touching home
This is the very first frame that we shot for this project. It’s women moving dirt around at Richard’s complex in Nikirebe to fill in a patch in shallow center field that needed to be worked over. A lot has happened since this shot…
I’ve tried to write these blog updates fairly plainly. I report the facts, through my own lens which I, of course, can not escape. But for the most part, I just wanted to write the things I saw and felt. It wasn’t always personal. This one may break that mold, I’m sorry in advance for the indulgent nature of that.
I’m going to go into hibernation mode for a while, which really means drowning myself in the 800 hours or so of footage we have and putting it together in what will be a meaningful and powerful film (I feel confident that we have something special here in these 800 hours). I’m not sure when I’ll resurface with something to share with you all. Our first task is to recut a teaser and rework the website into something that reflects better what we will be coming out with. But before I disappear I want to address that very thing I’m mentioning, what we’ll be making here. This entry will be somewhat nostalgic, in fact, if it’s the first one you’ve read you may not need to go back and read the others, maybe you’ll want to.
When you set out to make a film that happens to be currently unfolding in the real world (i.e. a non-historical/retold documentary) it’s a sort of leap of faith. I want to write about why I leapt in the first place, what I thought I was leaping for, and where we landed. From a personal stand point, this process of putting all of my hope, passion, and love into something that I couldn’t control was incredible and the people that ‘wrote’ the story for me (the amazing players and coaches I’ve come to know) doubled me in passion, love, and hope and I’ll do my best to honor that, it’s now my job to tell that story on the screen. They’ve done their part.
I’m sorry for the long opening here, but I also want to caveat the tense that I’m writing about these people. I realize that that last paragraph is past tense, and sort of disregards their actual existence. I 
think it’s important to remember that these lives are real, and I won’t stop visiting them, coaching, crying and laughing with them whether I have a camera in my hands or not. There are actually quite a few people catching on in Africa that they are being exploited by film crews and get little to nothing of benefit in return (often times unintentional negative effects in my opinion). I would hear a grunt in the local language every few days by someone we’d be walking by while I was interviewing George or a boy, telling them to demand money from me or what not. I’m actually happy that this sentiment is growing in the continent and filmmakers should be aware of it. We all want to believe we are different there, I can only hope that I am and all of this will help their cause. I know I would never want to betray their trust in telling their story and I’ll never compromise it when it is time to push this project into the realm of dollars and sense. And with that I’ll rewind it all the way back to the leap of faith (we’re still flying through the air).
Why I even leapt:
I blogged about it in one of the first entries. I love baseball, can you tell? I inherited it from my father and from day one it was the thing that bound us. My relationship with my Dad is far from a bad one, in fact, I think it is a very close one. But it isn’t one where we openly say ‘I love you.’ But we openly say 
‘Wow, what a play’ or ‘he is opening his shoulder up too soon.’ And for us that means the same thing. He always coached me from tee ball through high school. To me, the game was very literally a game of fathers and sons. I’ve never bothered to dissect the exact lessons I’ve learned from playing baseball and surrounding myself with it my entire life. Through the process of this film I may have gotten better at articulating lessons, but it doesn’t matter. It means something to me that is profoundly important. I believe in it. Let me try to unwind this in a grand sense.
I’m not a religious person. I don’t subscribe to a particular set of beliefs. I, of course, have built a set of ideas, values, and stories that I like and they outline a life that I feel is worthwhile to strive for. And in this ever evolving set of ideas, baseball has been constant, and by constant I mean separate. I know, I’m being cryptic and probably confusing, but let me try to explain that. This might make sense in the end, 
and there is a reason for me getting deep into my own head that I’ll get to by the end of this blog. In my set of ideas and stories I have to tackle the concept of free will and predetermined events or at least designed circumstances. Everyone has to tackle that issue in some way, whether it is coming from an organized religion or a complete lack thereof. My personal grappling with that question evolves as much as everything else and I don’t have the answer for you (sorry) but I’ve always insisted with my own stories that baseball be separate. The actual game, the outcome of the games, the playing of the games, is somehow spiritually protected by any kind of tinkering by a higher or lower power. The game is the game. It’s something that I have to believe in order to believe in anything. I know that probably sounds pretty grandiose, and maybe a bit intense, but hey, that’s me. I like baseball… just a little. And so when I involve myself in baseball it throws away any ideas of fate, it just is. You can earn it on the field, and no one and nothing is going to help you, except yourself and sometimes a little push from a friend.
