Culture

'They would have been angry if we had won' – The tiny Brazilian club who fooled North Korea

Published

2 months ago

February 28, 2024

'They would have been angry if we had won' – The tiny Brazilian club who fooled North Korea

Everyone seems to have a slightly different estimate of how many people were outside the stadium on that strange November afternoon, but the consensus is that it was a lot.

As the bus crept through the crowd, the Brazilian footballers on board stared out of the windows. Locals — tens of thousands of them, on some accounts — flooded the streets. Most greeted the bus with diffident waves. A few ran alongside, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone they would not have recognised anyway.

An hour later, those same footballers walked through a long underground tunnel, up a flight of stairs and out onto the pitch. They lined up in front of the dugout and sang Brazil’s national anthem.

The match that began moments thereafter took place in 2009, but you would never know it from the photographs. There is an austere, monochrome quality to the images, and not just because they were captured on a basic digital camera. There are no advertising hoardings and none of the other hypercapitalist trappings that adorn the modern game. As a result, it looks a lot like pre-war football.

Then there are the stands, which are packed but oddly lifeless; these appear to be spectators rather than supporters. There is also a jarring uniformity to them, which starts to make sense once the context becomes clear.

One picture, taken before kick-off, shows an outmoded electronic scoreboard. It reads “PRK 0-0 BRA”. That’s North Korea vs Brazil.

The game was played in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The home team represented the most closed-off nation in the world, a military dictatorship which has been shrouded in mystery for decades. The away team? That’s where things get even more complicated.

North Korea hosting Brazil at the Kim Il-Sung Stadium would have been a major geopolitical event. You would have heard about it if it had happened, which it didn’t.

But something even more unlikely did.

The team billed as ‘Brazil’ were, in fact, a tiny club side from a satellite town 80 kilometres north west of Sao Paulo. Theirs was a squad of journeymen and part-timers, none of whom could believe their eyes when they walked out of the tunnel and looked up at the scoreboard.

“It was clear that the North Korean regime wanted the word ‘Brazil’ to appear there,” says Waldir Cipriani, one of the organisers of the match. “But we were just a Brazilian team who wore yellow.”

The Reverend

Fifteen years ago, there were two football teams in Sorocaba. The most historic was Sao Bento, whose greatest claim to fame was reaching the last 16 of the Brazilian championship back in 1979.

Their neighbours, Atletico Sorocaba, had only been around since the early 1990s and had never made it higher than the third division nationally. Their matches — low-level affairs in the regional leagues, mainly — rarely drew more than a couple of thousand fans.

If the very notion of a Brazilian club team landing an away fixture against North Korea seems a bit far-fetched, the idea of that team being Atletico Sorocaba… well, we’re so far into the realm of the absurd that we’re going to need a map to get out again. That, though, is exactly what happened.

Atletico Sorocaba, in red, take on Palmeiras in the 2013 Sao Paulo state championship (Eduardo Efrain/LatinContent via Getty Images)

To understand how and why, we need to go back to the early 2000s when Atletico were acquired by a South Korean investment group led by Sun Myung Moon — or, to his friends and followers, ‘Reverend Moon’.

Moon was the founder of the Unification Church, a religious movement that stressed the importance of the family and proclaimed Moon himself to be the second coming of Christ. To call the church controversial would be to undersell it; the ‘Criticisms’ section of its Wikipedia page runs to 7,000 words. Moon, who died in 2012, was found guilty of tax fraud by a United States federal grand jury in 1982, spending 13 months in prison.

Atletico Sorocaba was not Moon’s first incursion into Brazil. After growing disenchanted with the U.S. — “the country that represents Satan’s harvest… the kingdom of extreme individuality, of free sex” — he acquired 85,000 hectares of land in Mato Grosso do Sul state in the 1990s. He planned to create a model community in the town of Jardim, on the border with Paraguay. According to news reports in Brazil, thousands of South Koreans relocated to the region at his behest.

As the Unification Church expanded, Sorocaba — around 100km from Sao Paulo and with a population of around a million — was seen as a useful staging post. It was Cipriani, a prominent figure within the church structure in Brazil, who recommended that Moon buy Atletico. Cipriani subsequently became the club’s vice president.

“Reverend Moon invested in football because he had a vision,” Cipriani tells The Athletic. “He believed that football was the cure for human hatred. He used to say that you forget about your enemy when you’re running after a ball. That was why he wanted to promote it.

“He especially liked the characteristics of Brazilian football — the playfulness, the love of dribbling. He believed that Brazilian football would help him. He saw it as a force for peace.”

Whatever Moon’s motivations, he could not be accused of thinking small. His largesse allowed Atletico to renovate their training complex and the result was so impressive that Algeria would later choose it as their base for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Atletico would play numerous games in South Korea over the years, despite their relative irrelevance on their own domestic scene.

North Korea, though? That was another level entirely. No team from outside the Asian Football Confederation had ever played there.

Atletico Sorocaba opening that door owed, mainly, to two factors. The first was North Korea’s qualification for the 2010 World Cup. A team that had had little motivation to leave its bubble in 43 years — their previous World Cup appearance had been in 1966 — now needed a crash course in the global game.

“North Korea were interested in getting experience of Latin American football,” explains Cipriani. “There was this pressure from the government, who wanted the team to do well at the tournament. The team performing well was going to be good for the country.

“This was just one month before the final draw. They had been trying to organise friendlies, but which other country was going to go to the effort of going to North Korea, sorting out all the visas, for 90 minutes of football?”

