BAGHDAD — The most famous soccer star on the best team in Iraq played a mediocre match Friday and lost, along with his teammates, to a far less talented cross-town rival. But when the drubbing was over, Laith Hussein could not stop smiling.
"I'm going home," he said.
Just months ago, such a defeat could have earned the soccer star a ride to prison on a bus with blacked-out windows, courtesy of Saddam Hussein's son Uday. There, he might suffer a beating on the soles of his feet or be humiliated by having his head shaved and then trotted out in front of television cameras.
Not anymore.
"Home," he said, still smiling. "Bye-bye."
Friday's showdown between the Zawraa Gulls and a team called the Police was Iraq's first professional soccer match since the beginning of the war. But fans, coaches and players alike seemed quite uninterested in who won, who lost, who scored or who squandered an easy shot on goal.
Everybody was simply thrilled that soccer was back and that Uday Hussein and his father were not.
"God willing, the game will return to the game it should be," said Ahmed Jamil, the Gulls' equipment manager for 36 years. "And the country to the country it was."
In a nation mad about soccer, the Iraqi teams of a generation ago often played respectably and drew tens of thousands of spectators regardless. Under Saddam Hussein's regime, especially since the internal crackdowns and international sanctions following the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the sport floundered.
"For decades, Saddam Hussein built no soccer stadiums, only guns and wars," said a 25-year Iraqi army conscript, who asked not to be identified. "We need soccer."
Crumbling stadiums were often the least of a pro soccer player's worries, however.
After the Iraqi leader installed his son in 1985 as chairman of the country's Olympic Committee and overseer of Iraq's national teams in every sport, players who performed poorly were harassed, fired, jailed and tortured.
Laith Hussein, who is not related to the former ruling family, once was placed in a steel contraption not unlike a suit of armor that required him to stand upright and unmoving for two days.
The entire national team was sometimes whisked from a losing match to a prison in a bus with shaded windows, held in solitary confinement and put through a brutal sort of boot camp that included beatings. The regimen took them to the brink of collapse and despair. They were held for days, even weeks, never knowing when -- or whether -- they'd be let out.
