Sport is no longer life-and-death for him

BENNINGTON, Vt. -- The Olympic Committee president was delivering a pep talk.

He'd convened the leaders of the various national teams, including volleyball coach Ahmad Jumili, for this inspirational session before qualifying began for the 1992 Barcelona Games.

He emphasized the benefits of success: free apartments, free cars, financial bonuses.

He explained the consequences of failure.

``The easiest punishment," said the Iraq Olympic Committee president, Uday Hussein, ``is execution."

The volleyball office at Southern Vermont College isn't really an office. It's a black swivel chair and a desk with a computer on top that at the moment is focused on a game of video solitaire. Next to it in this crammed cinder-block room is a similar setup. That's the rugby office.

Ahmad Jumili ignores the accommodations. This is his sanctuary, as it has been for the past six weeks.

Life is tranquil here. Peaceful, and safe.

Jumili, 53, relaxes in his chair, turns off the solitaire game on the computer that normally functions as his recruiting base as he begins a midlife career running the Southern Vermont men's and women's programs. He ponders his bucolic surroundings, at the foothills of the Green Mountains just after they take over from the Berkshires, in a college town where culture is a constant, terror an abstract.

``I like it here," he says. ``It's a beautiful area. I can finish the whole town in five minutes, 15 minutes. I like the quiet."

It is a sweet counterpoint to the savage tumult Jumili renounced in his native Baghdad. He savors it like an elixir, because he outran death to get here.

The contract contained a bonus clause. It wasn't in writing, but it was there, a stalker in the bushes.

``If I'd gone back to Iraq to sign it," says Jumili, ``they would have put me in jail or . . ."

He doesn't finish the sentence; his gesture does. With his left hand, he pantomimes slashing his throat.

Coaches use this imagery when they discuss the prospect of getting fired. Jumili doesn't mean he risked losing his job. He means he risked losing his head.

``There is no doubt in my mind," he says. ``They were after me."

This was the underside to being an elite athlete or coach in the Hussein regime. The patriarch, Saddam, pillaged the general populace. Before he was killed by US troops in July 2003, his son Uday concentrated on the sportsmen.

``Uday ruled," says Jumili. ``He controlled everything, like his father. If you signed a contract, he had to read it and approve it. If you went to play outside the country, he had to give permission. And if he wanted to put you in jail or torture you, he could just do it."

Jumili relates all this in a matter-of-fact monotone. It was a way of life for someone who had spent his entire life in Iraq. It was a way of doing business for an Iraqi Olympic athlete, which Jumili was from 1978-82; and for an Iraqi Olympic coach, which Jumili was from 1983-95.

Uday fancied himself a henchman with a heart. He didn't quibble about losing. Unless he expected you to win.

``Say the Iraqi soccer team was playing Brazil," says Jumili. ``Nothing would happen if you lost. But if you lost to Egypt . . ."

Then you'd be greeted at the plane by a military escort and ushered off to a two-week retreat. In prison. To get your head shorn, eyebrows included. To get beaten daily. To reach the conclusion that to Uday, ``do or die" was not a figurative proposition.

Jumili was lucky. His teams weren't good enough to be tortured. They never qualified for the Olympics, but they weren't supposed to. Some of his players occasionally were subject to Uday's decompression repertoire, but Jumili was spared.

The contract issue nearly changed that.

``That was political," Jumili says.

Not the contract itself. The situation. By the time Jumili left Iraq for Qatar to coach a professional team in 1995 -- with Uday's blessing -- some members of the Jumili family had earned the Saddam regime's mortal wrath. They had fled Iraq and were engaged in antigovernment activities.

Ahmad was implicated, by association. He coached for a year in Qatar, returned home for a three-week vacation, and while there signed another contract with the pro team. Again with Uday's imprimatur.

But he got an inkling of Uday's intentions when he was rousted at his home by intelligence officials who brought him to headquarters to question him.

One of his interrogators ``was a kid," recalls Jumili. ``Maybe this big." He spreads his right hand about 5 1/2 feet above the floor.

Size didn't stop the boy soldier from loading a bullet into the chamber of his gun, pointing it at Jumili's head, and telling him, ``I could kill you right now, and no one would judge me."

Jumili survived that visit. But when he returned to Qatar, Iraq began clamoring for him to come back and sign a contract. Jumili found this curious, since he already had signed a contract and gone through channels. He and Qatar athletic officials resisted, but Iraq wouldn't relent. A deadline of May 31, 1997, was imposed for his return.

``There was no doubt in my mind what would happen," he says.

The second contract would be signed in blood. Jumili's throat would be slashed.

He frantically petitioned dozens of countries for visas, and he didn't get a favorable response until nine days before doomsday.

``This was the only country," says Jumili, ``that would give me a visa."

So here he is, a desert man trying to adjust to life as a mountain man.

Jumili acknowledges that Southern Vermont was not his first choice in the college coaching sphere, that he in fact knew nothing about the place until he accepted the job on the eve of the women's season in September.

When he emigrated from Iraq to the United States with his wife and two sons in 1997, Jumili began building a life from scratch. He settled in northern Virginia. He coached championship teams at the elite youth, high school, and small-college levels before relocating two years ago to Houston, where he opened the Jumili Elite Volleyball Club. Along the way, he applied for numerous Division 1 college positions.

No takers.

``Finally," says Jumili, ``I stopped looking."

But Southern Vermont was looking, and when Jumili found out in August, he submitted his résumé. The money was irrelevant, a good thing. ``I make $60,000-$70,000 a year at my club," says Jumili, ``many times what I make here."

There was one priceless consideration. ``I love to coach," says Jumili. ``I love the sport."

This would not seem the ideal place to apply such ardor. Jumili inherited a program in a state that has no high school volleyball, at a college where most of the students consider volleyball an adjunct to a beach barbecue.

The new coach went right to work. The Mountaineers dropped their first five matches of the season. They won eight of their next nine.

Big-time volleyball beckons again: Jumili has an offer to return to Iraq, now sanitized of Saddam, to become president of the national association. He's not interested.

``I came here and started with zero," says Jumili. ``We have built a life here."

One that can't be taken away on a whim.