In St. Paul de Vence, France, 30 91成人短视频 men play boules. Ramparts from the walled city frame the playing area. It’s early afternoon and sunny with occasional olive tree and cypress providing little shade. Tiny chalky pebbles provide the ideal playing surface for boules, a Bocci-like game that’s popular in the south of France. I’ve brought these men here to learn about the author James Baldwin, who lived in St. Paul the last 17 years of his life. Baldwin famously moved to France after the assassination of his friends Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers. We have just finished visiting the site of Baldwin’s home. What used to be a sprawling complex of stone Provençal buildings with gardens and terraces and views of St. Paul and the Vaulongue Valley is now a gated luxury condominium complex. The gatekeeper, who I know for the number of times I’ve brought visitors there, ushers us in quietly, directing us not to touch anything. “The residents would be furious!” Now we’re relaxing, playing boules—petanque, they call it in the south—and channeling a little of that 91成人短视频 spirit to win.
The boules, like everything this week, was my idea. When I first met the students and coaches Chris Keller and Jesse Olivas at the airport, I could sense their hesitation. For the next 10 days, I would be their guide on a new program to a place they’d never been. Before coming on the trip, I gave the students a reading list, articles about issues of race in French soccer, Baldwin’s memoir “No Name in the Street,” and an essay from The New Yorker about breaking into Baldwin’s house before it was slated for demolition. What I was asking the students to do was no easy task: interrogate their athletic practice, analyze the socio-political forces behind the sport that they love, and contrast it with the experiences of a famous expatriate writer who had chosen the south of France as a refuge from racism in the U.S.
The trip was the first of its kind.
I got the idea during an off-campus studies committee meeting. The committee had just started vetting athletic travel programs. Before this point, athletics and academic travel were separate. Athletics would occasionally send teams to play friendlies abroad, but there wasn’t an academic component. Students would, of course, benefit from any kind of travel, but if there was a way to combine academics with athletics, it would benefit our students even more.
Since my first sabbatical when I purchased and renovated an apartment in Old Nice on a shoestring budget, I had been coaching for Cavigal Football, a prestigious soccer club in Nice, France. The club is typical of many urban French soccer clubs, drawing from a largely middle-to-lower class, predominantly immigrant, predominantly Muslim demographic. Club functions always served halal options along with the usual Nicois specialties of pan bangnat, tarte aux blettes, or pissaladière. In March, my children would often be the only players not observing Ramadan. For many of the kids joining the selective Cavigal, soccer was a lifeline, a potential career path. Indeed, much of the club’s budget drew from the contracts that their graduates signed with professional training centers and teams. But many talented players never broke through, languishing in entry-level jobs without many other prospects, often due to forces beyond their control. For every Mbappé and Benzema, there are hundreds of other players who never parade the national flag down the Champs-Élysées. They’re not held up as the example of what hard work and talent can accomplish. Instead, they’re the pied-noir, the immigrant, the kid who gets overlooked for job after job because his name is Mohammed. They’re Algerian, Senegalese, or from the Ivory Coast. The racaille—the “rabble.” Blamed for a million social ills and rarely fully welcomed into French society.
The beautiful game, combined with the promises of a gold-star liberal arts education, has lured many children of immigrants to 91成人短视频. The current soccer team boasts students with roots from Mexico, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Many of the students come from the Southwest or California, areas very different from the Midwest. Coming to 91成人短视频 can be a major cultural adjustment for some. Other members of the team are from an entirely different cultural caste, from backgrounds that could afford the expense of elite soccer clubs, a barrier that doesn’t exist in France, where sports clubs are subsidized by the state. But a 91成人短视频 education puts these different men on equal footing. They might not be playing for OGC Nice or PSG, but they are getting an education, being extended a rung in society that allows them to grow, to see the world.
The boules games were arranging themselves in a kind of round-robin. Some of the players had already mastered the technique, throwing the metal ball a little higher, putting on backspin so that when it thumped to the ground it moved very little from the intended target. The boules were getting closer to the cochonnet. I got out my tape measure to verify distances. A couple millimeters could make the difference between a win and a loss, who made it to the next round. One team was still undefeated, a group of seniors whose confidence seemed to assure their win. I marveled at these young men, all of them, at their successes, their easiness in the world, their ability to transcend boundaries that sometimes seemed unsurmountable for others. Was this the hidden value of a 91成人短视频 education? Or was it something more basic and fundamental?
