God Did Not Want Me to Go to Brazil

In an international airport, it’s very easy to lose track of scale. Thousands of people in the terminal are flowing past you on their way home, on business trips, on vacations. Faces you will see once and then never again, extras cast to mill about in the background of the television program that is your life.

Until you’re all standing in line at the American Airlines service desk.

Suddenly, the scale crashes in on itself. Hundreds of people stuck in the same situation as you, faces you were supposed to discard like used luggage tags at your final destination that are now etched into your mind as you inch your way closer to the airline rep entering hour number four of being berated over a decision that came from far above them.

When they finally give you a hotel voucher, you take an Uber and arrive at the same time as twenty other people from that service desk line. Those same people stand outside with you and wait for a ride back to the airport the next morning. You’re linked now, stuck together, forever able to bond about a shared experience that left you scarred.

It’s a lot like rooting for the Los Angeles Chargers.

When Arif Hasan and I sat down for our meeting to pitch this piece in May, life was much simpler. Wide Left has been credentialed by the NFL for games – international games, even – before. We’d get me a credential for the São Paulo game between the Chargers and Chiefs, I’d cover the game from the press box, write something about the game environment in Brazil or the turf conditions or Justin Herbert’s performance.

The NFL had other ideas. See, while Arif has been credentialed by the NFL before, I have not. While we wished Wide Left had the kind of pull as an outlet to send whoever we want to whatever event we want, we do not. The league denied my credential in mid-August, well after my travel plans were already booked.

This was a catastrophe beyond just this story. I have been fighting a losing battle with the NFL to credential me as a journalist for nine months, during which I have been rejected from the Pro Football Writers of America three different times. Their reasoning is that I do not cover NFL events in person. I have yet to find an NFL event that will credential me to attend – the unwritten reason being that I am not in the PFWA.

I was already heading to Brazil, though. We’ll have to find a different piece to write.

It’s 8:15 a.m. on Sunday, August 31. I leave my house outside of Seattle for the airport, show my Brazilian visa to the ticket counter, and fly to Dallas.

During my layover in Dallas, I’m reminded of the notorious reputation of airports as a liminal space. Even with only a two-hour time change, I have no idea what time it is when I get in line at a Whataburger built into an alleyway kitchen. A random man compliments my pants. The guy behind me is in a suit. The woman in front of me is in pajamas. I take my burger to the second story of my gate, which requires walking through a luxury mall wedged between two departure desks. The people across from me have built a fortress out of the lounge chairs to nap before their flight. Two small European children chase each other and shriek in a language I can only guess to be German.

By 8:09 p.m., I am on the next plane, scheduled to depart from Dallas and arrive in São Paulo the next morning. The plane stalls on the tarmac, presumably waiting in line for a runway or for maintenance. Something routine. At 8:42 p.m., the captain announces, in English, that a staff member has timed out and will be replaced shortly. By 8:47 p.m., this statement has been amended to push the flight back to the next morning at 9 a.m.

At 9:37 p.m., I walk outside to wait for a shuttle to the Motel 6 in Irving, Texas and discover that it is pouring rain. My friend lets me know later that it is actually only pouring specifically at the airport. A container truck has crashed into the underpass and blocked one lane of traffic coming into the arrivals pickup point.

I do not have a jacket nor transportation. American Airlines denies me access to my suitcase, preventing me from changing out of my soaked clothes. Desperate to salvage even a small portion of the evening, I order a burger and a Pizookie on DoorDash at 11:15 p.m. My driver gets stuck a few minutes away from the motel. It’s a confusing set of intersections, I reckon. In the rain, it’s probably even harder to find the right turn.

At 12:03 a.m., my DoorDash driver lets me know that he has crashed his car.

“Im ok just hydroplanned into the wall” becomes a catch-all response to the events that will follow. It is the new title of my group chat with other football media members. We’re thinking of printing T-shirts for a new Wide Left merch store.

At 1:05 a.m., my new order of Taco Bell, the only restaurant open by the time Mr. Hydroplanned and I figured out how to cancel my order, arrives.

By 7:55 a.m. the next morning, I returned to the gate, entering hour 25 wearing this outfit. An unnamed man with a small child comes up to me and says he’s a big fan of my work. He’s not on my flight to Brazil, he just happens to be in the DFW airport.

At 8:40 a.m., the flight was delayed another 9 hours. I accept an itinerary change that routes me through Miami, but I have to get in line for the service desk anyway because they have to see my visa to print a new boarding pass.

It has now been 22 hours and 25 minutes since I left my house. I was supposed to be in Brazil two hours ago.

In line at the service desk, I meet Maxx, who is trying to rebook his trip to São Paulo with his wife and 2-year old son. Maxx turns out to be the business manager of a well-known rap artist, a fact that goes overlooked in the group chat because TJ Finley transfers to Georgia State two minutes later.

