RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — On a School Day Saturday, young people from Rio de Janeiro’s Ciudad de Dios favela fill dirt roads playing soccer or posing as police and thieves in dangerous alleys.

Meanwhile, parents keep an eye on them, hoping that their children may not be detected by drug dealers looking for messengers and messengers.

Another user is chasing them. Marcelo Modesto was born in a quieter City of God than the famous 2002 film. Their goal is to take young people off the streets of the favelas and seek to turn them into professionals in a game that many Brazilians elitist or exclusive to whites.

Golf.

Caddy for 4 decades, Modesto, 54, has opened a golf education center in the favela’s maximum violent community. Without public or personal funding, from an undeniable fondness for sports, Modesto has attracted a hundred young people to the box in the hope of freeing up some along the way to find professionals or do anything to get out of the streets of the favela.

The Ciudad de Dios golf education floor is part of a program that hopes to turn young people from one of Brazil’s most violent favelas into young golfers invited to use the Rio 2016 Olympic Games course.

His arrival at golf is, at best, rudimentary.

The City of God’s educational floor is only 150 square meters (1,600 square feet), which is less than the length of an average green. Once a network center filled the site. Interested children, who are usually black, play with sticks and given balls, instead of holes, hit buckets. To warm up, they swing wooden sticks around their backs.

And regardless of the intensity of the training, they are attentive to any sound of gunshots.

“I have friends who have died, others have been imprisoned. They didn’t have the opportunities I had with golf,” Modesto told The Associated Press at a recent practice on Saturday, just hours after his afternoon watchman shift. the ball and start swinging, you fall in love and those kids too.

Modesto saw golf as a smart concept for the children of City of God by his own introduction. When he was 20 and had just left the military, criminals came to him as a potentially vital asset; l a young man who knew how to fight and shoot, also has a connection with the favela.

“It shook me,” Modesto admitted.

Which replaced his life with an invitation to paint at a golf club.

“I’m very grateful to golf. It’s like a family moment. The members of the club were like the father I never had,” he said. “I learned to speak well, I stood out here. They gave me club clothes. members, I dated the most beautiful women here and have become a reference.

Modesto hopes to expand the initiative to other favelas in Rio so that at least 60 young people can go to the city’s Olympic golf course until February to take categories and feed themselves, two already selected.

Ray de Souza Teixeira, 13, is already convinced he will be a professional golfer even though he only started betting on a genuine course last week. Teixeira’s care of a club is reminiscent of Tiger Woods’ Modesto.

Teixeira played rounds at the Olympic field on Monday and dressed appropriately in khaki shorts, a white blouse and black sneakers.

“No one had ever told me it existed in Brazil, only the rich knew it,” Teixeira said between the towers. “I need to play a professional tournament and win so I can get my circle of relatives out of the favela. it’s too difficult.

“Every time I hear gunshots, he dies. Every time there is a police raid, he dies. It’s very bad when there are police raids, there are also protests after that. Golf is my joy now.

The Olympic adventure has seen little action since the 2016 Games, which faced the greatest threat of fitting in a white elephant. Many clubs have restrictive memberships and Brazil has around 20,000 registered players, a figure that hasn’t replaced much since the Olympics.

But none of this matters much to Leijane Silva, 50, who is also a volunteer for the Ciudad de Dios golf project. All he needs is for his daughter, Sofia, and the other young men to stay away from crime.

“I just need those kids to get off the streets,” he said. “They expand a little more here, they perceive the game better. I’m so grateful that my daughter is here. “

Jack Correa, vice president of Rio’s Olympic golf course, believes children may not be frustrated if they are not golf finger professionals, as there are other golf-related activities that can attract them.

“Today, more than 80% of our arrangement are previous shopping carts. The bubble burst,” Correa said. The Olympics have moved the game forward. Now you can play, know the game.

Modesto believes that the golf assignment can also the opinion of many Brazilians about the young people who come from the City of God. He has the ambition to expand more land to build a field, climb two tennis courts and, if possible, a swimming pool.

“Golf has been the soft one at the end of the tunnel for me,” he said. “I hope it’s the same for some of those kids. I joke with the other people in force here that they will have to import personnel in the long run, because the children of City of God will be too busy with sports.

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AP Sports Mauricio Savarese reported from Sao Paulo