The Story We Thought We Were Telling:
With that in mind, when I met Richard Stanley 3 years ago and learned that he was trying to build baseball fields in Uganda, it was something I felt was important. But I’m also a story teller and filmmaker and know that you cant put everything I just wrote about my borderline fanatical love of a game (okay maybe not so borderline) onto a screen, you need a strong emotional story with a beginning middle and 
end filled with real compelling characters that get you there. So, without having met a single Ugandan and getting the little information I could get out of Richard, I could pitch the story like this: “A small community of young men playing a familiar game in a troubled place.” That of course, is not a story, or a film, or anything, it’s just a setting and an idea. But it was enough to get Nick Goldfarb (my fearless producer) excited enough to get me there to see if those other things you need for a movie might exist.
We found plenty of characters. I met Benard, Alex, Eric, George, Aron, Jimmy, Watero, Babou, Ashraf, Tony, Ivan, and countless others. With the set of circumstances in a place like Uganda finding characters 
with stories that you want to know more about isn’t that challenging… finding the right ones can be. There is an over saturation of characters whose backgrounds include war, death, disease, and survival that are usually chosen out of Africa. And with our very short trip, to be honest, these were themes that I was looking for so we could tell their stories quickly in edited pieces and get some parties interested to keep this film moving. Then the story started to unfold (or at least the first version).
In our first edited pieces we focused on Benard, Alex, and Jimmy. Benard was a young man who had stories of war in his past that were shocking… and common out of Uganda. Alex was a poor orphan living in a tiny shack. And Jimmy had a farm, he was 
sort of an exception to the usual hooks of war and hardship in Africa. And all three were excellent baseball players. I’m proud of those early pieces, though they, because of constraints with time, could never paint a full picture of a human and had to boil down their histories to some of those usual themes I’d been trying to not focus on. That wouldn’t be a problem, there was plenty more there that we knew we could flesh out. A budding love story, an expanding farm, a crossroads of finding a job or pursuing baseball.
The Story We Thought We Were Telling Part 2:
Richard was bidding to host the Little League World Series Regional Tournament in Uganda. This would be a major event for the country and a sort of coming out party for Uganda baseball. It was looking like he had 
a great shot to get the tournament there. Okay, I could revise the line to this “A small community of young men playing a familiar game in a troubled place that culminates in the hosting of the Little League World Series Regional Tournament that Uganda would compete in and surely lose, but show the world that they play real baseball in Africa.”
Then Benard was invited to Italy. That was something we hadn’t expected. We, of course, went to go film him. We weren’t sure how it fit in, but suddenly the film we thought we were making was expanding and it was brushing up against the highest level in the world. We could put it in the pitch, and Benard was thrust to celebrity status in the community.
Before our second trip, we started to go through the possibilities of how to best tell the story of that community, we liked all of them. Alex’s life was a perfect illustration of that world, that it was more than just baseball, and that it was tough, but it was also real. His life would be drastically different than the visiting players from Kuwait, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia but on the field he would be familiar to them. So, I devoted a good bit of filming to following his life, and I don’t regret a minute. The MLB Envoy came through Uganda and a big take away was that they would give a rave review of the facility to Little League before they decided on the location of the Regional Tournament. Then that decision was made.
The Story We Thought We Were Telling Part 3:
Little League would not grant Uganda the tournament, it would be in Poland again, largely due to the objections by Saudi Arabia. After some deliberation and venting of frustrations, Richard decided he would send the under 12 team to Poland to play. He felt he had to, to validate their program, and to let Little League know how serious he was.
It was revision time again: “A small community of young men playing a familiar game in a troubled place that culminates in sending a team to the Little League World Series Regional Tournament that would surely lose, but show the world that they play real baseball in Africa.”
The Story We Thought We Were Telling Part 4:
With this revision, Alex’s story began to lose its relevance. He was too old for that team. It was breaking down into an obvious generational story and he didn’t fit that line. We turned our cameras on the under 12 team and dove into their lives. The stories were powerful, it was beginning to take shape. The 
2nd generation of 15-25 year olds were doing the hands on training. The 1st generation of George, Deus, and Eric were overseeing the effort and still tackling the ghosts of tragedies past. And then a funny thing happened, the newest generation of kids started getting good. I mean really good.
