Fair play to the lad - 
Soccer: Emotion on the pitch — and beyond
Sometimes even soccer, an industry of millionaire players and billionaire club owners, needs reminding of man's mortality.
On Saturday in the stadium where 52,305 Newcastle United people were singing in the pouring rain after their team came from behind to beat Liverpool, 2-1, the television cameras suddenly picked out two men on the pitch.
Glenn Roeder, the Newcastle manager, reached out to Celestine Babayaro, his Nigerian fullback. The manager took the player's head in his hands, and we saw tears flowing as freely as the rain.
It took a while before the news media could fathom these emotions. Roeder gave his customary question-and-answer postmatch conference, speaking about his men gifting Liverpool a goal and then wringing victory out of potential defeat.
At the very end of his conference, Roeder asked to say something about Babayaro.
"Baba called me at 10 to midnight last night," he said. "His younger brother has been suffering from tuberculosis, and at 11.30 he lost his life."
The manager, having waited months for Babayaro to return fit after a groin injury, could only respond in human terms to his player's tragedy. "It puts a lot of things into perspective for me personally," Roeder reflected.
"My father died on a Saturday when I was playing, and I wasn't too clever myself three or four years ago," he added, referring to a brain tumor Roeder suffered while coaching West Ham United.
As midnight turned, Roeder's mind turned to considering the solution to the left-back position on his squad, already reduced by injury.
The phone rang again. Babayaro called back to say that his older brothers wanted him to play, and they believed the younger brother would have wanted that, too.
"I have always said that football is the most important thing in your life," Roeder responded, "apart from family."
The manager decided that whatever the family wanted was right. Babayaro got through the 90 minutes and his manager stated: "To play in the manner that he did takes courage. He is now traveling down to London to be with his family, and hopefully he will travel with us to Belgium on Wednesday."
The Belgian trip takes Babayaro full circle in his life. Newcastle happens to be playing the SV Zulte-Wareg club in Waregem in the UEFA Cup on Thursday. The players will travel through Brussels, where Celestine Babayaro's odyssey from Africa to European riches took off.
Like many a bright young Nigerian, spotted at world junior championships when he was 14, his passage into Europe was arranged by an agent and smoothed through the Brussels gateway. By 16, he was an Anderlecht player, and by 21 he had already played for coaches who themselves were often just passing through.
There had been "Mister Babayaro" — his godfather, Sabo Babayaro, who ran a youth soccer team in Kaduna and fostered scores of children in that northern Nigerian town. When Celestine was an infant, his father died, and Babayaro became official guardian to his mother and her eight children.
Celestine, following his goalkeeper older brother, soon began being coached by foreign trainers — one French, another Dutch, then a Yugoslav — as he rose to become a part of the Nigerian team that won the Olympic gold medal in Atlanta in 1996.
To get him from Anderlecht, Chelsea paid £2.25 million, which would be more than $4 million today, when he was still a teenager. But Chelsea's coach, Claudio Ranieri, who admired Babayaro's adventurous counterattacking style, was soon fired, and the next coach, José Mourinho, was not such a fan of it.
Babayaro was traded, again, to Newcastle in January 2005. Before that, I had gotten to know this quiet, unassuming young man.
We met at Chelsea's training ground, where he arrived in a black Jaguar XJS sports car. His clothes were trendy King's Road fashion, his accent was a curious Afro-Cockney London, with traces of Flemish in the vocabulary.
Aside from the game, his life centered on his family. Four Babayaro brothers were living in London. Three of them were doing what their mother back in Kaduna thought was right: They were studying at the University of Greenwich.
Celestine was her big disappointment. "She didn't really want me going into football," he said. "She's happy that we four settled in London. When she sees me on the telly, somebody has to inform her whether I'm playing for my club or for Nigeria, and what kind of form I'm hitting."
He laughed, but he was serious when he said his mother couldn't see the point of relying on sport rather than, like his brothers, making something of himself.
"Don't ask me what they study," he said laconically, "I only do the bill-paying."
They lived together, the four brothers, and Celestine, content to move through intuition on the pitch, and in life, knew that he was grateful to their intelligence if ever he needed to write something down in a letter.
The tragedy that came with the call in the midnight hour Saturday had its roots in Africa, and was long in the making. His brother, at 26 two years younger than Celestine, gradually and inexorably grew worse and succumbed to the respiratory disease that the World Health Organization lists as killing 1.7 million victims a year.
Few outside the family knew that Babayaro was going through this personal crisis. Many thousands of Newcastle fans knew that he was struggling for physical fitness after his groin injury.
And on Saturday, as he played through grief, the overnight headline in many a British newspaper was of the "courage" of David Beckham proving his point to Real Madrid after its coach had benched him.
A goal down at Real Sociedad, a typical Beckham free kick scudded off the grass and was allowed by a sleepy home goalie to pass into the net. Madrid rallied and won, 2-1. Beckham was the hero of the hour, apparently.
Back in England there was a real human life story, from a player against whom Beckham has never shined, Babayaro.
