A Good Man in Africa 

Posted: Wednesday July 25, 2001 6:17 PM

A week like this, however, allows Weah barely enough time to think that far ahead. On Tuesday morning, between running Lone Star practices, tending to his family and stopping by the courier service to pick up the team's uniforms, Weah begins a grueling round of visits to Monrovia girls' schools. He plunges into one classroom after another, telling girls of various ages that he would put up money if they would begin playing soccer, if they would stay away from boys, or at least use condoms. 

"Nobody's educating our girls to protect themselves," Weah says before one group. "Please," he tells another, "I want to help." The next day he tells another class, "You are the people of tomorrow. Forget about boys. Boys are trouble. Boys make mothers and don't want to see them." Weah promises the girls he'll come to their games, help coach them, play with them. Please, he says. 

No one asks why he's so impassioned about the subject. This kind of mission is expected from Weah, so he doesn't feel the need to tell the girls what he learned when he arrived in Liberia this time. He doesn't tell them that on Monday night, only 2 1/2 weeks after he'd learned that his 16-year-old sister, Karmah, had had a baby out of wedlock, someone told him that a teenage cousin of his had given birth and begun to bleed and never stopped. He doesn't say that the funeral will be on Saturday, just after morning practice. 

The first time Anthony Tokpah saw what George Weah had done to the Lone Star, he began to cry. This was in December. By 1998 Tokpah, a longtime goalie on the national team, had become fed up with the parade of weak coaches and the poor management, and he vowed never again to suit up for Liberia. But when Weah, in his new role as player-coach, called Tokpah and asked him to join the team for an African Nations Cup qualifier against South Africa, he had no choice. "He's too big," Tokpah says. "We all owe him. We know what he's done for the country, for the world...and he helped me go play in Europe for four years." 

Still, when Tokpah showed up in Johannesburg, he expected the same old Lone Star. Liberia had always produced aggressive finishers, but its lack of a recognizable system made the team as dangerous to itself as it was to opponents. Yet under Weah, who demanded that players train together for one week--instead of the usual one day--before each game, the Lone Star had cohered into a patient, confident unit. Though Liberia would lose 2-1 to South Africa (Weah's only loss since taking over last June), Tokpah was astonished. "They were playing together," he says. Sitting on the team bench in Johannesburg, the goaltender with 2 SAD on his license plate bowed his head and wept out of pure happiness. 

By then Weah's magic had long taken hold of the other players. Handed the team after Liberia's 2-0 loss to Sudan, Weah faced what seemed a ridiculous challenge: Nigeria. The Super Eagles had dominated Africa for a decade and had won over the planet as the darlings of the last two World Cups and as champions of the 1996 Olympics. Liberia hadn't competed well against Africa's best teams since the late '80s, and only five of the dozen-plus Liberian professionals who play abroad bothered to come home to play Nigeria. Still Weah kept asking friends, "Can Nigeria fly? If they don't fly, we will beat them." The night before the game, Liberian Football Association president Edwin Snowe stayed up until 3 a.m. worrying. "We're going to win 2-1," Weah told him. "Relax. Go to sleep." 

At game time Monrovia's Samuel K. Doe Stadium, with 35,000 seats, was only half filled. Many Liberians wore Nigeria's colors. Weah had only 11 players. By the time the game ended--in a 2-1 Liberian victory, with Weah setting up both scores--Charles Taylor was dancing in the stands. 

Weah's prediction had been no fluke. "He does this with everyone," says goalkeeper Louis Crayton. Years ago Crayton, angry over his relegation to the bench, wanted to quit the Lone Star. Weah told him that soccer was a game you cannot cheat, that Crayton had to keep playing because he never knew when his chance would come, and Weah guaranteed it would come. Then, Crayton says, it did: He is now the Lone Star's starting goalie. "The wisdom, the understanding, the knowledge--this is all from God," Crayton says of Weah. "Because when he speaks to you, the words are prophetic." 

Maybe that's what has the Lone Star so inspired. Or maybe, as Massaquoi puts it, "Now the players know they have somebody they can't bull----." Certainly Weah knows everything they've been through--and then some. Abandoned by his parents at birth, raised by his devoutly Christian grandmother, Emma Klon Jleh Brown, Weah spent his youth on the streets in the Monrovia neighborhood of Gibraltar, playing barefoot soccer, smoking an occasional joint, selling popcorn, rummaging through garbage for bottles to sell, gambling. Every Saturday his grandmother sat him down and told him to work hard, stay honest. 

