Journal Prompt: What Was Your Most Humiliating Day as an Athlete?
–Written by Swedish high school exchange student Jonathan Szeps who played soccer in Michigan.
I easily remember the most humiliating day as an athlete. It was about three years ago when my team had an away game in a suburb called Rinkeby. Rinkeby is one of the suburbs in Sweden with a lot of crimes and problems. It is also a suburb with a majority of immigrants. In my team, almost everybody has their roots in Sweden (I’m one of the few who doesn’t). Everybody on the team also comes from pretty wealthy families. A lot of my teammates has a lot of prejudice of Rinkeby. Before the game everybody was joking about how we would get robbed after the game after we easily had defeated the team.
When we arrived to the field the win seemed even more obvious. The field was a joke. Not as big as it should have been in our age, not grass, no nets in the goal and the team we were playing didn’t even wear the same cloths. We expected an easy victory but we were SO WRONG!
The team, called Benadir, gave us a lesson how to play soccer. On a shitty field in the middle of nowhere they played like the Brazilian national team. They played with us, making cool tricks and scoring beautiful goals. At the end of the first half the score was 10-0 and we couldn’t believe what we just had experienced. After some yelling from our coach we got back out for second half. We played a little bit better, scoring two goals (I scored one) but we still got beat by 16-2. After the game, instead of robbing us, the players were really nice to us and behaved like a winner should. We were so embarrassed and all of us didn’t say a word on way back home. This really proved us wrong about prejudices. I will never forget that loss.
I easily remember the most humiliating day as an athlete. It was about three years ago when my team had an away game in a suburb called Rinkeby. Rinkeby is one of the suburbs in Sweden with a lot of crimes and problems. It is also a suburb with a majority of immigrants. In my team, almost everybody has their roots in Sweden (I’m one of the few who doesn’t). Everybody on the team also comes from pretty wealthy families. A lot of my teammates has a lot of prejudice of Rinkeby. Before the game everybody was joking about how we would get robbed after the game after we easily had defeated the team.
When we arrived to the field the win seemed even more obvious. The field was a joke. Not as big as it should have been in our age, not grass, no nets in the goal and the team we were playing didn’t even wear the same cloths. We expected an easy victory but we were SO WRONG!
The team, called Benadir, gave us a lesson how to play soccer. On a shitty field in the middle of nowhere they played like the Brazilian national team. They played with us, making cool tricks and scoring beautiful goals. At the end of the first half the score was 10-0 and we couldn’t believe what we just had experienced. After some yelling from our coach we got back out for second half. We played a little bit better, scoring two goals (I scored one) but we still got beat by 16-2. After the game, instead of robbing us, the players were really nice to us and behaved like a winner should. We were so embarrassed and all of us didn’t say a word on way back home. This really proved us wrong about prejudices. I will never forget that loss.