Enter Moon, whose background provided motive and opportunity. Moon was born in 1920 in what would become North Korea. He was imprisoned in a North Korean labour camp for two years in 1948, only moving to South Korea after being liberated by United Nations troops during the Korean War. As a result of his experiences, Moon was staunchly opposed to communism — “especially atheistic Marxism,” says Cipriani — but still cultivated links with Kim Il-sung, the supreme leader of North Korea between 1948 and 1994.

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon (left) speaks at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1974 (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

“I learnt the essence of Christianity from him,” says Cipriani. “People speak a lot about loving your enemy, but you have to put it into practice. His teaching was to love your enemy, but hate the thing that makes him your enemy — love the ill, hate the illness. Reverend Moon was anti-communism, but not anti-communist.

“When Reverend Moon went to Pyongyang, it was after being invited by Kim Il-sung, who had spent 40 years trying to kill him. Before he died, Kim Il-sung authorised Reverend Moon to build a car factory and acquire a five-star hotel (in North Korea). So in practice, due to that relationship, we had great contacts in the North Korean ministry of sport.”

Those connections bore fruit in 2009, against a favourable diplomatic backdrop.

“Brazil was in a honeymoon period with North Korea,” says Cipriani. “Lula da Silva (Brazil’s president at the time) had opened an embassy there earlier in the year and the ambassador liked socialism. We never discussed it because he showed us a lot of hospitality. We left out the politics and the ideology. Our objectives were sporting and diplomatic. We were there to build bridges. That was Reverend Moon’s aim.”

It is impossible to know whether Moon’s opportunism was truly in service of improved relations between North Korea and South Korea, or merely part of a wider strategy for himself and his church. Either way, it was adventure time for Atletico Sorocaba. They were heading to Pyongyang.

Black-and-white city

“I didn’t even know there were two different Koreas,” Leandro Silva says with a grin.

Silva was 21 years old in 2009. He was Atletico Sorocaba’s right-back, one of a handful of players who had come through the youth ranks at the club. “Simple lads,” Cipriani calls them.

Initially, Atletico’s players did not know they were going to North Korea. The plan was to play games in China and South Korea, a fun little jaunt that would help them prepare for the 2010 season. The news that they might be taking a detour came late in the day; they were already in Beijing by the time their visas were finally approved.

“Enchanting, a novelty,” is how Cipriani describes the chance to go to Pyongyang, but not everyone was quite so animated by the prospect.

“My first reaction was one of shock and fear,” recalls Silva. “I tried to find out a bit about North Korea but I could only see bad news. Poverty, lack of freedom, food shortages… everyone said it was a country at war, heavily armed.

“I thought about what it would mean to be there when something happened. I thought about my family. They (club officials) explained everything to the players but we were worried.”

The journey to Pyongyang did not exactly settle the nerves. “We set off from China on this aeroplane… this ugly, scruffy, old thing,” says Silva. “You can’t imagine how bad it was. There were suitcases rattling around in the back and others strapped to the roof outside. The plane bounced and wobbled the whole way.”

Cipriani remembers Edu Marangon, Atletico’s coach, being so scared he could barely speak. The team masseur, Sidnei Gramatico, summed up the situation in an interview with GloboEsporte: “Have you ever seen an aeroplane stuck together with superglue? I have.”

A frosty reception awaited them at the airport. “Soldiers everywhere… it felt like you were arriving at a concentration camp,” Marangon told Record TV. “It was like we had taken a space shuttle to another planet.”

The players and staff were asked to hand over their electronic devices. Mobile phones were confiscated and put into storage at the airport; laptops and cameras were inspected as if they were bombs.

From the airport, the delegation boarded a bus. Destination: Mansu Hill, home of a 22-metre-high statue of Kim Il-sung. It was the first of a series of excursions to important North Korean cultural sites, organised by the dictatorship. “Our itinerary there was decided down to the last millimetre,” says Cipriani. “Every part of the trip was organised.”

The Atletico travelling party at a statue of Kim Il-sung (Waldir Cipriani, Atletico Sorocaba)

That first drive through Pyongyang left a mark on Silva. “It was like something from a film about the old days,” he says. “You know those period dramas on Netflix, with vintage cars? It was like that, a black-and-white city. There was no colour there.

“There were men crouched down on their haunches, smoking cigarettes. There were people working on plantations and no kids out playing. You could see in people’s faces that their lives were dedicated to work. It was very regimented and very grim. What we saw was a real dictatorship.”

The players laid down flowers at the monument, had a brief look at the pitch they would be playing on two days later, then went for a meal at the embassy. At all times, they were shadowed by North Korean officials in long coats. “We were always accompanied,” says Silva. “We couldn’t do anything without an escort. If you went to the bathroom, someone would follow you and wait outside the cubicle door.”

Some of the players saw the funny side. Marangon, the coach, did not. He found the entire experience deeply unsettling. “I asked God to let me see the sea one more time,” he told Brazilian website UOL. “I didn’t know whether I’d ever leave that place.”

In the evening, the players got settled at their hotel, which was not nearly as bleak. “It was top quality, five stars,” says Silva. “They put on these special meals for us, almost banquets. They tried to make things from our cuisine: rice, beans. It was a long way from the Brazilian food we were used to, but we could see the effort they put in. It was really cool.

“We all had a good laugh, joking as normal. The hotel staff didn’t understand anything we said and we didn’t understand them either. Waldir Cipriani understood a bit of Korean, but for the rest of us, there was a lot of laughter. There was also a microphone in the dining room and we would sing Brazilian songs and dance a bit. They would laugh at our style of music.”

