The Sports
On March 24, we take the bus downtown St. George’s to watch Grenada National Football Team—nicknamed The Spice Boys—play the United States Mens National Soccer Team. We weave through crowds from the bus terminal past the fish market and along the shoreline to the stadium.
Sports are a big deal in Grenada, especially football and track and field. At Sam’s school, they began preparations for their annual sports day about one month in advance. Every day, they practiced marching for the March Past competition, a tradition of British origin where the school houses march in formation to be judged against each other. As proof of my limited world experience, I had never heard of such a thing.
In addition to the March Past, the annual sports competition featured track and field events. They held some of the events in the weeks leading up to the actual sports day. Things like shotput, discus, javelin (for which Sam showed some natural talent), and jumping.
For sports day, parents were invited. Andrew and I watched several classic track races around the pre-measured track on the grassy field, then the less serious, but no less competitive races. Sam impressively came second in the sack race and ran hard in the three-legged race. My new favorite—the market race—made each athlete bend to pick up items like coconuts and green bananas laid out on the track, then tuck them in their bags. Points were tallied at the end of the day, and The Lions of Amber won the house competition.
During the last week of term—after exams—there was a nationwide Intercollegiate Sports competition. For three days, athletes selected from each school competed in track and field events held in the Kirani James National Athletics Stadium, named in honor of the first Olympic gold medalist of Grenada. The events were televised and shown live on screens in bars and grocery stores, where people would leave off shopping or checking out groceries to watch a 100-meter sprint or 400-meter hurdles.
On the night of the Grenada-U.S football match, it seems like half the island has shown up. Good smells float from the grill-smoke of street vendors and mingle with the cigarettes and cologne.
As we circle the stadium to the entrance, we walk past flying sparks as workers are still welding together a section of the gate. In general, though, the stadium security is tighter than a month earlier, when we watched a stray dog wander onto the field during an international friendly match between Grenada and Barbados.
Seats fill fast with fans from both countries. Many U.S. fans are St. George’s University students, but there appear to be plenty of tourists among them. Some hold a U.S. flag in one hand and Grenada’s flag in the other. One woman wears a rasta hat with fake locs dangling from it to mingle with her blonde hair.
Grenada’s fans are decked out in red, yellow, and green with Grenada’s flags waving everywhere and more being doled out by the megaphone-bearing DJ in charge of hyping up the crowd. Many hands not holding a flag are holding a beer.
We each have a guess at the final score, with all of us predicting a U.S. win. Andrew and I are wearing our Grenada shirts, though, and cheering for the underdog.
Either way, we are excited to see the U.S. men’s team play its first competitive game since the 2022 World Cup, which we watched late this fall from our home in New York. To our delight, we recognized starting players from the World Cup, such as Christian Pulisic, who sustained a groin injury while scoring the U.S.’ only goal against Iran, and Weston McKennie, who had a strip of his hair dyed red, white, and blue, and memorably toweled off his hands on a photographer before a throw-in during the game against England.
Four minutes into the game, Ricardo Pepi scores for the U.S. At thirty-two minutes, Myles Hippolyte scores a goal for Grenada. The home crowd is ecstatic. The U.S. continues to dominate, though, and the score is 4:1 by half-time.
Despite being a tough game for Grenada, it’s an exciting game to watch with lots of goals scored and several near misses. At the final time, Sam’s guess is correct. The U.S. wins 7:1.
Our kids are among the youngest fans, and it’s almost ten pm. We squeeze past football fans towards an exit. Traffic and pedestrians already clog the streets. Many buses have apparently been reserved as taxis. The bus terminal is empty in contrast to the chaos on the road along it.
We figure that walking might be our most reliable transportation home, so we head that direction. As we walk, we keep asking the drivers of bus-type vehicles, “Number 1? Grand Anse?” We are nearing the tunnel, when the driver of an unlabeled, mostly empty bus replies, “Yes. Grand Anse!”
After we jump into the back seats, the man drives a very unconventional route of loops through the chaos, picking up mostly drunk football fans. To my relief, he picks up a Grenadian woman and her ten-year-old kid, reassuring me that it is a legitimate bus and will take us home. And, despite it being one of the most hard-driven, rickety vehicles we’ve had the pleasure of riding, it makes it out of town and stops right at our street. We clamber out, tired and grinning from all the excitement.