Soccer: Emotion on the pitch — and beyond
Sometimes even soccer, an industry of millionaire players and billionaire club owners, needs reminding of man's mortality.
On Saturday in the stadium where 52,305 Newcastle United people were singing in the pouring rain after their team came from behind to beat Liverpool, 2-1, the television cameras suddenly picked out two men on the pitch.
Glenn Roeder, the Newcastle manager, reached out to Celestine Babayaro, his Nigerian fullback. The manager took the player's head in his hands, and we saw tears flowing as freely as the rain.
It took a while before the news media could fathom these emotions. Roeder gave his customary question-and-answer postmatch conference, speaking about his men gifting Liverpool a goal and then wringing victory out of potential defeat.
At the very end of his conference, Roeder asked to say something about Babayaro.
"Baba called me at 10 to midnight last night," he said. "His younger brother has been suffering from tuberculosis, and at 11.30 he lost his life."
The manager, having waited months for Babayaro to return fit after a groin injury, could only respond in human terms to his player's tragedy. "It puts a lot of things into perspective for me personally," Roeder reflected.
"My father died on a Saturday when I was playing, and I wasn't too clever myself three or four years ago," he added, referring to a brain tumor Roeder suffered while coaching West Ham United.
As midnight turned, Roeder's mind turned to considering the solution to the left-back position on his squad, already reduced by injury.
The phone rang again. Babayaro called back to say that his older brothers wanted him to play, and they believed the younger brother would have wanted that, too.
"I have always said that football is the most important thing in your life," Roeder responded, "apart from family."
The manager decided that whatever the family wanted was right. Babayaro got through the 90 minutes and his manager stated: "To play in the manner that he did takes courage. He is now traveling down to London to be with his family, and hopefully he will travel with us to Belgium on Wednesday."
The Belgian trip takes Babayaro full circle in his life. Newcastle happens to be playing the SV Zulte-Wareg club in Waregem in the UEFA Cup on Thursday. The players will travel through Brussels, where Celestine Babayaro's odyssey from Africa to European riches took off.
Like many a bright young Nigerian, spotted at world junior championships when he was 14, his passage into Europe was arranged by an agent and smoothed through the Brussels gateway. By 16, he was an Anderlecht player, and by 21 he had already played for coaches who themselves were often just passing through.
There had been "Mister Babayaro" — his godfather, Sabo Babayaro, who ran a youth soccer team in Kaduna and fostered scores of children in that northern Nigerian town. When Celestine was an infant, his father died, and Babayaro became official guardian to his mother and her eight children.
Celestine, following his goalkeeper older brother, soon began being coached by foreign trainers — one French, another Dutch, then a Yugoslav — as he rose to become a part of the Nigerian team that won the Olympic gold medal in Atlanta in 1996.
To get him from Anderlecht, Chelsea paid £2.25 million, which would be more than $4 million today, when he was still a teenager. But Chelsea's coach, Claudio Ranieri, who admired Babayaro's adventurous counterattacking style, was soon fired, and the next coach, José Mourinho, was not such a fan of it.
Babayaro was traded, again, to Newcastle in January 2005. Before that, I had gotten to know this quiet, unassuming young man.
We met at Chelsea's training ground, where he arrived in a black Jaguar XJS sports car. His clothes were trendy King's Road fashion, his accent was a curious Afro-Cockney London, with traces of Flemish in the vocabulary.
Aside from the game, his life centered on his family. Four Babayaro brothers were living in London. Three of them were doing what their mother back in Kaduna thought was right: They were studying at the University of Greenwich.
Celestine was her big disappointment. "She didn't really want me going into football," he said. "She's happy that we four settled in London. When she sees me on the telly, somebody has to inform her whether I'm playing for my club or for Nigeria, and what kind of form I'm hitting."
He laughed, but he was serious when he said his mother couldn't see the point of relying on sport rather than, like his brothers, making something of himself.
"Don't ask me what they study," he said laconically, "I only do the bill-paying."
They lived together, the four brothers, and Celestine, content to move through intuition on the pitch, and in life, knew that he was grateful to their intelligence if ever he needed to write something down in a letter.
The tragedy that came with the call in the midnight hour Saturday had its roots in Africa, and was long in the making. His brother, at 26 two years younger than Celestine, gradually and inexorably grew worse and succumbed to the respiratory disease that the World Health Organization lists as killing 1.7 million victims a year.
Few outside the family knew that Babayaro was going through this personal crisis. Many thousands of Newcastle fans knew that he was struggling for physical fitness after his groin injury.
And on Saturday, as he played through grief, the overnight headline in many a British newspaper was of the "courage" of David Beckham proving his point to Real Madrid after its coach had benched him.
A goal down at Real Sociedad, a typical Beckham free kick scudded off the grass and was allowed by a sleepy home goalie to pass into the net. Madrid rallied and won, 2-1. Beckham was the hero of the hour, apparently.
Back in England there was a real human life story, from a player against whom Beckham has never shined, Babayaro.
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