"All the minutes and seconds and hours in my career, my entire life, I dedicate to my grandmother," Weah says. His clock began ticking in 1981, when the 15-year-old Weah began a quick rise through the cream of Liberia's soccer teams: Young Survivors, Mighty Barolle, the Invincible Eleven. While Weah captained the IE, his speed and towering presence caught the eye of a scout for Cameroon's powerhouse, Tonnerre de Yaounde. After Weah helped Tonnerre win a national title in 1988, Cameroon's national team coach, Claude le Roy, told Arsene Wenger, then coach of AS Monaco, that he had struck gold: a lithe, 6'2" striker with a magician's touch. Wenger flew down and signed Weah, but within four years Paris beckoned. After Weah led Paris-St. Germain to two French Cup championships and the '94 French League title, he had only one more level to conquer. 

However, just a few weeks after Weah signed with AC Milan in May 1995, his grandmother died. Weah had been a practicing Muslim for a decade. In honor of his grandmother he converted back to Christianity. For her, he pushed his game even higher. Weah's ability to find seams for the most implausible passes, to produce one astonishing run after another, left aficionados breathless. After scoring 11 goals in '95, he became the only player to be named European, African and world player of the year. On opening day of the '96 season he cut through, over and around seven Verona players to produce a spectacular coast-to-coast score that remains one of the greatest in the game's history. 

Much of what makes Weah unique is there in that run: creativity, grace and aggressive pride. Liberians may think him saintly, and he likes to think of himself as pious, but there's a part of Weah that is always ready to fight. While playing for Paris- St. Germain in the early 1990s, he became incensed when a Paris police officer pulled him over. Convinced that he was being harassed because of his skin color, Weah got into a shoving match with the cop, who pulled out his gun. Weah yanked it out of the gendarme's hand and waved it in his face. His car was impounded, never to be seen again. Then there was this infamous incident in November '96: After a game in which Porto defender Jorge (the Animal) Costa stepped on, kicked and provoked him with racist taunts, Weah waited for Costa in the tunnel beneath the stadium and shattered his nose with a head butt. "I did what I was supposed to do," Weah says. 

None of that fire has burned off with the years, no matter how casual Weah appears. When you least expect it, in fact, he erupts. "We must be paid!" he shouts. "It is our constitutional right. You understand? We have to be paid!" 

It is late Thursday evening, three days before the Sierra Leone game. No one has heard from Sierra Leone yet, but Weah isn't thinking about that. He is thinking about the $5,000 per game that each Liberian player receives from the government, and how that fee can't come close to covering most players' expenses or insurance or the salaries they lose when they leave their professional teams to play for the Lone Star. Weah is thinking about a government in which some men are getting rich while some of his national-team members must bum rides because they can't afford cars. 

"Players don't have anything," Weah says. "Some have been on the national team for almost 17 years, but they don't even have a pin, something that shows, 'I got this through the national team.' It's sad. Even the young guys are doing their best, and what are they getting? Nothing, and I feel it is cheating." 

Before their previous two games, in January, Lone Star players threatened to strike if they weren't paid in advance. Each time Snowe showed up with a suitcase of cash hours before game time. This week it is lost on no player that Massaquoi, the former leader of a faction aligned with Taylor during the war, is driving a new Mitsubishi Pajero. "We all play the game, and he's benefiting," Weah says. "He's got a new Jeep! The players are getting nothing. Do you think it's fair?" 

Weah is careful not to name people above Massaquoi, because he knows what can happen to men who speak out in Liberia. It's clear that the issue goes beyond money, that Weah, like a lot of his countrymen, thinks Taylor takes advantage of the Lone Star. Weah was no supporter of the corrupt, often savage government of Samuel Doe, from 1980 to '89, but he says national-team players were appreciated back then. When they beat Ghana in 1988, Doe gave each player an acre of land. A tie game netted a player $10,000; a win was worth $25,000. Doe would personally drive the team onto the field before games. 

Weah threatens to quit. He threatens a team strike. This won't happen, of course; no one has more interest in playing, and playing well, than the Lone Star players. Still, Weah wants to stir up public support because he has a real hammer now--because, as Massaquoi says, "George Weah and football are the only things we have to hold on to. Football is the glue that holds this country together." 

So maybe if the Lone Star keeps winning, not even Taylor can withstand the pressure. "We've got all the people on the government's back," says James (Miracle Man) Debbah, the team's star striker. "There's no way they can go against it." 

Weah again wants to make one thing clear: He wants his team to be treated fairly; he does not want power. "I have my own power," he says. "I have my constitutional rights. I am king in the eyes of the law because God gives me blessing. Anything that's going to happen to me, only God knows. So I'm not frightened of anybody for anything." 

He says this late on Thursday night, sitting in what used to be the master bedroom of the house that Taylor's men burned in 1996. Weah rebuilt the place, planning to move back in. "I lived here three days," he says, surrounded by players, hangers-on, soccer officials, women. "But I didn't like the feeling. The spirit of the house was not the way it used to be. A lot of atrocities happened here, and I couldn't live with that spirit. So I had to move to my new place." 

