And Now for Some Good News in Soccer

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/sports/soccer/27iht-soccer27.html

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LONDON — Life feels pretty good to Eric Abidal and to Kei Kamara right now.

Abidal is a man whose career could have been behind him. He’s 33, has played in a World Cup final with France and won medals galore with Barcelona. But the best news anyone at Barça has had in the past week was when doctors told Abidal that he could work as hard as he wanted to in challenging for his place in the defense, a year after undergoing liver transplant surgery.

Speak to the greats around the Camp Nou, and they say that nothing lifts them more than the spirit Abidal is showing in his comeback.

Kamara, too, has a life story — if not yet a comparable soccer career — worth telling.

On Saturday, Kamara came off the bench to outjump one of the best headers of a ball in the English Premier League. He scored, then set up another goal, and Norwich City won its first league game since December.

Kamara surprised even himself. He ran like a boy toward the crowd. He danced a loose-limbed jig with teammate Sébastien Bassong. And when someone told him that thousands of his countrymen were watching in theaters throughout Sierra Leone, Kamara’s response came out in a deep American drawl.

He said his next task was to work his butt off to try to get into the starting 11. He joked that he had given away his “secret” — the athleticism of his leap. But if he gets a chance for Norwich against Manchester United this weekend, he will give it everything he has got.

Kamara sounds like an American college student — which he was, having played at California State University, Dominguez Hills. He is now 28, and who knows, his goal last Saturday might turn out to be the highlight of his career.

It makes him the first Sierra Leonean to score in the Premier league, and the 88th different nationality to hit the mark in the 21 years that the English elite tournament has been running.

Anyone who has gone to Sierra Leone, as I did just after the civil war, would appreciate how soccer — big league soccer in Europe — was a dream beyond a dream to the children there. In a transit camp for misplaced or orphaned minors, the kids played soccer games organized by the International Red Cross. And somehow, even in their “lost” existence, they had replica shirts bearing the names of Dennis Bergkamp of Arsenal and Ruud Gullit of Milan.

What made these kids play? The freedom of expressing themselves, the dream of earning riches beyond their imaginations, or just simply to enjoy kicking a ball on a wasteland without being recruited by the militias.

Kamara was never, quite, one of them. His parents fled the strife when Kei was a boy, first entering Gambia and then winning a place in a U.S. refugee program.

They settled in Hawthorne, California, near Los Angeles, when he was 16. Kei, by then a strapping youth, was named an all-American after his sophomore season at Cal State, Dominguez Hills.

He was big (eventually rising to 6-foot-3, or 1.91 meters), strong, enthusiastic, and a sponge for anything the coaches would tell him. He matured through the Orange County Blue Star of the U.S.L. Premier Development League.

The man that emerged — sometimes a winger, other times using his physique through the center — belongs now to Sporting Kansas City of Major League Soccer. He has scored 31 goals for that team in 98 games, and guided in a header against Manchester United when the English giant toured the United States three years ago.

“I guess,” he said Saturday, “if I get some minutes against United at Old Trafford next Saturday, I might be a marked man now. But, hey, that actually makes it a whole lot more fun for me.”

He talks of work ethic, of listening to what the coach and the experienced pros tell him, of adapting and of feeling blessed to be in this league getting this chance. The deep drawl is redolent of the United States, but the child of Africa is reawakened whenever he answers the call — which he has 14 times — to play for his country of birth.

Right now, Norwich is offering him an extended trial in the M.L.S. off-season. No one yet knows if the goal he scored Saturday against Everton is a one-time event or a prelude to a contract that will transform his life.

It is enough to say that the physical potential is there. Any player who can rise above Marouane Fellaini, one of the outstanding men in the air in the Premiership, has to be regarded as having potential.

“It couldn’t be written better than it’s going right now,” Kamara said. “It’s a blessing to be here.”

Eric Abidal, too, knows about blessings. When his liver disease was first diagnosed two years ago, it shook every player at Barcelona and beyond. When Abidal fought off the illness, and returned to the first team, it served as an example of fortitude.

Then came the relapse, the search for a donor who turned out to be his cousin Gerard, and surgery in March 2012.

Barcelona, whose current coach, Tito Vilanova, is in New York having treatment for throat cancer, stood by Abidal again. And again, the defender appears to be coming back.

“Eric is mentally the strongest person I have met,” said Xavi, the team’s midfield maestro. “We returned from Milan after defeat, and Eric was the good news. He continues to train, to hope, to be motivated after his disease. It’s the greatest example I have seen in my career.”

Abidal and Kamara are examples in more than soccer. They show what can be done in life.