At night, there were card games in the rooms. At least until 10pm, when the electricity went off, plunging the city into darkness.

‘Brazil are here’

On the second day, Atletico trained for two hours on the Kim Il-Sung Stadium’s artificial pitch. They were studied throughout by the North Korean players and coaching staff, all of whom were sat in the stands. At the end of the session, it was North Korea’s turn to train. Atletico were not allowed to watch.

“We had no information about the team we were playing,” says Cipriani. “Zero.”

The following afternoon, after a little more obligatory tourism (a visit to a museum dedicated to Kim Il-sung’s fight against the Japanese), the Atletico players returned to the stadium. There, they were confronted with scenes that would have made even an international footballer draw breath.

“When they saw the stadium, with 80,000 people inside and 20,000 more outside… well, you can imagine their reaction,” says Cipriani, and while most estimates put the capacity of the Kim Il-Sung Stadium at around 50,000, that hardly dilutes the anecdote.

“It was a lot of people,” says Silva. “It was a novelty for them. I think it was this feeling of, ‘The Brazilians are here, Brazil are here’. I think they wanted to see different people — people of a different race, a different colour.”

Brazil, or just Brazilians? That part is up for debate. Some insist that the game was, in some sense, ‘sold’ to the North Korean people as a historic meeting with the most successful nation in World Cup history.

The scoreboard reading North Korea 0-0 Brazil, at kick-off (Waldir Cipriani, Atletico Sorocaba)

“I think that’s the story they told the people there,” goalkeeper Klayton Scudeler said in an interview with Radio Novelo. “The stadium was packed on every side. I think people thought we were the Brazil team and that’s why it was so rammed.”

Cipriani agrees. “They created this political propaganda,” he says. “The regime wanted people to see North Korea beat Brazil before the World Cup.”

Others, like Silva, are more sceptical. What is certain, however, is that the letters ‘BRA’ up on the scoreboard lent the occasion an extra dose of prestige.

“When I saw the scoreboard and looked at us, all wearing yellow kit… it was cool but I also felt this responsibility,” says Silva. “I felt like I was playing for the Selecao (another name for the Brazil national side). It was an emotional experience.”

It was the same for Marangon. “We had to put on a performance that honoured our country,” he said. “In that situation, we were Brazil.”

For the players, that sense of patriotism was tempered by pragmatism. “Edu said to play hard, but we were joking around before kick-off,” says Silva. “We said, ‘If we win this game, we might not get out of here alive’. It was a stadium full of soldiers! We thought a draw would make everyone happy.”

As it turned out, they did not need to go easy. North Korea were better than they expected.

“We didn’t expect North Korea to be the best technically, but they were very good,” recalls Silva. “They were also very fast. They clearly did a lot of fitness work. They must have trained with the military because physically they were very strong. They played quick football, each player taking one or two touches, always in the direction of the goal.”

Atletico Sorocaba – not Brazil – take on North Korea (Waldir Cipriani, Atletico Sorocaba)

That was one memorable aspect of the game. Another was the behaviour of the crowd, who cheered enthusiastically when North Korea had the ball and were eerily quiet when Atletico were in possession.

“It was like they were organised or controlled, like they were following rules,” Silva says. “It wasn’t the kind of energy you get from fans in other countries and it wasn’t this big mix of colours. They were all from the military, all in dark green uniform.”

Cipriani agrees. “It was clearly the work of the state,” he says. “In North Korea, you click your fingers and you fill the stadium. If you decide that this school will send 50 students, that this union will send its workers, that other groups and factories will do the same… it was a state directive to fill the stadium.

“There was no comparison with a stadium in Brazil. There was this deathly silence when we had the ball. It was like a funeral.”

The game ended 1-1. Two days later, over a celebratory meal at one of his residences in South Korea, Moon thanked the players for their efforts — and for the result.

“He said that the North Koreans would have been really angry if we had won,” Cipriani recalls. “He was happy that we drew.”

Recon and recognition

A month after Atletico’s trip to Pyongyang, Brazil were drawn in the same World Cup draw as North Korea. A story that had been doing the rounds in the local press went national.

All of the major Brazilian newspapers got in touch with Marangon, Cipriani and the players. So, too, did Brazil manager Dunga and his technical staff.

“They didn’t know anything at all about the North Korean team,” says Cipriani. “There was no information. Brazil were set to play North Korea and Atletico Sorocaba knew more than they did.”

Silva looks back on that period with great fondness. “My phone rang off the hook,” he says, giggling. “People wanted to know about their best players, their technical level, their tactics. The fact we went there ended up being a big deal.

“When the World Cup began I was getting so many messages from friends and family. ‘You played them, right?! That’s so cool!’. I remember watching the (Brazil vs North Korea) game and telling my friends, ‘I marked that guy! I’ve got his shirt!’. It was really gratifying.”

Brazil’s Kaka holds off North Korea’s Mun In-guk at the 2010 World Cup; Brazil won the fixture 2-1 (Mike Egerton – PA Images via Getty Images)

In the years that followed, Atletico made three more journeys to North Korea: the senior side visited in 2010 and 2011, and the under-15s took part in a youth tournament in 2015.

“It was different each time,” says Cipriani. “But by (the second visit) they had realised they weren’t playing the Brazil national team, just a small club from Sao Paulo state with a yellow away kit.”

Cipriani stepped away from the club in 2014. Two years later, with financial support from the Universal Church having dried up in the wake of Moon’s death, Atletico Sorocaba folded, leaving behind only surreal memories.

