Soccer Is a Great Sport
What does a soccer ball have to do with surviving poverty, crossing oceans, raising children, and building a life from nothing?
Everything.
Born in Yaound , Cameroon, Aristide Dagbove grew up without running water, without consistent meals, and without a father who showed up in the ways that mattered. At thirteen, his mother left for America. She would not return for eight years. During those years, she was secretly battling breast cancer alone-so he would not worry. He would not find out until much later.
What he had, from age three, was a soccer ball. And that ball taught him everything life never explained: how to read what is coming before it arrives. How to stay composed when the pressure is highest. How to prepare so relentlessly that when the opportunity finally appears, you are already exactly where it is going.
Soccer Is a Great Sport is the true story of what happens when a boy with nothing uses the lessons of a game to build a life that should not have been possible.
Dagbove walked out of classrooms as a child because his family could not pay the fees-and learned to carry that walk with dignity. He took the GED six times before passing. He arrived in California with almost nothing, chasing a professional soccer dream that ended on a phone call when they discovered he was twenty-four, not eighteen. He ate pretzels for dinner. He received an email for a job he did not remember applying for.
He became a flight attendant. On one flight, he recognized that a passenger had stopped breathing, diverted the plane, stopped it on the runway, and saved a life. The man woke up angry about the diversion. Dagbove said nothing, filed his report, and went back to work.
He went on to build a career in data analytics and counterterrorism. He became a father. He bought a house. He paid for his estranged father's plane ticket in full. He wore pink cleats in every soccer match he played-in honor of his mother, who survived.
This memoir is not a story about talent. It is a story about preparation-about what is built in the dark, in the quiet, long before anyone is watching. It is about the discipline that soccer forged in a barefoot boy on a dirt field, and how that discipline became the framework for every professional challenge, every personal loss, every moment of fatherhood, and every room he walked into wearing a suit that cost sixty dollars and looked like it cost five hundred.
It is about what it costs to be a Black man navigating American institutions not designed for you-and what it means to navigate them anyway, with composure, without apology, and without ever letting the room decide who you are.
It is about a marriage that ended. A car accident and a thought that should never have come. A friend's voice. Two children who call him Dad. And the slow, deliberate, daily work of becoming the father he never had.
Soccer Is a Great Sport speaks directly to anyone who has ever been told no more times than yes. To every immigrant who crossed an ocean and had to rebuild everything from scratch. To every Black professional navigating a system with different rules for different people. To every father trying to break a cycle he did not choose. To every person who has ever stood in the gap between where they are and where they are trying to go-and had to figure out how to keep moving.
The ball is always coming. The only question is whether you are ready when it arrives.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks ® and the ThriftBooks ® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