Maxx and I talk for an hour as we wait for the line to inch its way forward. We’re both half Japanese. We both work in entertainment. He tells me a bunch of insider information about the rap artist he works with. I told him about how Dawand Jones went missing at the Senior Bowl. We’re both going to Brazil for work, but also sort of not for work.

I’m just going on vacation, but Maxx is visiting his wife’s family, who live outside São Paulo. His sister-in-law has been denied an American visa five or six times, he tells me, including times where his sister-in-law attended the same interview as her parents, who were approved to visit. Maxx and his family going to Brazil is the only way she can see her nephew.

My reasons for being mad about this delay, now entering hour 24, suddenly feel very stupid. I just want to go look at a waterfall before I go to São Paulo and figure out what I’m going to write now that I don’t have a credential. This guy wants his son to know his family.

Maxx also reveals to me that at 8:42 p.m. the previous night, when the captain announced the delay, the accompanying announcement in Portuguese was not a direct translation of what I heard in English. They told the Portuguese speakers that the flight was cancelled.

Maxx and I follow each other on Instagram before we head our separate ways, me on my new flight to Miami and his family on a mysterious journey that no longer has anything to do with me.

A face I was not supposed to remember, a story I was not supposed to know, now linked together via extraordinary circumstances.

Now stuck in DFW’s Terminal A for the next four hours, I discover two Einstein Bros. bagel shops exactly 118 steps apart. Why do they need those? One of them only had four types of bagels. I spend an inordinate amount of time deliriously trying to rationalize why another business, any other business, didn’t take the smaller bagel location and make it something else.

I force the group chat into considering this liminality with me, stunting what otherwise would have been a very productive discussion about Bill Belichick’s girlfriend.

After three gate changes and a trip to Terminal C, my fourth stop in the DFW airport, I sit down on my flight to Miami around 4 p.m., 22 hours after arriving in Dallas. American Airlines immediately let me know that my flight from Miami to São Paulo has been delayed until the next morning at 6 a.m. I quickly swap to yet another flight, departing Miami at 11 p.m., before the plane pulls away from the gate and I lose Internet access.

I briefly consider switching airlines in Miami before realizing that American would have to give me my suitcase back, something that they had been unwilling to do for an entire day. The flight leaving Dallas gets stuck on the tarmac for 20 minutes as they wait for yet another storm cell to pass, which kills any hopes of making a cross-airline connection.

The time on the tarmac is extended another 30 minutes at 3:33 p.m. Im ok just hydroplanned into the wall.

At 4:03 p.m., I finally escape the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

The flight touches down at 7:40 p.m., at which point I discover that my suitcase got back on the plane in Dallas and is already airborne for São Paulo while I wait in the American Airlines service counter line in Miami to show a third person my Brazilian visa. My suitcase and original flight are now projected to beat me to Brazil by an hour.

My weather app notifies me of a lightning strike in Miami. Confidence is at an all-time low. The service desk line grinds to a halt.

When a gate agent arrives, I slip out of line to show them my visa instead. I ask them frankly if this flight is actually going to leave on time. They say yes, then give me a boarding pass for a middle seat. I don’t even care anymore. Just get me on a plane.

Kevin has been a Chargers fan since the LaDainian Tomlinson days, ardently enough that he’s convinced his partner Stephanie, an Eagles fan, into donning Chargers gear multiple times a year, including at the terminal in the Miami airport.

Gage has also been a Chargers fan since the LT days, ardently enough that he’s converted his fiancée Abbie into enough of a believer that the two are in the Miami airport six weeks before they are due to be married.

The two couples know each other — sort of. Both went to last year’s Week 2 Chargers game at Carolina, where they sat a row apart. A month later, in Week 7, they were both in Arizona for Chargers-Cardinals, where they again, by sheer coincidence, were a few rows apart.

Now, as it so happens, the two are both in the Miami airport, catching up before taking off for São Paulo, where they are seated in adjacent sections for Friday’s game.

I stumble into this interaction halfway through, primarily because I had been looking for Kevin and Stephanie since I noticed them in front of me in line to receive our boarding passes. These are not terribly online fans — Kevin does not have Twitter and Gage hardly follows any media members on the platform. They did not coordinate being here at the same time for the third time in 12 months. They just saw a game in Brazil and booked their flights.

People I was not supposed to meet. Stories I was not supposed to know. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, I would’ve been getting wasted on caipirinhas in the middle of the jungle while Kevin, Stephanie, Gage and Abbie caught up in the terminal.

It is around this point that I realize that I didn’t even pack a Chargers jersey to wear to the game.

The modern content creation economy has made it possible for fans to turn their passion for the sport into a career. That’s how Arif started — posting threads on the SB Nation Vikings page until they hired him. Same with me — I posted my way into my job at USA Today with Chargers Wire. Neither of us are journalists by training.