“I still have a North Korea shirt from that game — the number two, from their right-back,” says Silva. “I’ve been offered a lot of money for that shirt, but I’m not selling it. It’s important to me, historic.

“I’ll cherish these memories forever. They were very special moments in my career. There are so many famous players and teams in the world who have never done what we did. I’m really proud of it.”

Postscript

Brazilian journalist Renato Alves visited North Korea in September 2017. He was there to research his third book, The Hermit Kingdom. He was taken on a 10-day propaganda tour and was accompanied everywhere by three guides.

One of the sights on his itinerary was the Arch of Triumph, a huge structure aping the Parisian landmark of the same name. Stood on top of the monument, one of the officials accompanying Alves pointed to the Kim Il-Sung Stadium, just a stone’s throw away.

“In this stadium, our eternal president made his first speech after liberating the Korean people from Japanese imperialists,” he said.

“Oh, and it was also there that Brazil played against our national football team. You must have heard about that match. It was very good. I was there.”

(Top photos: Waldir Cipriani; design: Eamonn Dalton)

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Culture

'Rafa, Rafa, Rafa': Encouragement and valediction at Nadal's last match in Madrid

Published

4 hours ago

May 1, 2024

Press Room

'Rafa, Rafa, Rafa': Encouragement and valediction at Nadal's last match in Madrid

Imagine having done the same thing for something like 30 years, being better at it than just about anyone who has ever lived, and then one day, it’s all completely new.

And so it is for Rafael Nadal in this through-the-looking-glass spring. For years, no place felt more like home than a red clay court. He could lose matches sometimes. Everyone does. But he almost never played poorly.

He could leave his guts on the court with an effort that would leave most of the population unable to walk for weeks. Then he would wake up in the morning and, within a few hours, be able to start preparing to do it all over again. And then, sometimes, he really would do it all over again.

Those days are done, perhaps never to return. Nearly a year and a half since a debilitating hip injury, nearly a year since major surgery to try to fix it, nearly two years since he was a mainstay of the professional tour, each match, each day, has become an experiment and a riddle for Nadal.

How much can he push? How long can he go? How does his body feel when he opens his eyes for the first time each morning, when he rolls out of bed, when he leans over to pick up his 18-month-old son, Rafa, when he walks onto the court for a warm-up session and strokes the ball for the first time?

The latest test came Tuesday night against Jiri Lehecka, the talented young Czech with the limber physique and easy power that Nadal, always the brutalist, never had. But nothing about the match really had anything to do with the contrasts he and Nadal presented, or really even the score.

This was all about the latest of Nadal’s experiments.

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A little more than 24 hours before he and Lehecka took the court, Nadal had gone three sets and more than three hours against Pedro Cachin of Argentina. In both matches, the most important numbers on the scoreboard were counting the elapsed time. How many rolling backhands and bullwhip forehands could Nadal endure, or even want to endure, with his lodestar, the French Open, starting in 26 days.

Nadal is balancing fitness and pride in his final season (Mateo Villalba/Getty Images)

The first set went 57 minutes, with Lehecka surviving three tight service holds and capitalizing on a cluster of Nadal errors in the 11th game to break, before serving out the set. Lehecka then broke Nadal’s serve in the first game of the second set. Nadal’s balls started to fly long and into the net without it bothering him all that much, and it was hard not to think of how he had described his game plan moving forward the night before, after his three-hour fist-fight with Cachin.

“Trying without doing crazy things, but trying,” he said, which is what Lehecka’s 7-5, 6-4 win that lasted a little over two hours ultimately looked like.

A third set and another hour might have qualified as a crazy thing under the circumstances.

Cachin, a 29-year-old journeyman who knows his way around a clay court, had given Nadal as much as he could handle and more than anyone had expected, digging in for long fights for points, forcing him to scramble across the baseline. A few years ago, this would have been another day of certainty for Nadal: the clay, the winning, the looking ahead to the next match knowing — within a very small margin — what version of himself would take the court.

Instead, he walked the corridors of the Caja Magica Monday night, shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head, and telling everyone who would listen that he had no idea what the future held.

“I never recovered too bad after tough matches, I think even at 36 years old or 35,” said Nadal, who is now nearly 38. “Today is a completely different story. It’s not only about injuries. First thing is injuries. Second thing is about… I never spent almost two years without playing tennis tournaments.”

Everyone knows what this is all about for Nadal — figuring out whether it’s going to be worth his while to put his name in the draw at the French Open, the tournament he has won 14 times, where his record at Roland Garros is a ridiculous 112-3. He’s not going to go merely for an ovation and a bouquet, or to gaze at the nine-foot statue of him outside Court Philippe Chatrier.

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He knows his tennis is there, but he will only go if he believes his body will be there, too. This is best-of-five-set tennis, on clay, and matches are affairs that generally last close to three hours, maybe longer. His serve in its current iteration, slowed by injuries to his midsection, isn’t allowing him to grab many quick and easy points. Nearly everything he gets, he has to earn the hard way. Late in the second set on Tuesday night, 40 per cent of Lehecka’s serves had gone unreturned, allowing him to speed through holds of serve already rendered tricky by the booms of “Rafa, Rafa, Rafa” about his ears every time he stood up to the line. Asked about how he dealt with them, the Czech world No 31 could only puff out his cheeks and say, “I don’t know.”

Nadal’s figure was six per cent.

