Warren St. John > Quotes

“Everything in the world starts small and then becomes bigger—except bad things. They start big, and then get smaller.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“No one person can do everything . . . but we can all do something.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“The thing I got to thinking about,' he said, 'is--what are the conditions that lead to larger portions of society being generous, humble, and selfless? While we have the conditions for economic opportunity here--and that is a blessing--do we have the conditions to learn how to self-regulate our own passions for the good of the whole?”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“The police were in no mood for a lesson on constitutional law from a Sudanese refugee.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“My team is the Alabama Crimson Tide. Growing up a Tide fan in the 1970s gave me an unrealistic sense of what it means to be a fan, for the simple reason that in the 1970s Alabama won, and being a sports fan is largely about learning to cope with losing. In most sports there is just one champion per year - every four years if you're into a sport like World Cup soccer - so for the overwhelming majority of fans, losing at least once a season is a near certainty. In my childhood, this small kink in the works of the fan's life went more or less unexposed.”
― Warren St. John, Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer: A Road Trip into the Heart of Fan Mania

“intriguing”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“…a group of refugee boys who had survived the unimaginable, strangers now in an unfamiliar land, playing the game with passion, focus, and grace that seemed, for a brief moment anyway, to nullify the effects of whatever misfortune they had experienced in the past.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“I have a dark-skinned pigment and I lease new cars,” Chime said. “You can’t have dark skin and a new car in Clarkston without harassment.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“Poultry processing plants had become the front lines in the nation’s increasingly heated debate over immigration policy. They offered low-paying, dangerous work in revolting conditions and at an unrelenting pace, work Americans seemed less willing to do than immigrants, at least for the wages offered.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“Unlike basketball, baseball, or football, games that reset after each play, soccer unfolds fluidly and continuously. To understand how a goal was scored, you have to work back through the action - the sequences of passes and decisions, the movement of the players away from the action who reappear unexpectedly in empty space to create or waste opportunities - all the way back to the first touch. If that goal was scored by a young refugee from Liberia, off an assist from a boy from southern Sudan, who was set up by a player from Burundi or a Kurd from Iraq - on a field in Georgia, U.S.A., no less - understanding its origins would mean following the thread of causation back in time to events that long preceded the first whistle.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town

“Luma had always told them they had to shake off bad calls. In all her years of coaching, she liked to say, she’d never seen a referee change his mind about a call because of the arguments of players or coaches. Bad calls were part of the game; you had to play on.”
― Warren St. John, Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town