Real World: Fort Washington

The best thing I learned upon going to today's D.C. United kickoff luncheon, aside from the fact that the Capital Hilton has cool Capitol Dome-shaped butters, was that five DCU rookies are sharing a house out in Fort Washington: Bryan Arguez, Kasali Yinka Casal, Shawn Crowe, Guy-Roland Kpene and Kiki Willis. I mean, that's a D.C. Sports Bog natural, right? "Find out what happens when professional soccer players stop being polite and start getting real."

Well, I'll tell you what happens. They start commuting to work together, and then they decide to offer their opinions on the driving styles used therein.

"Shawn Crowe, he's like the dad, trying to tell me what to do while I drive," Arguez complained. "It doesn't work out."

"I don't know, he goes too fast," Crowe told me. "And I'm like, 'Slow down, just slow down a bit, don't kill us'."

"Let's not talk about Bryan's driving," Casal said. "He's actually quite bad."

Anyhow, let me start over. These are five guys from all the heck over the place: Willis is from Ohio, Guy grew up in the Ivory Coast, Arguez is from Miami, Casal from England and Crowe from Colorado. They all got along, and they hung out during the preseason trip to Mexico, and they all needed a place to stay in D.C., so Arguez's cousin found them a place in Fort Washington with five bedrooms and hardwood floors and a finished basement and all that.

"It's like the kind of basement you'd see on MTV Cribs, with the carpets and the bar and the pool table," Arguez said.

Wow, sounds great. Please, tell me about the rest of the house.

"There's nothing to tell at the moment," Casal said. "We have no furniture."

Come again?

"It's naked," Arguez confirmed. "We don't have anything."

To be fair, they just moved in last week, and it's been a busy few weeks for United, and there's a furniture-shopping outing planned, possibly as soon as tomorrow, which I might live-blog, which might be the first live-blog ever for an MLS group-house furniture-shopping outing. But as of right now, the guys still haven't bought beds, so they're mostly sleeping on the floor, which is what I did when I got my first apartment right out of college, so I can sympathize.

"Some of them have sheets," Arguez told me. "I didn't even get that yet."

Ah, to be 18 again. More importantly, they have no television just yet. So they've spent a lot of quality time getting to know each other over the past few evenings.

"What we do is I turn on my laptop, blast the music real high, and we all just sing the songs together, rap together," said Arguez, who actually writes lyrics in his spare time.

"We just talk about everyone on the team, how everyone did at practice," Crowe explained. "We just talk about life. It's been an awesome experience without a TV." He paused. "But I'm dying to get a TV, I'm dying."

Once they get a TV, they figure to play a lot of video games, because, as Willis said, they're all gameheads, and they all play FIFA '07 and Winning Eleven and stuff like that. "There's gonna be a lot of ranting and raving," Willis predicted. "We'll sit in front of the TV for hours."

Also, Arguez bought some pots, and they're gonna go buy more kitchen implements from Macy's in the near future. Oh, and Casal's been cooking. He said he's made pasta and rice, and also pancakes and eggs for breakfast, and that he's the best cook in the house.

"Are you crazy?" Arguez responded. "He's from London."

At which point Arguez began calling Casal "grandfather," because "he looks like my grandfather."

"I call him grandson, because he's like a kid, a big kid," Casal said. "You know what I mean? He's the most immature, the youngest, no surprise there."

It should be noted that Arguez's official team nickname is either "Mookie" or "Mooks-Dukes," for reasons that are either unclear or unfit for publication. Anyhow, the only other Real World: Fort Washington disagreement I heard concerned the thermostat; Crowe turns it down at night because he gets too hot, while the others say the house then becomes freezing cold. But the point is, the guys seem to get along pretty well, at least for now, and they figured it would be a nice way to get acclimated to the area and be among friends, and their older teammates are sort of touched by the arrangement.

"They're like, 'We want you to come out and check it out,' and I'm almost afraid," Bobby Boswell said. "They're an interesting group. I will tell you this, it's the most interesting hair household ever," and indeed, Arguez has those long braids, and Willis has multi-colored dreads, and Guy has his Didier Drogba-inspired 'do. "Even the guy who doesn't have hair, Shawn Crowe, he brushes his eyebrows," Boswell continued. "He's been doing it since college. You can write that."

Consider it done.

By Dan Steinberg |  April 10, 2007; 5:07 PM ET  | Category:  D.C. United
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