Nadal was ultimately unable to impose himself on Lehecka (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

He will have a day off between matches at the French Open, unlike the 24-hour turnaround from Cachin to Lehecka, but still, the past days in Madrid have brought his first experience in what feels like forever of the grind-recover-grind routine the sport demands.

Ten days ago in Barcelona, he couldn’t do it, winning a match then essentially folding after losing the first set of a second. Had he pushed for more in that moment, he might have been back where he was in January, in a tuneup tournament in Brisbane ahead of the Australian Open. There, in his third match, he pushed too soon. He went to sleep with a tweak. In the morning, an MRI revealed it was a tear. Three months of recovery and many more moments of doubt ensued.

Maybe this was it? He could swing a racket, but anything close to trying to replicate the intensity of top-level competition was out of the question. Same with an intense three-hour training session. He just wasn’t strong enough.

Madrid has been different. His strength is back, but it’s not chartable: he still doesn’t have any idea what will happen from one day to the next.

“It’s unpredictable, that’s it, and you need to accept the unpredictable things today,” he said earlier this week. “I need to accept that.”

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In a sense, Nadal has been preparing for this moment for more than 20 years, ever since doctors detected a congenital defect in his foot that nearly derailed his career before it ever got started. He had to accept then an extremely uncertain future. Anything that followed was a kind of gift.

The experience begat ‘Zen-Rafa,’ the player who years ago compared an opponent’s aces to the rain, something he had no control over and simply accepted. Now he was back where it all started and not just because he said Madrid is where he felt for the first time, back in 2003, that he could compete at the highest level.

Sure, Nadal would have preferred to win once again in this packed metal bandbox in front of 12,000 people who love him as they love little else. He is as big a sports hero as this country has ever produced, which Raul Gonzalez Blanco, the legendary Real Madrid and Spain striker, knows well. He was there watching against Cachin.

But Nadal knew he had already won by being able to answer the bell against Lehecka, something he could only hope he would be able to do when he closed his eyes the night before. Picking up some easy points on his serve marked another win. Those classic, loop-one-ball-then-crush-the-next-one combinations, the quick bends for the short-hop winners, the perfect slice volley when he followed his serve into the net midway through the second set — win, win, win.

The moment when he sprinted to the baseline from his chair, one game from defeat, and 12,000 people stood and roared, and the noise rattled all around the metal building — that may have been the biggest win of all. They did it again on match point, then chanted his name when he sprayed a final backhand wide on what is likely his final match in the city.

Madrid’s tribute to Nadal after his defeat (Julian Finney/Getty Images)

He described the night as “very positive in many senses, not only sporting but also emotionally.”

“It’s been a gift to spend 21 years here,” Nadal told the crowd during a celebration on the court after the match. “The emotions, of playing in Madrid, playing on this court, are going to stay with me forever.”

Still, as much as Nadal has accepted the uncertainty of the future and soaking up the love, he is also making plans. He is playing himself into form now, trying to pass tests with every match so he can dream of magic, not just at the French Open but after, too.

The Olympic Games are at Roland Garros. He wants to at least play doubles there with Carlos Alcaraz, who is well on his way to taking over from Nadal in the Spanish tennis imagination. Last week he committed to play the Laver Cup, the Team Europe vs Team World competition that his friend and rival Roger Federer created. That’s in September.

Madrid brought four matches in six days. Assuming his body comes through all this, he will head to Rome for the Italian Open next week for another series of tests. Then comes the decision about the French Open.

That’s both imminent and a ways away. Nadal, who, in all his greatness has still somehow always managed to come off as a normalish guy, is day to day, as the saying goes — just as we all are.

(Top photo: Manuel Queimadelos/Quality Sport Images/Getty Images)

Culture

What happened to Deion Sanders' Colorado castoffs? Revisiting a record-setting exodus

Published

19 hours ago

April 30, 2024

Press Room

What happened to Deion Sanders' Colorado castoffs? Revisiting a record-setting exodus

Chase Sowell walked into Colorado’s football facility on the Sunday after the 2023 spring game and saw more than a dozen teammates lined up against a wall.

As each player entered the head coach’s office and emerged within minutes enraged or in tears, the second-year receiver nervously pondered his fate.

“We knew it was going to happen, but we didn’t know it was going to happen that soon,” Sowell said.

Deion Sanders, given his Power 5 head coaching shot in December 2022 after three successful years at Jackson State, had promised to clean house. He vowed talented transfers were on the way to replace anyone unprepared to play for him. And less than 24 hours after the Buffaloes’ ballyhooed ESPN-televised spring showcase, Sanders informed 20 scholarship players they were moving on.

“He didn’t sugarcoat it,” Sowell said. “He was telling me, ‘You’re coming off injury. I don’t think you will be one of the guys we need to start this year. We need guys that are going to be ready to play now.’”

Sanders didn’t need to use the word “cut.” Sowell understood it was time to pack his bags, enter the transfer portal and find a new home.

First-year coaches running off underperforming players are commonplace in college football. Dumping 20 in one day is not. By the end of the spring, 53 scholarship players transferred out of the program.

Colorado’s extreme roster makeover, unprecedented in modern college football history, yielded 87 newcomers and far more fascination about what Sanders could bring to Boulder. The Buffaloes were a downright phenomenon when they stunned TCU and started 3-0. They backslid hard, losing eight of nine Pac-12 games. Win or lose, Sanders got everyone watching – including his former players.

Where did they go?

