by Amy Bass
When someone scores at Sheikh Hassan Stadium, players celebrate with wild abandon, not a word of English to be heard. There are no red cards for taunting.
Teams are large, sometimes eighty or more players, all male, aged twelve to thirty-five. They come and go, different groups warming up on the “sidelines” while others play.
“Where’s my goal, which side am I on?” a kid yells, quickly lacing up his cleats. He throws his sandals in a pile and races to join a team, not sure what his position is, knowing it really doesn’t matter. With so many on each side, ball possession is key. Once a player passes, it could be ten or more minutes before his feet touch a ball again.
“No passing—you hold onto the ball,” says Zak, laughing. “I play striker down there! And I’m a defender! I score goals there!”
Nothing is out of bounds. There are times when players jump on the small concert stage at the end of the field and play off the front boards. Everything’s a showcase, players outdoing one another’s moves in good-natured fashion, dazzling with footwork, speed, and intensity.
Despite qualms about getting hurt, many Blue Devils are in the mix, their blue long-sleeved shirts standing out in the fray. Here they learn how to dribble in tight quarters, leave fear behind, take a beating, and keep running. It is obvious where the team gets its remarkable ball-handling skills, its fierce attacking style, and the ability to handle heavy defensive traffic. No one here waits for the ball—it’s all about attack and counter attack, and it can get rough. Players use their bodies to ward off whatever defender might be in their path. It’s a master class in how to perfect a first touch, the moment a player first makes contact with the ball. From every angle, and at every pace, players take control, deadening the ball’s speed and its spin before it hits the ground, flicking it quickly to a teammate running through to score, or simply taking the shot. Just as one side seems to dominate, the ball flying down the field, a counter attack turns it around, clearing the ball just before it gets inside the goal markers, sending it in the other direction.
It is here that they also hone their communication skills. Yelling at each other in Somali or Arabic, the Blue Devils unconsciously develop strategies that will keep their opposition in the dark when they hit the pitch at the high school. It goes beyond telling one another who to mark or where to pass. It strengthens their connection to one another on the field, developing a cohesive team spirit.
Some nights, Coach McGraw discreetly parks his car behind the pizza house and sits on an old railroad tie so he can watch the action. He knows they bring a lot of Somali Stadium with them when they don their Blue Devils uniforms. His players often stay on the field long after the sun goes down and he can barely see them.
In the winter, the game continues. Sometimes the kids shovel the basketball courts at Kennedy Park to play, but it’s easier to throw on parkas and head to the Colisée, usually the first place plowed.
“It’s really cold,” Abdi H. admits, “but you run around, you’re set, you’re good.”
Built in 1958, the Androscoggin Colisée sits high on the hill next to Drouin Field, home to the L/A Fighting Spirit, a hockey team that plays in the North American 3 league. In the 1970s, it was home ice for the Maine Nordiques, and more recently for the Lewiston MAINEiacs. The Boston Celtics played exhibition games on the floor, and Lewiston High School’s hockey teams have won many state championships on its ice.
But the Colisée’s biggest claim to fame—and Lewiston’s, too—came in May 25, 1965, when Muhammad Ali squared off against Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship title. The bout, which lasted just a few minutes before Ali’s famous “phantom punch” took Liston down, is one of the most famous sports moments in history.
Lewiston was an unlikely host for such a marquee sports event. The bout was supposed to happen in the fall of 1964 at the Boston Garden, a rematch for Liston to recapture his title from Ali, who had just changed his name from Cassius Clay. But Ali’s emergency hernia operation just days before the fight put things on hold. The delay sent promoters into a frantic search to find a new site; Lewiston fit the bill.
“Clay-Liston Championship Match Set for Lewiston’s CMYC May 25,” the Lewiston Evening Journal declared on May 7, 1965. With just a few weeks to prepare and a seating capacity of only 5,000, the Colisée—then called the Central Maine Youth Center—would be one of the smallest arenas ever to host a heavyweight bout.
