Goal!

Photo by AP

Iraqi people have always really liked soccer. In any neighborhood you go, you’ll find kids and men alike playing the game passionately, as though great kingdoms depend on the outcome. After the game is done, they’ll sit in a café drinking tea and talking about the Iraqi soccer team, debating which players are good and which are bad. They might be laughing about it one second, and the next they’ll be jumping from their chairs and shrieking at each other. But it’s really just talk between friends who love each other and soccer. When I was still a boy and I used to skip school to play soccer in the streets, I began to hear this name repeated all over town: Uday. Saddam’s son. Day by day, this name got bigger. Scarier and stranger stories were told about him. Wherever you went, you’d find someone talking about Uday. There is a joke in Iraq: They call us the Third World because each place you go, you will find two guys talking about another one. One day, Uday was put in charge of the Olympic Committee. That meant he was the leader of all Iraqi sports and that, in his mind, the quality of all Iraqi sports reflected on him personally. He took it really, really fucking seriously. This was OK at first—the Iraqi soccer team was the best in the Middle East and Asia. But then the soccer team, and Uday, and everything in Iraqi sports and life began to get worse. Uday pressured the team to improve, but like everyone knows, athletes don’t thrive on intimidation and fear. Rather than understanding that and finding new, progressive ways to coach his team, Uday took another route, settling on imprisonment and torture for any player who missed a goal. He got into the practice of threatening the players before each match. He would go down to their locker room and talk to them. This was very serious talking. He would remind them what would happen if any player did poorly in the game. Uday saw each match as a battle and he eventually infected the players with this view. We watched it happen: The Iraqi soccer team became like crazed, desperate soldiers. And in whispers in the stadiums all the people would say, “Fucking crazy Uday.” After Saddam’s fall, a friend of mine showed me where Uday tortured his soccer players. The devices he used were like tools from the Middle Ages, like things of Roman princes. It was so weird. There was a 50-pound black iron mask. Uday would make players put it on and stand up in the sun for the entire day. (This is in our fucking hot summer, where it routinely gets up to 120 degrees.) No one can withstand this kind of hell, and the players would, after only an hour, fall to their knees. Then Uday’s guards would wake them up with a few full-force kicks in the ribs and stand them up again under the sun. You understand that Uday was really a sadist? That he only got sexual pleasure when he hurt people? There were other things I am embarrassed to explain. There was a pear-shaped iron tool. It had two handles and was kind of like a car jack. Uday would put this into a man’s ass and tear it open. He did it to soccer players and artists. He did very disgusting things. He raped many women and fed them to his tiger. That’s right, Uday had a big tiger. Sometimes when he went out, he’d take his tiger with him to walk in the streets along with his girls and his guards, just to show the Iraqi people he was the master. But now that is all over. The Iraqi soccer team has no more Uday. He has gone to hell. HAYDER DAFFAR