Colorado’s castoffs went off on new journeys across college football. Fifteen matriculated to Power 5 programs. Twenty-two ended up on Group of 5 rosters, 11 went FCS or Division II, and two attended junior colleges. Three ex-Buffs went unsigned out of the portal and haven’t played since. And several had to fight the NCAA for the opportunity to keep playing.

Quarterback Owen McCown arrived at Colorado in 2022 with a freshman class desperate to turn around a program that had eight losing seasons over the past decade. The son of Minnesota Vikings assistant Josh McCown started three games as a freshman during the brutal 2022 season. Coach Karl Dorrell was fired after an 0-5 start. The Buffs got blown out almost weekly.

“Going through that rough season made us all close,” McCown said of his class. “And then, obviously, it all went away.”

Sanders walked into his first Colorado team meeting on Dec. 4, Tupac’s “All Eyez on Me” on the speakers, and delivered his first warning.

“I’m coming to restore, to replace, to re-energize some of y’all that are salvageable,” Sanders said. “I’m not going to lie. Everybody that’s sitting their butt in a seat ain’t going to have a seat when we get back.”

Sowell, a redshirt freshman from Houston, was unfazed.

“I don’t think he was being a d— about it,” Sowell said. “I think he was just being straight up: Prove to me that you can play.”

McCown skipped the team meeting. He was the third Colorado player to enter the transfer portal, going to UTSA, where he could start this fall. Sowell stayed to battle it out, but after season-ending surgery for a torn labrum, it was a tough time to be at his best. He was cleared to practice a week into spring ball.

Every day felt like a tryout. Sowell thought he had to be perfect to gain approval. He wasn’t himself. More stressed, more withdrawn. New coaching staffs can be disorienting for players, because they don’t know whom to trust. Sowell’s father grew up in Florida and revered Sanders, and Sowell didn’t want to disappoint his family by failing.

There was nowhere to hide. Cameras followed the team around constantly for Sanders’ Amazon documentary series and his son’s Well Off Media YouTube channel.

“It kinda felt like a reality TV show,” Sowell said.

It didn’t take long for returning Colorado players to figure out the narrative. Quarterback Shedeur Sanders, wide receiver/cornerback Travis Hunter and 19 more transfers were brought in for spring practice. They were the stars of the show.

“We felt like it was us vs. them instead of all of us together,” Sowell said. “That’s the best way I can put it. The new guys were going against the players that had already been there. It wasn’t a good environment to be in. It wasn’t a team environment.”

His freshman class was an inseparable group. The players lived on campus together, dined together and played pickup basketball together. They would return to the dorms at night that spring and talk openly about their predicament: What do we do?

On the morning of April 23, their group text blew up. Players were called into exit meetings with Sanders and told they couldn’t play at CU. One described the experience as going to see the Grim Reaper. Sowell’s meeting was his first one-on-one conversation with the head coach.

The following morning, Sowell said, players were locked out of Colorado’s football facility. They couldn’t grab their things from the locker room. They couldn’t grab a meal at the training table.

“When you’re gone, you’re gone,” Sowell said.

Sowell wanted to go where he could play as many snaps as possible. He picked ECU. It was a big move across the country for a Texas kid who knew hardly anything about the school. But he connected with receivers coach Dyrell Roberts and felt welcomed in his first team meeting with the Pirates.

They needed him, too. Sowell emerged as ECU’s No. 1 wide receiver, leading the team with 47 receptions for 622 yards and a touchdown.

Sowell says he’s happier than ever. His mom says he’s back to being his “true self” at ECU. A year later, he remains in touch with his freshman class in the group text.

Jordyn Tyson picked Arizona State. Dylan Dixson chose Missouri State. Grant Page and Simeon Harris are at Utah State. Anthony Hankerson and Van Wells left Colorado this offseason and are now at Oregon State.

Not one member of their 31-man signing class is still playing for Colorado.

Xavier Smith’s sitdown with Sanders was later Sunday. By then, the redshirt freshman safety knew what to expect. His father encouraged him to hope for the best. But he didn’t even get a one-on-one. Defensive coordinator Charles Kelly brought Smith and safety Oakie Salave’a into the office together.

“We sat on the sofa, and he’s talking to us, but he’s not even looking at us,” Smith said. “I’m looking Coach Kelly dead in his eyes. (Sanders) said he felt like I should hit the portal. He didn’t want me to waste a year thinking I could earn a spot.

“I was actually getting mad, like tears coming to my eyes. Because, bro, you never even tried to get to know me.”

Smith wasn’t shocked he was cut, given his injury history. He’d broken his right leg during his senior season in high school and again in the spring while rehabbing. He played in one game in 2022 but missed the rest of the season with a hamstring injury. Now Smith was finally healthy and, as a young defensive back from Atlanta, eager to learn from his Hall of Fame coach.

Smith assumed Sanders would dump older players and embrace the young talent he inherited. During the team meeting, he told himself: He’s not talking about me. I ain’t leaving.

During the spring, Smith felt more like an extra in the background of the reality show. He tried to make the most of second-team reps and made plays in the spring game but struggled to get Sanders’ attention. So as he sat on that couch and listened to Kelly encourage him to leave, sure, there was frustration.

“He was destroying guys’ confidence and belief in themselves,” Smith said. “The way he did it, it could’ve been done with a little more compassion.”

For Smith and many of the inexperienced players cut by Colorado, the spring transfer window was unnerving. Schools have limited scholarships available entering the summer, and it’s tougher to earn offers with limited game and practice tape. Among the 30 scholarship players who left the program after the spring game, 20 continued playing at the FBS level but only nine joined Power 5 programs.