Two days before the fight, Ali, increasingly controversial because of his commitment to the Nation of Islam, rolled into town, staying at the Holiday Inn in Auburn. He greeted hundreds of fans before heading out for one of his legendary training runs, which Maine state police cut short because pedestrians aren’t allowed on the turnpike. Locals photographed him hanging out on his hotel balcony, relaxed and ready.
The night of the fight, fans who couldn’t afford a ticket gathered high on the hill behind the arena in Marcotte Park. Looking out across the city, the basilica in the background, people peered through binoculars hoping to catch luminaries entering the building as packs of international media assembled to cover the action.
The crowd, which was about half capacity, cheered for Liston and booed Ali, who was introduced by his new name for the first time. Actor Robert Goulet, chosen to sing the national anthem despite being Canadian as a nod to Lewiston’s Franco-American community, famously mangled a few of the words.
Much has been written about Ali’s “phantom punch” that night. Some claim he connected a short right to Liston’s face, sending the already off-balance former champion to the mat. Others insist it never happened, crying the fight was fixed. Instead of going to his neutral corner, Ali stood over Liston, daring him to get up, a ferocious look on his face. Standing ringside, camera in hand, Neil Leifer captured the moment, the most famous of Ali’s career.
Liston later said he never heard the count and that relatively inexperienced “celebrity” referee Jersey Joe Walcott should have restrained Ali. When Liston finally got up, there was confusion as to whether or not it was a knockout. As the two boxers squared off, Walcott reached in and raised Ali’s arm in victory, pushing Liston back to his corner. While Sports Illustrated’s Tex Maule called the fight “perfectly valid,” Jimmy Breslin wrote that Walcott’s ineptitude was “the worst mess in the history of all sports.”
The Ali-Liston fight put a national spotlight on Lewiston. But it wouldn’t be the last.
In July 2006, the local paper ran a headline that many national publications would soon echo: “Pig’s Head Thrown into Lewiston Mosque.” At ten p.m. on a Monday night, Brent Matthews, thirty-three, rolled a frozen pig’s head into the Lisbon Street mosque, where some forty men knelt in prayer.
“Desecrating a place of worship,” read the charge. A misdemeanor. But for Lewiston’s Somali community, it meant much more than that. While Imam Nuh Iman acknowledged that the crime was the work of one man, the incident added to the fraught quality of life in Lewiston. Insults to Somalis ranged from racial slurs in school hallways to long stares at women wearing hijabs—“Dress American!”—to vicious letters to the editor of the Sun Journal that regurgitated myths about the impact of “parasitic” Somali refugees.
City officials held a press conference about the mosque incident, hoping transparency and quick consequences would make the story go away. They worried when they saw that a news team from Al Jazeera, in town for a story on Somali refugees, attended the press conference. But while the then-burgeoning network included the episode in the piece that aired, it wasn’t the focus.
Although the pig’s head story soon disappeared from headlines, Lewiston remained on edge as a small rash of anti-Muslim, anti-Somali incidents occurred. A Somali-owned restaurant bore the wrath of vandals, while police arrested a woman for spitting on a Somali man while shouting racial slurs. What, many wondered, would be the next shoe to drop?
On April 11, 2007, less than a year after Matthews rolled the pig’s head into the mosque, a middle school student put
a bag of ham on a table where some Somali students were eating lunch. Allegedly, he was acting on a dare from friends who thought it was funny. The Somali kids were not amused. The student was suspended for ten days, and Superintendent of Schools Leon Levesque dubbed it a “hate incident.”
The event rekindled memories of the pig’s head affair, as many considered it a copycat crime. Ten days later, around eight o’clock in the morning on Saturday, April 21, a distraught Brent Matthews called 911. Within minutes of police arriving at the scene, he committed suicide with a semiautomatic handgun.
