tree, and he fell to the ground like Cristiano Ronaldo. “No seas payaso que acá no hay arbitro,“ I said with a snicker. He was on his feet quicker than a lightning strike. An inch from my face, he shouted what he’d do to me if we were back in El Salvador. Rather than trading punches, we’d go on to combine for many goals in the years before I moved away.

When I was a teenager, an unbelievable thing happened. On a rare summer night when the city had left the full-sized soccer goals out after a youth scrimmage that afternoon, an informal game took shape on the big field. Mexicans and Egyptians lined up on each half, all wearing counterfeit jerseys from their national teams and preparing to face off in an intercontinental battle. I still remember the Egyptian goal celebrations: one player pretending to shine another’s shoes, another grinning like Mohamed Salah and posing for a picture in front of an imaginary camera. The Mexicans, many of whom had Corona bellies that leaked out from the bottom of their jerseys, won 9–3. 

But it wasn’t just them. Every night we were all out there representing our national pride. It didn’t matter if you were from Nicaragua, Nigeria, or New Zealand, you knew better than to show up wearing your team’s jersey after an embarrassing loss. When Argentina would get eliminated from a World Cup or a Copa América, I was always left with an impossible choice: staying home and licking my wounds or showing up just to hear Viejo and JP roasting me, as creatively as possible, from 50 yards away as soon as they caught sight of my sky blue jersey.

Despite all the time I spent out there, I wasn’t, and am still not, a great soccer player. My dad, who played in the reserve side of a professional team in Argentina, had tried his best to transmit his abilities to his firstborn son. Before I was old enough to play regularly with grown men, he’d take me after work to the field and teach me how to hit the ball with the outside of my foot and how to place a shot within a five-inch radius of the top corner. But I could never figure out how to play like a real Argentinean. My feet were like two boulders. My legs so stiff that I couldn’t dribble 10 feet without tripping over the ball. I had no waist—no cintura, as Nono says. But that didn’t matter. The men I played with still called me by the name of my hero.

In the late 2000s, another Argentinian emerged as the most famous soccer player in the world. One day a trio of Cubans hopped the yellow brick wall and took the dirt trail to the fields. The leader of the troupe, after hearing my accent, screamed, “Messi!” (It wasn’t—it still isn’t—uncommon when meeting immigrants, whether Uruguayan or Macedonian, that the first thing I also say, after they reveal where they’re from, is the name of a very famous soccer player from that country: “Forlán!” “Pandev!”) The others quickly corrected the newcomer: No, ese es Batistuta, amigo.

More than a decade has passed since anyone on a soccer field has called me by my hero’s name. During my first weeks in Knoxville in 2011, I drove to local parks seeking out foreigners kicking soccer balls in the grass. But I rarely found any. Then a co-worker invited me to play on Wednesday nights at an indoor facility called D1, and I realized that in places like Knoxville—far from the concrete immigrant hubs I’d known before—soccer is organized. If you want to play, you’ve got to pay, regardless of whether you’re a toddler or an old-timer on Social Security. So you can imagine my relief when someone told me about the Chinese grad students who played on Saturday mornings at the university rec center and the Brazilians who got together on the other side of town at Cool Sports. 

My favorite place to play pickup in Knoxville, though, was the overgrown field at Liberty Street, where you’d see Koreans, Arabs, and Russians smoking cigarettes outside their cars before dribbling circles around players half their age. That sent me back in time to the days at 16th Street when a bunch of guys who didn’t care to know your real name, your place of employment, or your marital status would talk for days about a ridiculous goal you scored to end a game. “You see the backheel ese mamahuevo tried last week?“ somebody would ask, bellowing as flocks of us gathered to shoot the bull before the start of the next pickup. “He thinks he’s Ronaldinho!”

Hours later, with no Rossi around to mediate, somebody would get fed up with the insults or the roughhousing, snatch up their sneakers and hoodie from the goal, and head home, leaving one of the makeshift posts lopsided for the last hour of play. How I miss the arguments about whether a shot had been kicked too high above a backpack to count! Or when, after calling it a night, we’d sit huddled in the grass for an hour or two, talking about our favorite players and teams from Europe and South America, learning a little about each other’s lives away from the football pitch.

For years, especially when my best friends were away at college, and I was a stone’s throw from those fields, trying to figure out where my road in life would lead, the soccer community at 16th Street meant everything to me. And I recognize we couldn’t recreate it now. But if I had the keys to a time machine, I know I wouldn’t hesitate to return, for a single night, to play soccer with those ruffians one last time.

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