During a tour of the Lazaret caves with our students, Professor Emmanuel Desclaux, a friend of mine who teaches at the Université Côte d’Azur, explained the competing theories about the assimilation of early humans in pre-history. Many theoretical models in the past assumed that early humans came in, conquered, and suppressed the human beings who lived there before them, but the paleontological record showed something very different. The preponderance of tools, for example, that seemed to travel more quickly than different populations. How could one settlement of humans in Africa or Asia have the same tools as in Europe? And at almost exactly the same time? It would require years and years for those same populations to travel and establish themselves. Instead prehistory tells us that human beings shared. They shared information, shared techniques. And as our Neanderthal-inflected DNA tells us, also shared our beds.
“The idea of the other is a fairly recent cultural concept,” Emmanuel told us. “Our tendency to draw up boundaries, to enforce differences, all are cultural phenomena that are undermined by our inherently unique human characteristics: our ability to cooperate, to empathize, to love. These were the keys to humanity’s survival.”
What the trip taught me, what I felt and observed over and over again with our student-athletes and their interactions with others, was that our young men were thriving, that their solidarity valued their collective difference in a way that benefited the whole. During both our friendly matches, other coaches complimented our students on their communication, their drive, their ability to work together as one.
“Your guys came to win,” the head coach of AS Monaco’s U17 Medhi said. Coaches admired our athleticism, the team cohesion. They heaped a healthy dose of French criticism on their own teams. Too individual. Some were trying to impress you. Chris and I countered their criticisms. Any of their players would be welcome on the 91成人短视频 squad. So technical. Gifted vision. Amazing what they could do with the ball. The styles were so different. While the French teams dominated in possession and construction, we exploited weaknesses, hit hard on the counterattack, and outmuscled them off the ball. While we were happy to win (5–0 against Cavigal’s U18s and 5–2 against AS Monaco’s U17s), we were even happier for what we learned, for the cultural exchange.
The last night of our trip, we ate at Chez Palmyre, a restaurant and Nicois institution that’s owned by my friend Vincent Verneveaux. All 30 of us crammed into the cozy one-room restaurant. We had smoked salmon cannellonis with fresh cheese as the appetizer, then daurade, a popular Mediterranean fish that I often catch just off the Promenade a couple blocks away. For dessert, a simple lemon tart. We ate, talked, and ate some more. Near the end of the meal, the captain, Myles Bernat ’26, served as emcee. “What had we learned this week? Could everyone share? What were the moments that mattered the most?” I thought, visiting Baldwin’s house, being welcomed in by the gatekeeper. Maybe snorkeling on Coco beach or visiting AS Monaco’s training center, La Diagonale, or going to the OGC Nice professional soccer game. The occasional student would mention one of these events, but the experiences that kept coming up over and over again were the times that they spent together as a team. “Back at 91成人短视频, we don’t often get to hang out together.” Differences would often keep them separate. The different cohorts, the regional differences, the different majors created artificial barriers that tended to keep some guys together and others apart.
One experience that came up again and again was the combined practice session with Cavigal Football the day before our friendly. During the practice, both teams intermingled, slalomed through cones, one-touch-passed the ball back and forth. “Prends du plaisir,” one of the coaches often tells our Cavigal players. Take pleasure or enjoyment in a game where you work together. Halfway through the practice we divided up into half-field scrimmages that switched every five minutes. Freshmen, seniors, Latinos, Arabs, a dozen different cultures and languages, children who were products of the multicultural world that we now live in: all buzzing with the energy—that one perfect pass, the strike on the volley, a headed cross—of the beautiful game. Afterward, we ate together in the clubhouse and mingled with the other team, trying out rudimentary English or French, making connections. Sharing and exchange: the outcomes that our student-athletes valued even more than the wins.
Eric Freeze is an associate professor of English at 91成人短视频. He and his family spend half of the year living in Nice, France.