THE LONG, INSPIRING JOURNEY OF SOCCER PHENOM ALPHONSO DAVIES
Alphonso Davies is the most famous soccer player in Canada today, and not because of what he has done but because of what he could do after European mega-team Bayern Munich paid an eye-popping $22 million to obtain the rights to the 17-yearold wunderkind from the Vancouver Whitecaps.
But the big money, the goals Davies might score and all the ways he might become the greatest soccer player in a (largely) non-competitive soccer-playing country’s history — and rescue our woebegone national team program from its chronic obscurity as he goes — are related to the unknown future, when what is remarkable about Davies isn’t where he is going but where he has already been.
The soccer phenom didn’t grow up in the suburbs in a house with a double garage and glide to youth practices with Mom (or Dad) at the helm of the family minivan. Alphonso’s mother, Victoria, and his dad, Debeah, had more pressing concerns in the early years of their marriage, chiefly: doing their utmost not to get themselves killed. The Liberian couple are from Monrovia, capital of a country that, 20 years ago, was awash in a civil war that claimed an estimated 300,000 lives.
Victoria remembers stepping over dead bodies on her way to get food. Debeah remembers life boiling down to a simple equation: you could carry a gun or you could flee. And he didn’t want to carry a gun, so the Davies escaped to Buduburam, a refugee camp in Ghana with 42,000 inhabitants. Food was scarce. Water an issue and, on Nov. 2, 2000, life a lot more complicated (and richer) with the birth of their first child.
They named him Alphonso.
“Refugee life is like, if they put you in a container and then they lock you up,” Victoria said in a documentary about the family’s life produced by the Vancouver Whitecaps. “You can’t go far from the camp. Anything can happen to you.”
Every day started with a challenge: how to get enough food and water to keep Alphonso alive. Victoria and Debeah eventually enrolled in a refugee resettlement program. Debeah knew some bits and pieces of Canadian history. But neither he nor Victoria had family in Canada, or really knew anything about the place, or what shape their lives here might take. In 2006, they landed in Windsor, Ont., moving on to Edmonton a year later.
“Looking back at what my family did for me,” Alphonso told ESPN in a 2017 interview. “Keeping myself motivated is a little bit easier than usual.”
In Edmonton, the family lived two blocks away from the Clareview Recreation Centre. Alphonso was different from the other kids, sweet and competitive, and talented beyond his years, but also more grown up and, perhaps, aware of life’s stakes. Debeah and Victoria worked shift work, pulling long hours. As their eldest child, Alphonso was a third caregiver to his two younger siblings, changing diapers, preparing meals and helping out.
And, of course, there was soccer, a pull that took him away from Debeah and Victoria at age 15 after he was recruited to play for the Whitecaps development team. He lived with a billet family. He promised his mother he would work hard at school. Victoria wept when she said goodbye, and she weeps when she speaks of Canada now, where children like hers can go to school — for free — and where life can be a struggle, but at least it gets fought on each individual family’s terms.
On June 6, 2017, Alphonso Davies became a Canadian citizen. This was no small thing in soccer circles since, in bygone years, some of the great soccer talents actually born in Canada — think Calgary’s Owen Hargreaves — embraced the non-Canadian half of their identities (Hargreaves father was from England) and bolted from the country of their birth instead of embracing the Canadian national team. But Davies, as a teen, has already scored three goals in six games for Canada. He represents soccer hope, for some, but also stands for something more.
“Alphonso Davies is somebody that all our players can aspire to become,” national team coach John Herdman told the Edmonton Sun. “He underlines what Canada is.
“It is a country that accepts all.”
Indeed, it is, as dewy-eyed as it sounds. So when we speak of Alphonso Davies, and about the goals he might score and the riches he stands to make, what we’re really talking about is hope — and a mother and father’s dream of finding a better life for their kids.
“I’m proud of Alphonso,” Debeah Davies says in the documentary. “Because if I look back, where we came from, refugee camp — no food, no clothes — and here we are today.”
“He has everything he needs.”
And he has only just begun.