Down but not out in Georgia

Waiting for Grant Wahl's magnum opus, I have been devouring Outcasts United by Warren St. John.

The format is familiar - an embedded reporter follows a team for a season, inviting the reader into the family with engaging off-field human stories.
The club in question are The Fugees, a team of asylum-seekers from warzones worldwide planted by the UN into a conservative Georgia town unused to foreign cultures and with a soccer-hating mayor.

The Fugees' coach and founder emerges as an extraordinary hero - Luma Mufleh, an independent-minded Jordanian woman who after college in the States painfully decided to tell her parents she was not coming home again. In Clarkston, Luma single-handedly chose to give the impoverished and culturally alienated kids she would see hanging around a focus in their lives and established a soccer club, in the process becoming a mother to many lost souls.

The educational power of soccer is a well-trodden tale, but this is more about immigration and the cultural challenges we all face as the world globalizes around us. The unifying power of the Beautiful Game still shines through the 300 pages and while football is not the definer of the Fugees' lives any more than it is of ours, it is always there is in the background, a bedrock of identity and a springboard for life.



-Sean O'Conor