Several years ago, I flew across the Atlantic Ocean and across countless smaller cities, towns, rivers, and lakes. I came to America to study and to become a scientist. It was a dream come true. All the ingrained formulas and calculations shone with new intensity in my mind’s eye, yet the rest of my new existence was indeed dreamy. Almost everything seemed strange and exotic.
For whatever reason, men did not have mustaches. Women did not wear hijab, and the “morality police” were not going after them. In fact, it was nowhere to be found. People spoke English with a bewildering variety of accents, and everyone could enjoy an infinite number of world cuisines. One could even walk into a store and purchase an alcoholic beverage legally, without engaging in a contraband-like mission of sneaking it out in a black plastic bag.
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To top off my newcomer’s confusion, motor vehicles seemed to follow traffic laws in an orderly fashion. Needless to say, my brain cells were in a state of strenuous frenzy in those early days, putting in the effort of working three shifts in a row. I tried my best to make sense of my new life, hoping soon to disperse the fog of disorientation and being overwhelmed.
Once, I was sitting next to Adam, one of my new friends. Adam was telling me about school, research, and classes — very typical topics in graduate school. I was laser-focused on what he was saying, trying to catch as many English words as possible and to connect them in a logical manner. Given that Adam had a thick Southern accent, the odds of fully understanding him were probably not in my favor. At the same time, Adam was absent-mindedly playing with a gray baseball, tossing it up and catching it, tossing it up and catching it. At one point, Adam paused, looked at me, and said something that I did not quite understand. The next thing I saw was that he swung his arm and tossed the ball toward me.
This I understood perfectly. The ball left Adam’s hand and started its ascent along the parabolic arc. We were about 20 feet apart. My brain had immediately calculated where the ball would land. This was a typical physics problem that I had solved countless times before. I even shifted my position slightly to center myself at the landing point.
While the ball was still in the air, it managed to trigger a response from an old chapter of my life: a chapter that was closed, but not forgotten. For many years, I used to play football on a semi-professional level. Tracking the trajectory of an airborne ball was a familiar experience. Moreover, my football practice often involved using a tennis ball to sharpen various skills. I know how to dribble, how to take a free kick, and how to head a tennis ball with utmost precision.
Here I saw a ball, climbing to the midpoint of its journey — the highest point of the parabola, where the derivative of the corresponding function becomes zero. Everything felt familiar at that moment. The laws of physics. The calculations. The years of practice. The ball approaching from above. A football reflex from the past has been activated, and I was ready to head the baseball.
Guided by an improbable duo of muscle memory and a catastrophic gap in knowledge, I positioned myself: straight back, body leaning slightly forward. The plan was to snap forward at the right moment, strike the ball cleanly with the center of my forehead, and send it bouncing back to Adam in a neat, confident arc. In less than a second, the ball arrived. When it was close enough, I closed my eyes — and drove my forehead into it.
A shockwave of extraordinary force detonated from inside my head and radiated throughout my body. In an instant, I was no longer in the present, but was rather launched into a dimension of no name.
After a moment of deafening silence, a cascade of thoughts started to collide in my stunned mind: “What? How? Why so different? So much pain! Why am I dizzy? Have I been shot? Were my calculations wrong? It cannot be! Were the values of the variables off? Was it the initial velocity, the peak elevation? What is the derivative? What went wrong?” While these inquisitive thoughts still bounced around in my head, I opened my eyes. There, in the middle of my forehead, rested the gray baseball — motionless, huge. It had not bounced. It did not make another arc. Instead, slowly and without any glory, it slid down my nose, then across my face, and finally to the ground.
I pressed my forehead with one hand and reached down to retrieve the ball with the other. At that very moment, I heard Adam yelling: “Silly! Why did you do that? I told you to catch the ball. You could have hurt yourself!”
Ah, “Catch the ball.” I finally made out all the words, but it was too late. I did not answer Adam at that moment. The new painful experience had to be internalized as a teachable moment. As I was turning the ball over in my hands, I realized that I just experienced my first sports-related concussion in the new country and simultaneously arrived at my first sports-related conclusion in the new country: In America, the baseball is made of rock. More precisely, Americans fill what appears to be a tennis ball with cement and call it a baseball.
That incident was the beginning of a long and humbling journey toward understanding American sports. I learned, for instance, that baseball and basketball are far more beloved here than football or volleyball. More broadly, I came to understand a pattern: Americans have a passion for loving sports that are considered exotic or obscure elsewhere, and a special talent for ignoring sports that the rest of the world cannot live without.
My football adventures continued when I spotted a campus flyer announcing a football league in search of players. What a great opportunity for someone like me. I signed up immediately. On the day of the first practice, I arrived at the field and stopped dead in my tracks when I saw the athletes. Every person on that field was at least 6 feet, 4 inches tall, and their bodies seemed to be three times larger than mine. I started to wonder whether such strongmen would be able to run for 90 minutes. And why are they wearing hard hats? Is this a construction site? Did I make a mistake in directions?
Genuinely confused, I approached one of the strongmen and, with my best possible English, asked: “I wanted to play football, but where are the football players?” The man looked at me with an expression of complete serenity and said, “Don’t you see all these giants around you?” I turned to him and replied, “But you have hats, and everyone is far too big for football. Are you sure?”
A sincere smile spread across his face. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I think you’re talking about European football — the one with the round ball. Right?” He did not wait too long for my answer. “Did you just come to America?”
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I nodded.
He started laughing. “In America, we call that soccer.” He began to walk away, but after a few steps turned to me and delivered the most memorable line of any athletic event: “Hey, man, welcome to America!”
Saman Karimi is a scientist at Johns Hopkins University. He came to the United States in 2009 and has signed a contract to publish his first book, America Hugs a Persian, a humorous story of his journey to blend into American life.
