For a long time, Alphonso Davies knew only the outline of the story. His parents had given him the bare facts, but little more: that they had fled the bloody civil war engulfing their native Liberia; that he had been born in the refugee camp in Ghana where they sought shelter; that they had moved to Canada when he was 5.
He had been too young not only to understand where he was and what his family was enduring, but also for those years to leave any imprint on him at all. His memory kicks in, he said, at age 6 or so: He remembers starting school in Windsor, Ontario, but nothing before that.