Bates College graduate Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, fictionalized the pig’s head incident in The Burgess Boys. The story takes place in fictional Shirley Falls, a depressed Maine mill town fraught with racial and religious tensions since the arrival of thousands of Somali refugees. Through brothers Bob and Jim Burgess and their sister Susan—whose nineteen-year-old son committed the crime—Strout’s nuanced perspective on the complicated relationships in Shirley Falls shows the hardships and trauma felt by all of the characters and questions who the strangers in the community really are.
Without question, the détente in Lewiston was fragile between those who considered themselves to be “real” Lewiston and the newcomers. But the city was hardly in a position to turn away people interested in living there. Not only did its economic instability help solidify longstanding patterns of white intergenerational poverty, it had a detrimental impact on population numbers, sending capable young people looking for opportunity elsewhere.
It wasn’t just Lewiston’s problem. Maine’s entire population was growing older by the second, outpacing even Florida’s. It wasn’t that Maine had too many old people; it just didn’t have enough young people, making it difficult to attract new business—especially the kind Lewiston needed. For the state to sustain its workforce, according to one prediction, it needed to attract three thousand new residents a year for the next two decades.
While City Hall planned economic recovery in many ways, such as the commercial repurposing of the mill buildings, Somali refugees were a much-needed shot of energy. The school population, for example, grew more than 10 percent in ten years. The Somalis arrived at a time when Maine, one of the nation’s whitest, most homogenous states, reigned supreme, according to assistant city administrator Phil Nadeau, “in all the metrics you don’t want to lead in. Our population doesn’t go up without the presence of foreign-born.” For Lewiston’s economic plan to work, potential employers needed to believe that there were enough people living, working, and buying there.
But the arrival of the Somalis, and the speed and numbers with which they came, shocked the economically fraught blue-collar city, which began to experience Islamophobic behavior. Taxi drivers refused to pick up Somali passengers, Somali women complained of white men exposing themselves on the street when they passed, and calls of “Go back!” from trucks adorned with Confederate flag decals became commonplace. “WE FEED SOMALIANS AND LET U.S. TROOPS DIE,” read one lawn sign. Regardless of the actual data, rumors continued to swirl that freeloading Somalis were draining state and city resources. Lewiston was going bankrupt, fumed many, because City Hall was buying the newcomers cars and giving them large sums of cash. How else, they reasoned, could “those people” afford anything? Our grandfathers came to Lewiston to work, they seethed. These people are getting handouts.
While Somalis gave many reasons for choosing Lewiston, from available housing to schools to safety, headlines focused on the economic pull of Maine’s General Assistance Program, as if it was the only viable reason. Working with state and city budgets, the program provides support for basic needs—medicine, fuel, rent, and food. While many states had weakened or eliminated General Assistance, Maine continued to provide support to individuals based solely on financial need, the majority of whom were not refugees.
“I’m just so tired of the myths,” Sue Charron, Lewiston’s director of social services, told the local newspaper amid the reports of free cars, air conditioners, groceries, and apartments. “Eighty-five percent of the population is still the good old American folks who come in here.”
But in the early days, myths grew quickly. People claimed that schools were overcrowded because of the number of rooms devoted to Muslim prayer sessions, and the city was riddled with Somali gang warfare. Nadeau rolls his eyes when asked about this, pulling out data sheets that show otherwise. Kids—all kids—will be kids, he notes of the gang claims, regardless of where they are from. Some had made some bad choices along the way but, he emphasizes, nothing that necessitated crisis management.
“It isn’t perfect,” he acknowledges, always ready to squelch the next inflammatory headline. “But there’s nothing to report on.”
The rumors of African gangs in the streets and chickens in the kitchens went national when Patrick Reardon of the Chicago Tribune read about Lewiston. Reardon was in Maine to write about Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which is about an economically depressed town in Maine. Reardon’s subsequent article, “A Yankee Mill Town Globalizes,” published in June 2002, engendered more stories on Lewiston, including one spuriously warning of an additional 20,000 refugees on their way.
