It's Just a Ball: Casco Antiguo, Panama


It's Just a Ball: Casco Antiguo, Panama

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Written by Matt Landau

Wednesday, October 03 2007

A friendly afternoon match

Click to enlarge

As a young American living in Panama, much of my business and pleasure is done in the presence of people significantly older and more astute than myself. There are times at dinner parties or office meetings, when conversations inevitably take a turn for the serious and in an effort to thwart this gravity, this weightiness of my social existence in Panama, I recently decided to opt for a bit of a younger crowd.

Without sounding like a pedophile, the first step to acquiring friends under the age of 15 in Panama is buying a soccer ball. I wanted to revert back to my youth a little bit, you know, take a step back to a time when things were less serious and mistakes had no consequences and hamburgers only cost a nickel. So when I wandered through my neighborhood holding my shiny new purchase, it was rewarding to see that, not unlike a soccer pied piper, hordes of children began to follow me. "Come children" I called into alleyways and home fronts. "Come follow me to the promise land."

We began to play soccer every few days on a basketball court that overlooks the ocean. It's amusingly third-world picturesue, with a desserted church on one side and the ocean on the other. And whether it's a subconscious move to better my self esteem or not I do not know, but I am regularly the tallest and best player on the field. Most of the kids are quite talented, but a better reason to like them is because they call me Senor Matt, a term that evokes true soccer stardom. A term that brings to mind the likes of Pele and Maradonna and Brandi Chastain.

When told where I come from, many of my new friends seem under the impression that the US as a whole is a celebrity-studded wonderland. "Do you know singer Puff Daddy?" one of them asked. "You house," commented another. "It has movie theatre like Fifty Cent? It has golf course?"

I wrote down the names in my journal next to the word humiliation.

It is with great regret that I often reveal my home town of Baltimore, Maryland as not only terribly boring, but also atop the nation for the number of crack deals gone bad. It was always funny, I thought, that statistic which presumes somewhere in the continental US there is a city with a large amount of crack deals which have stayed successful. However, my new friends tend to care less about material or shallow things like where I grew up and more in my ability to buy them cold Coca Colas after the match.

We often then sit on the beach and talk about unserious things like how Mario shot a marble out of his nose on the first day of school. Kids really do expel the darndest things!

They are able to play at just about any hour of the day and rely solely on my soccer ball which is starting to resemble a worn-out cantaloupe. I would like to think that my presence is appreciated too, but that's probably not the case. Now that they know where I live, they'll push the buzzer asking if I can come out to play, secretly using me the way you might use someone who owns a boat.

It's really a nice refreshment though, from the stressed-out world I left behind in the states or even the stiff business discussions that plague my schedule in the Republic. And if I'd have known that buying a soccer ball would improve my lifestyle like this, I'd have done it a long time ago.

Comments (1)

Mateo: Update

Since I posted this article, I decided to get a little cocky and try to play with the older guys: a group of 20-30 year olds who apparently are part of a gang. I injured myself in three areas and they essentially destroyed my ball. So much for that.

October 05, 2007

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