Dave Bidini’s no clairvoyant. But at 22, when he declared that “legal-age life at the variety store… are the things that make me roar,” as he did on the Rheostatics’ 1992 album, Whale Music, maybe he was onto something. Sure, he’s since traded in his guitar for a literary career, but he’s still driven by life’s simple pleasures: rock ’n’ roll and sports. If you thought these were merely post-adolescent diversions, think again.
“It’s the vessel which I use to examine the human condition,” he says. “Music and sports are two things that I’ve loved since I was 11, and they’re two worlds that still fascinate me. In post-secondary, they want you to harden and get serious. That kind of approach to literature can still be tight and stuffy — it likes to think a lot of itself. It’s just as exciting to follow new mythologies, and in Canada, you can do that in both arts and sports.”
For his part, Bidini understands that sport, like film or music, can be a powerful storytelling tool; if the arts are a culture’s way of communicating its archetypal stories, then sports are the arts for those who don’t give a shit about, well, the arts. And he’s adept at finding those quirky narratives in athletics, whether he’s searching for hockey in the United Arab Emirates or baseball in the Italian countryside (as he did with Tropic of Hockey and Baseballissimo, respectively). That exploration continues with his latest book, Home and Away, which finds Bidini in Melbourne, Australia, rubbing shoulders with some of street soccer’s international elites at the Homeless World Cup of Soccer.
But like plenty of his travelogues, the book’s genesis originated close to home — in fact, Home and Away’s premise stems from the John Innes Community Centre, east of Toronto’s downtown core. There, he discovered not only a thriving street soccer community — its homeless soccer program holds practices three times weekly — but the foundations for Canada’s four-person entry to the World Cup.
“When I found out where the centre was, I thought, ‘Wow, I’m an idiot. I should have totally done this before.’ It was two blocks from where I used to live in Toronto,” he says. “I’d lived there for 10 years, and I never knew that this program existed. It wasn’t until I passed through its doors for the first time that I realized that this is an opportunity to create some good art, to tell some incredible stories.”
“It’s what Laurence Stern said, ‘I had to travel halfway around the world before I realized that what I was seeing, I could see at home.’ Going around the world is one thing, but it’s almost more impactful to find this incredible world that exists next door to you.”
Beyond the tournament, though, Bidini says John Innes’s soccer program is a testament to the restorative powers of sport — in fact, he says the centre boasts a 70 per cent success rate in getting its players off the streets. And while he was initially suspicious of such a statistic, he says that he’s witnessed the program’s effectiveness.
“It’s hard to see the homeless as being anything like you and I, but they’re exactly like you and I,” he says. “I play (sports) with people who live for their Saturday nights. A lot of people don’t have social lives, but they play on teams. A couple of degrees removed, you can see how (the program could) have that kind of an impact.”
Still, Home and Away never veers into a political statement. Like plenty of his work, which has, in the past, employed Howard Zinn-styled interview transcriptions, he lets his characters do the talking. And, he’s quick to note, some of the most intriguing characters — in sports or otherwise — are found off the beaten path.
“The most interesting people are the people who sit at the end of the bench in the C-leagues and they’re often found on the outer curve,” he says. “And Jesus, not only is homeless soccer disenfranchised, but the people are disenfranchised. We know about the Phil Kessels and the great stars, but we don’t know about the people in the lower divisions.”
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