‘Survivor’ using soccer to teach others how to survive
From fortwayne.com
by Ben Smith
I pick up the press release. I read the first line. I see my career flash before my eyes.
Ethan Zohn is best known as the nice guy with the curly hair who won “Survivor Africa” . . .
“A ‘Survivor’ guy?” I say.
I read the first line again.
“I’M WRITING ABOUT A ‘SURVIVOR’ GUY!?” I scream.
I close my eyes. Visions of Celebrity Badminton dance in my head, Tonya Harding and Danny Bonaduce lashing shuttlecocks back and forth as I hammer out the game story.
I’m writing about a “Survivor” guy.
But pull up a chair. Lean closer. This is not quite what it seems.
This is about, yes, a nice guy with curly hair who won “Survivor Africa,” but mostly it’s about what happens when the nice guy meets his social conscience, and who might survive because of it. It is not made-for-TV, although it has a particular serendipity that makes it seem so. It is, on the other hand, reality in a way TV could never hope to duplicate.
It begins with a kid and his two older brothers and the path they led him down, which in this case led to a soccer pitch. Ethan Zohn’s brothers played soccer, so he played soccer. Played it as a kid, played it in college at Vassar, played it professionally after college from Hawaii to Cape Cod to Zimbabwe.
He was back in the States, playing for the Cape Cod Crusaders and serving as an assistant coach at Fairleigh Dickinson University, when “Survivor” caught his eye.
“I applied as a joke,” he says now. “I mean, 65,000 people apply, you never think it’s gonna be you, right?”
But then it was, of course.
And then he was headed to Kenya for “Survivor Africa.”
And then, one day, about halfway through the filming, this became more than just a survivor’s tale.
“I was hanging out in the parking lot of hospital in Wamba, Kenya, playing Hacky Sack with all these Kenyan children,” recalls Zohn, who’s in town this weekend for the IPFW Soccer Showcase. “I found out after I left that all those kids were HIV positive. And then I started getting a different perspective.”
Before it was just a lark, the “Survivor” business, just a what-the-hell shot at a million bucks. Afterward .well, afterward it became something else again, of course.
“It really touched me, being with those kids,” Zohn recalls.
And so when it got down to the end there on “Survivor,” and the host started asking the few who were left what the first selfless thing any of them would do if they won the million bucks, Zohn replied immediately he would start some sort of charity linking soccer to AIDS relief.
Grassroots Soccer is the result.
It’s a non-profit based in Zimbabwe and including Zambia and Ethiopia that utilizes pro soccer players to educate African schoolchildren about AIDS and HIV. Ethan Zohn’s “Survivor” winnings were its seed money.
“It basically combines everything important to me: soccer and saving lives,” Zohn says. “These pro soccer players, they’re heroes over there, the gods of the communities. So when we send these guys in, (the kids) listen, and they learn, and they don’t even realize they’re learning.”
And once they do maybe it makes a difference. Seventy percent of the world’s AIDS cases are in Africa; by 2010, the Centers for Disease Control predicts that 35 percent of the children in Zimbabwe alone will be AIDS orphans. The depopulation of an entire continent is at stake here.
Now comes one nice guy with curly hair, one lucky collision of fates, one reality show that really is about life and death.
“It is an amazing coincidence,”concedes Zohn, who does not mention, but could, how differently this all might have played out if his older brothers hadn’t played soccer, and if he hadn’t applied for “Survivor” on a lark, and if he hadn’t somehow won. “It was the perfect set of circumstances.”
And now I pick up that press release, one more time.
I read the first line. I read it again. I think about what Ethan Zohn said.
Yes, I’m writing about a “Survivor” guy.
Thank God. Thank God for it.
Ben Smith has been covering sports in Fort Wayne for 16 years. His columns appear four times a week.