It was time to change the script again: “A small community of young men playing a familiar game in a troubled place that culminates in sending a team to the Little League Series Regional Tournament in Poland that might just win and become the first African team to play in Williamsport’s history.”
During this iteration of the film I became very close with the team, became one of them as much as I could, something like a big brother. I’ll stress again my commitment and love for them as people. As a filmmaker I often grappled with the distance from my subjects. You want to remain impartial, fearing that somehow you’ll taint the purity of their journey. But this… there… with them… and me… wasn’t always 
easy. I don’t even like that I just referred to them as subjects, I am not a scientist, and they are not experiments. And in a country so starved for positive male role models, I know I became one to them… at least I think I did, and I’m honored and humbled by it. The baseball though, and this is important to me, the baseball is theirs.
They would come to me for coaching tips and guidance and I would help them out to do their best, but that wall between their team, and their efforts, and mine, would always stand, I wanted to make sure. Above all else, from day one, I respect the game, no matter when and where.
So, this was the version of the film that we took with us to Poland. And what happened in Poland (you can go back and read the entry before this if you need a refresher) was something that didn’t fit in any script. I had spent the last 3 months preparing the film to reach its climax with the big showdown between Uganda and Saudi Arabia in the championship. Win or lose, we were ready to tell that story. We got to that point, it was only hours away when it was yanked from existence. That night was the most emotionally draining hours I had ever witnessed and experienced, it was something really big and important, but what was it? Suddenly, we had to question everything. What story would we tell now?
The Story We Will Tell:
The 2 innings that didn’t count, the fun ones, the next day against Dubai where Augustus and Jonah played after the tournament was over, became the story we have to tell. Those 2 innings, drenched in rain and joy, were why I came to Uganda in the first place. They were why I played as a kid in Allentown, Pennsylvania. They are why I still watch every Phillies game I can. And they are why I will never stop loving this game. The story we have to tell is the story of 
baseball. There will be themes that I never expected to be addressing making their way into the film such as an indirect pondering of the culture of ‘winning at all costs’ tarnishing youth sports, and maybe a more direct exposure of some pretty obvious mistakes and errors by Little League Baseball International, but in the end it will be a journey about a Ugandan community’s struggle to be recognized by the world through baseball, and that struggle that doesn’t end here.
After that night, and those 2 innings, something else began to become clear. In some way, this film would have to be told in my voice. I have resisted that idea for quite a while in that I was never comfortable injecting myself into the story, and believe me, this is not my story. But because of the nature of the shoot and the unexpected events of Poland it may become a necessity. This is why this final entry was so personal. We will play around with format ideas on how best to get this story out in a timeline that makes sense, but if it is my voice guiding you through, then I thought you should know a little about what makes me tick. But again, this is not, and will not be my story on film, don’t worry, I’m not interesting enough anyway.
A while ago I asked Aron a question while he was sitting on George’s couch somewhere in revision 2 of the film we thought we were making, I asked, “If we are writing the book of baseball in Uganda, what chapter are we in right now?” And he told me “We are in about chapter 3.” I asked him how many chapters there are in the book and he said “I don’t know, but probably more than 20.” I asked him that question about a year ago. All I know is that, this past year was one hell of a chapter in that book. I’m excited to tell it and they are excited for the world to see it. They would ask me every day what I was doing with all of this video I take, when I would tell them the possibilities they would nod and just say “make sure you show my home run okay?” Well, I’ll do my best. And before I sign off and go digging for all those home runs along the way, I’ll say that I am filled with hope and energy in knowing that they aren’t going to stop writing the book of baseball in Uganda here, and personally I can’t wait to see what the next chapter brings.
For now, thank you for all the support. Keep an eye on the website and facebook page and all of that to follow any updates. I get emails from time to time from George or a player or two in Uganda with some news, and I’ll share anything exciting that comes my way. Benard is about to return from Italy, I left him there in the middle of the camp but I know he pitched well and will come back with an even greater wealth of knowledge about the game to help the country get even better. I don’t know of anything else more direct as far as opportunities for his life, we’ll see. George and the crew have already begun regrouping and training with their eye on the under 14 tournament next year. It looks like Major League Baseball may send another envoy program over in the winter as they had such a good experience with the last trip. Next year is an interesting year for Uganda as they have elections in spring (maybe), and they are still dealing with some post Al-Shabaab terror attack stress. Richard’s complex will continue to be built and hopefully is granted some big tournaments in the near future. And the rest… well, like I said, I can’t wait to see what happens next.