Smith regained his confidence at Austin Peay. The FCS program in Clarksville, Tenn., provided an opportunity to play right away, and coach Scottie Walden won him over with his relentless enthusiasm. Smith caught up quickly to earn a starting role and Freshman All-America recognition on a 9-3 team that won its conference.

At the end of the season, Walden landed the head job at UTEP. Smith re-entered the transfer portal and followed him to El Paso.

“It’s rare you meet a head coach who genuinely wants to see every player on his roster succeed,” Smith said.

Jake Wiley did not get cut. But he wasn’t looking to stay.

The offensive tackle from Aurora, Colo., spent four years with the Buffaloes and saw it all. He committed to Mike MacIntyre in 2018, redshirted during Mel Tucker’s lone season, became a two-year starter under Dorrell and had five different offensive line coaches.

“That’s not a normal number,” Wiley said.

He stayed for the spring to finish his degree and to see if he fit with the new staff. On cut day, Wiley received an ominous text.

“In our O-line group chat, one of the offensive line coaches texted the group and said, ‘Good luck fellas,’” Wiley said, “and then he just removed all of them. It said these five people were removed from the chat. We were like, ‘Huh? What happened?’”

Two days after they entered the portal, Wiley joined them. He said players who survived the cut still felt unwanted and expendable. He was one of seven returning starters who departed that spring along with running back Deion Smith (BYU), receiver Montana Lemonious-Craig (Arizona), defensive linemen Jalen Sami (Michigan State) and Na’im Rodman (Washington State), cornerback Nikko Reed (Oregon) and safety Tyrin Taylor (Memphis).

“Let me tell you this, because this is something you may not know,” Sanders said last November on “The Dan Patrick Show.” “Maybe 20 kids we may have sat down with and said, ‘We may head in a different direction; I don’t know if this is gonna work out.’ Everybody else quit. They quit. You can’t hold me responsible.”

Wiley was overwhelmed by the number of calls he received upon entering the portal and narrowed his list to UCLA, Duke and Purdue. He flew to Los Angeles to watch a spring practice and was told the Bruins needed a tackle. Wiley loved the campus and liked staying in the Pac-12. It was an easy decision.

He didn’t learn he was moving to guard until the day before preseason camp. That’s a lot of new technique to learn in addition to a new offensive scheme. Wiley rotated in at right guard in UCLA’s first four games but then saw his playing time drop off considerably.

For many of his fellow ex-Buffs, this was a common issue. Among the 37 transfers who departed after Sanders was hired and landed at FBS schools, 23 did not start a game last season. Three former teammates – running back Jayle Stacks, receiver Maurice Bell and cornerback Nigel Bethel Jr. – went unsigned and didn’t play last season. Bell is now a trainer and working in real estate back home in California.

Going from playing to watching wasn’t fun, and Wiley admits he might’ve handled the letdown poorly if he were younger. He tried to respond with maturity.

“I wasn’t going to be that guy that was really complaining a lot or pouting and being negative,” he said. “If I wasn’t going to play, I wasn’t going to sit there and be a drain on the team.”

Wiley re-entered the portal in late November and relocated to Houston, where he’s once again playing tackle and helping a new coaching staff set a standard.

Wiley says he’ll always be a Colorado alum and fan, and he couldn’t help but marvel at the spectacle Sanders created.

“I never would’ve ever thought that Lil Wayne would be running the CU Buffs out of the tunnel,” Wiley said.

While his new Miami (Ohio) teammates enjoyed a day at Universal Studios in Orlando, Fla., Maddox Kopp testified via Zoom in a U.S. District Court hearing in West Virginia.

At the conclusion of the Dec. 13 hearing, District Judge John P. Bailey issued a 14-day temporary restraining order against the NCAA, granting immediate eligibility to college athletes who’ve transferred multiple times. The TRO halted the organization’s attempts to enforce a one-time transfer rule. And it was a former Colorado quarterback who helped make history.

Kopp was required to sit out the 2023 season as a two-time transfer. So were defensive back Tayvion Beasley (San Diego State), tight end Seydou Traore (Mississippi State) and offensive linemen Yousef Mugharbil (NC State) and Noah Fenske (Southern Illinois). Beasley, Traore and Mugharbil came to Colorado as transfers with Sanders and were gone by the end of the spring.

Kopp was sitting in the front row when Sanders arrived. He’d trained with Shedeur Sanders and knew what came next. In his first visit with the QBs, Sanders told them Shedeur was on the way and their job was to make him better.

“I was just sitting there thinking, it is what it is,” Kopp said. “I need to find a new home and a place that wants me.”

Kopp was starting over again after one year at Houston and one at Colorado. He transferred to Miami (Ohio) and built his case for an eligibility waiver.

The NCAA significantly altered its waiver criteria in January 2023. Getting run off by a school was no longer a valid justification. Kopp needed to provide a documented medical or safety-related reason for leaving. His attorney argued Colorado did not make accommodations for learning disabilities Kopp has dealt with since elementary school. The NCAA denied his waiver and then denied his appeal in August.

Fenske went through the same ordeal. The offensive lineman left Iowa in 2021 for mental health reasons and was a backup with the Buffaloes for two seasons. He didn’t like what he heard in Sanders’ team meeting.

Fenske rode back from the meeting with lineman Alex Harkey and said he was entering the portal. Harkey told him he was overreacting. Harkey was cut after the spring game and is now at Texas State.

“There’s not one person that watches that video – even the people who love him – and says he’s not gonna sh–can everybody,” Fenske said.