He speaks about the incident a bit more, and then his temper rises again, and he begins to talk quickly. He is angry but careful. "I don't want an apology from anybody," Weah says. "I'm hurt. I'm still serving this country as a national-team player; that's my duty to the Liberian people. But my house cost me personal money. Everything they took from me? One day I'm going to get it. They're going to pay for my house. They will pay one day." 

The thousands of people who line Tubman Boulevard hear the Lone Star bus before they see it, carried as it is on a wave of screaming. The bus is packed with players in suits and ties. It rolls past St. Peter's Lutheran Church, where Doe's men killed at least 600 people. Past billboards that say, WORDS CAN BE MORE HARMFUL THAN BULLETS AND UNBALANCED NEWS IS ALSO A HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSE. Past the Pentecostal Church, the Baptist relief mission, the Assembly of God mission school and all the other missionary hubs of what seems to be the nation's one thriving institution. Past the airfield, where hundreds of kids play soccer in the dirt and where, in April 1996, soldiers stabbed Frank Seator's brother to death in front of his mother. Sunday church services stop in mid-sentence; people smile for the first time in a month, men in camouflage hop from foot to foot and thrust their rifles toward the sky. The bus bearing the slogan THE NATION'S PRIDE AND JOY makes a right turn down Airport Road, leading a caravan of cars through the heat-blasted afternoon. The Sierra Leone team finally showed up yesterday. The bus turns into Samuel K. Doe Stadium, and a man with no legs tries to crawl after it as it passes. 

Asked earlier this week if he thought his team could help change Liberia, Weah said, "Every time we win, we're like a different country: Everybody's happy. Football can bring peace." This, of course, would be a laughable statement in other corners of the globe, but Weah is serious. He had T-shirts printed for both teams declaring FOOTBALL UNITES, and when the players march onto the field, both teams are wearing them and carrying a long banner that reads LIBERIA-SIERRA LEONE PEACE. 

Taylor walks out from under the stadium surrounded by security men and wearing a powder-blue shirt. In an astonishing display of brass, he shuffles down the line of Sierra Leone players, shaking hands as a 23-piece brass band plays a plodding dirge. Then Taylor walks the Liberia line, shaking hands with each player, hugging Debbah and, briefly, Weah. Taylor walks off waving a kerchief, and the crowd roars. 

It is not a good game. Sierra Leone wants nothing more than a draw, so it doesn't bother trying to score. The pressure begins building on Liberia as the first half ends 0-0; the home fans choke on their frustration. Finally, in the 65th minute, after a flurry of blown chances by the Lone Star, Debbah centers the ball to Zeze Roberts, who pops in a clean header for the day's only score. The stadium seems both to expand and contract in an explosion of hollering, dancing, drumming; relief pours in like a summer flood. Liberia wins. Liberia takes control of Group B. Hours later a phone rings in the Queens home of Clar Weah. "We're going to make it to the World Cup!" her husband screams. "Just four more games and we'll make it!" 

The ride back downtown goes at a crawl. The traffic jam stretches for miles, and for a long time no one carves a path for the Lone Star. No one wants to. Men hold up children so the kids can get a better view of the jammed bus. Inside, the players sit or stand, sweating, leaning on one another, watching the madness outside. A crowd 12 deep presses up against the side, slapping the windows. Dusk is coming down when the bus passes the Nigerian embassy, the tin-roof boxes that pass for housing, the cottage bearing the sign ONE DAY, ONE DAY, GOD WILL PROVIDE. 

The bus picks up speed going down Tubman Boulevard. One player begins to sing. 

We are the famous Lone Star team
We never fear no foes
We ne-ver fear no foe!
(Adona, Adona)
Adona is our mighty spirit
Adona is our mi-i-ighty spirit 

Now all the players have joined in; now the bus is filled with two dozen male voices perfectly in tune. 

Play, Lone Star, play!
(Lone Star, play-oh!)
Play, Lone Star, play!
(Lone Star, play-oh!)
Play Lone Star, never fear
Never fear, nooooo foes! 

The voices grow louder, thundering their way under one's skin. The bus makes a left turn toward the house that used to be a home, the one that was burned and rebuilt and is now a hotel called the King's Lodge. Weah sings too, his eyes shining, his voice raspy and fine. The bus makes a right turn and drives along the wall where the men once lined up single-file. To keep the Lone Star together, Weah decided last year to house the players in his former home. He began to think of the team as a blessing, as a way to cleanse the house of all the evil that had come before. 

Another massive crowd closes in as the bus rolls through the gate, all music and light. Night falls, but people keep coming, braving the dark because nowhere else matters. Wonderful is here. 

Return to Part I

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