On October 1, 2002, the gossip hit an apex when then-mayor Laurier Raymond issued his now-notorious open letter to the Somali community. “Maxed-out,” read the headline in the Sun Journal. “Mayor appeals to Somalis to stem migration.” In the letter, Raymond implored the Somali community—which had grown to more than a thousand in the last eighteen months—to tell their friends to stop coming. He prided the city for having “cheerfully accepted” and “accommodated” the new arrivals, but hoped the slight decline in their numbers in recent weeks would continue, as it was a “welcome relief, given increasing demands on city and school services.”
“The Somali community must exercise some discipline and reduce the stress on our limited finances and our generosity,” he wrote. “We have been overwhelmed and have responded valiantly. Now we need breathing room. Our city is maxed-out financially, physically and emotionally. I look forward to your cooperation.”
Although not Raymond’s intention, the three-page letter opened floodgates of racial tension, dividing the city into distinct camps. Xenophobic residents heralded Raymond’s letter as a breath of fresh air, allowing them to use economic arguments to mask racist sentiments. He was right, these people said. The refugees had a detrimental impact on the city and had to be stopped.
Others called the letter blatantly racist, hurting those who’d already been told to “go back to Africa” when they walked down the street. Its language played upon age-old American racial stereotypes, evoking notions of an uncontrollable black element. The mayor’s use of “we” and “our” indicated that there were two Lewistons, and that Somalis were not authentic residents.
City officials made clear that the letter, while written on city letterhead, was the mayor’s opinion, not policy. Council members expressed concern he hadn’t consulted them before issuing the missive. City Administrator Jim Bennett assured people that Lewiston could not and would not close its doors, but would continue to support anyone who chose to live there.
After taking a few days to determine a proper response, Somali elders delivered a letter, signed by twenty-five Somali men and women, to the mayor’s office. They also held a press conference on Lisbon Street. City officials saw it as an opportunity to learn who the leaders in the Somali community were. If someone got time with the microphone, they mattered.
The elders characterized Raymond’s letter as “inflammatory and disturbing,” describing their “dismay, astonishment and anger” and admonishing him for failing to meet with them as they had requested. They were proud of the Lewiston they helped create, a “multi-ethnic, multi-racial city” with fewer vacant apartments and storefronts. Lewiston’s downtown had come alive as they “put money in the pockets of landlords,” raising property values. They emphasized their statu
s as citizens and legal residents, with many of their children “Americans by birth.” The letter, they concluded, was the work of an “ill-informed leader who is bent towards bigotry.”
“Somalis Rip Mayor,” shouted the Sun Journal over a photograph of Abdirizak Mahboub addressing the crowd. Networks like NBC and CNN covered the story, while reporters from the Los Angeles Times to the New York Times wrote about Raymond’s letter. But national media wasn’t the only entity paying attention.
“Who is that?” Phil Nadeau asked when Maggie Chisholm, director of recreation and parks, called to tell him that World Church of the Creator had contacted her. They had applied to rent space for a rally at the Multipurpose Center on Birch Street. Now known as Creativity, the group, which espouses a white supremacist worldview, announced that it planned to “unite the White people of Lewiston against the Somali invasion.” These guys, Nadeau realized, weren’t local. And they were looking for a fight.
News of the proposed rally propelled Lewiston into action. A coalition entitled “Many and One” brought together people from area colleges, churches, city administration, and neighborhoods to plan a counter-rally. National interest in the story swelled when Matthew Hale, leader of World Church, landed in jail for soliciting an undercover federal informant to kill a judge. City Hall moved the group to the Maine Army National Guard Armory near the turnpike. “In and out,” Nadeau said of the plan. “Not downtown.”
“Let there be peace,” the Sun Journal begged the morning of January 11, 2003. “With Nazis coming, some pray for peace while police brace for trouble,” read the subhead.