Fenske transferred to FCS Southern Illinois and was set to be the Salukis’ starting left tackle last fall. He submitted his waiver request in July and waited 70 days for a rejection in September, three games into the season. He kept preparing to play, believing he’d win on appeal. The final denial from the NCAA came Oct. 17, days before Southern Illinois faced No. 1 South Dakota State. Fenske broke down in tears in coach Nick Hill’s office upon learning the news.

“It didn’t matter if we had letters of recommendation from (Colorado athletic director) Rick George and (Colorado interim coach) Mike Sanford,” he said. “It didn’t matter if we had proof that I was seeking counseling and wasn’t getting it. They decided that my mental health was not dangerous enough to myself that I needed to leave there.”

The eligibility cases of North Carolina’s Tez Walker and several men’s basketball players generated national attention and political pressure. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost led a seven-state antitrust suit filed in December.

Though Kopp was eligible to play in the Cure Bowl against Appalachian State since the school semester had ended, he was eager to push for reform and help athletes avoid the NCAA’s complicated waiver process. Xavier Smith was able to transfer to UTEP after the TRO and said he’s thankful Kopp went the extra mile.

“It takes the power out of their hands,” Kopp said of the NCAA. “If they’re gonna make these rules, I just want them to be consistent.”

You know you’re married to the game when you get a restraining order against the NCAA to play in the Avocados From Mexico Cure Bowl. 🫡 pic.twitter.com/gYGOk8CEHC
— The Walmart Wolverine (@TheWalMartWolv) December 16, 2023

Empowered by the court ruling and the NCAA’s subsequent adoptions of new rules permitting unlimited transfers, more college football players are entering the portal than ever before. At Colorado, more than 30 Buffs are moving on, including 18 transfers Sanders brought in to replace those he cut.

Their exits have not brought the same shock-and-awe fanfare of last spring’s purge, but the motivations are similar: Sanders retooling with eyes on dramatic improvement while his departing players seek better situations. The head coach joked on a podcast this month that the portal is akin to room service.

“I can order what I want,” Sanders said.

For the Colorado players he didn’t want, those 53 transfers whose locations and lives changed over the past 12 months, the bitterness is beginning to wear off.

“My experience with Deion wasn’t one where I’m going to go bash him,” Sowell said. “There were things I agreed with that he did and things I didn’t agree with that he did. But that’s like any head coach. When he came in and made his decisions, I trusted God and I said everything happens for a reason.

“And I got to meet Deion Sanders, so I can’t really complain. I got to meet one of the best to ever do it.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photo: Ryan King / Getty Images)

Culture

Nike expected to alter MLB uniforms by 2025 after complaints

Published

1 day ago

April 30, 2024

Press Room

Nike expected to alter MLB uniforms by 2025 after complaints

After months of complaints from fans and players, Nike is expected to change several elements of its new Major League Baseball uniforms by the start of the 2025 season, according to a memo obtained Sunday.

The memo from the MLB Players Association to players states that after weeks of conversations with the league and its official uniform supplier, Nike, the union has “receive[d] indications” the following changes will be made: Returning to the larger lettering on the jersey tops, and on the pants bringing back the previous tailoring options, seam stitch count and higher-quality zipper that were in place in 2023.

In addition, as Nike previously told The Athletic, the memo said Nike is working toward solutions for teams’ mismatching gray uniforms and for the sweat stains showing through jerseys.

“This has been entirely a Nike issue,” the memo said. “At its core, what has happened here is that Nike was innovating something that didn’t need to be innovated.”

It’s worth pointing out what the memo is and isn’t. It is, first and foremost, not a commitment directly from Nike. (Nike did not respond to a request for comment.) It is the union updating players on perceived progress to that end. It also is not a promise to return to the uniforms from previous seasons. The Nike Vapor Premier is here to stay, as far as fabric and general jersey design are concerned.

Nike rolled out the Vapor Premier this spring, after first introducing it at the 2023 All-Star Game, and was met by immediate blowback. Fans ripped certain designs, most notably the strangely small name-on-back lettering. Players blasted the pants fitting process and the cheap feel of the fabric.

Once the season started, sweat stains appeared, road grays were identified as having different tones and pants began blowing out along the seam — apparently due to a change in stitch count. (One issue not mentioned in the memo is the pants’ see-through nature, because, as previously reported, well-placed sources say the pants fabric did not change this year, though some smaller details like the zipper and belt loops did.)

“We cautioned Nike against various changes when they previewed them in 2022, particularly regarding pants,” the memo said. “MLB had been, and has been, aware of our concerns as well. Unfortunately, until recently, Nike’s position has essentially boiled down to — ’nothing to see here, Players will need to adjust.’”

MLB and MLBPA declined comment.

In leveling blame at Nike, the MLBPA continued to back Fanatics, the manufacturer of the uniforms. For months, as more and more issues arose with the new uniforms, Fanatics drew much of the public ire for the mess. MLBPA has on multiple occasions publicly absolved Fanatics, which it did again in Sunday’s memo: “Fanatics has been, and continues to be, a great partner with the Players and has been making the uniforms for the last eight years without issue.” Apart from its partnership with MLB and Nike, Fanatics also has a lucrative licensing deal with the players union, and the MLBPA has invested in Fanatics.

Fanatics declined comment.

“Fanatics recognizes the vital importance of soliciting Player feedback, obtaining Player buy-in, and not being afraid to have difficult conversations about jerseys or trading cards,” the memo said.

“Our hope is that, moving forward, Nike will take a similar approach.”