It Should Be a
Kick
Ready of not, Americans, here comes soccer's—some would
say sport's—greatest
spectacle
by Alexander
Wolff
Issue date: June 20,
1994
You don't have to watch the World Cup. No one's going to
make you, and two billion people could be wrong. For your
early summer amusement there will still be those
gut-over-the-belt golfers at the U.S. Open, and numbers 66
through 93 on baseball's
162-game schedule, and the final few encounters between Patrick
and
Hakeem.
Most Americans are not used to seeing this sight.
(George Tiedemann)
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But Mr. Olajuwon himself developed his lateral quickness as
a goalkeeper in Nigeria, and he won't for the world miss
soccer's quadrennial showcase, which gets under way this
week on these benighted shores. And if there's the
slightest bit of hot blood
pumping through your heart, or a corner of your cranium in
which you've stashed some trace of curiosity about this
planet we inhabit, you won't want to ignore the World Cup.
It will unfold over one month at nine venues. Twenty-four
nations will vie to win
the prize that once disappeared for a week only to be
recovered from a South London garden by a dog named
Pickles. And if you absolutely must have some hometown hook
in order to relate to this ''game for commie pansies'' (as
New York sportswriter Dick
Young once so gracefully described it), there's even a U.S.
side that could actually win once or
twice.
Why should you care? Because, in a sporting world shorn of
real significance by so much hype and overexposure, the
World Cup still matters. Even if these weren't the most
technically dazzling soccer players in creation, the
visceral emotions of their
followers are rarely seen stateside, at least not since free
agency and scoreboard dot races killed off fan
spontaneity.
To the rest of the world, the appeal of soccer is very
simple: At work, man engages his hands; at play, his feet.
''Even an unborn baby is kicking,'' says Sepp Blatter, the
secretary general of FIFA, soccer's international governing
body and the outfit
whose show the World Cup is. Soccer is Rio at carnival time:
color and movement and infectious music. It's those low,
mournful horn blasts that fans sound for an hour before
kickoff, suggesting some fogbound port. It's the derisory
whistles—the boo in
Esperanto—that sound like a flock of Hitchcockian songbirds
on a Tuscan morning. It's Paraguay under General
Stroessner: Argue with the ref, and he'll card you for
''dissent.'' Soccer is as senseless as religious warfare
(tensions rise in Northern Ireland
whenever two Scottish clubs, Catholic Glasgow Celtic and
Protestant Glasgow Rangers, play each other across the
Irish Sea), yet capable of stopping religious warfare
(rival factions in Beirut called a cease-fire so they could
watch a match during the
1990 World
Cup).
Scholars even make the case that Argentina's 1978 World Cup
victory in Buenos Aires shored up a repressive military
government. ''Enough has been written about football
hooligans,'' says Simon Kuper, author of Football Against
the Enemy. ''Other fans
are much more
dangerous.''
So, soccer isn't innocent. But in the passion it evokes, it
is pure. It is a window on a nation far more revealing
than some sterile pavilion at a slicked- up world's fair.
Listen to Henry Kissinger on his native Germany: ''Both the
national team and
the generals who followed the Schlieffen Plan during World
War I paid meticulous attention to detail. But there is a
limit to human foresight, and both suffered when, under the
pressure of events, they were forced to deal with
contingencies that
overwhelmed their intricate planning. If they're not ahead by the
75th minute, a certain melancholy settles in, and the
Germans are shadowed by the underlying national premonition
that in the end even the most dedicated effort will go
unrewarded.''
The Nepalese once played soccer with skulls, and the game
has always done a macabre dance with the people who play
and follow it. Not that soccer is a matter of life and
death; as an English coach named Bill Shankly once noted,
the game is something
much more serious than that. A year ago, after Iraq eliminated
China to reach the final round of World Cup qualifying for
Asia, celebrations in Baghdad killed nine people and
injured 120, more carnage than had been inflicted in the
U.S. missile attack on an
Iraqi intelligence compound several weeks earlier. In 1969
a World Cup qualifier between Honduras and El Salvador
touched off a five-day war—the so-called Soccer War—that
left 2,000 dead and 12,000 wounded. Following Cameroon's
elimination from the
World Cup four years ago, a Bangladeshi woman committed suicide,
telling the world in her note that with the Indomitable
Lions gone, she had nothing left to live
for.
But the game doesn't merely occasion death born of anger
and hate and madness. Sometimes it causes death born of
joy. In 1950, after their team won the World Cup in
Brazil's 200,000-seat Maracana Stadium, some Uruguayan fans
jumped off the lip of the
stadium to a happy
doom.
Of course no comparable passion prevails among the few
Americans who follow soccer. Yet 16 million people in the
U.S. do play the game, more than any other sport except
basketball. There are twice as many soccer teams on
American college campuses as
football teams. Huge numbers of young women have come to the
game, thanks largely to the Title IX revolution, and the
U.S. is the women's World Cup champion, having won the
inaugural tournament in 1991. Still, there are jokes: that
it's the sport of the
future—and always will be; that of course millions play it,
because that way they don't have to watch
it.
''A soccer game without goals is like an afternoon without
sunshine,'' said Alfredo di Stefano, the Argentine great,
and by that standard the World Cup in Italy four years ago
was a cloudy disappointment and a gift to the sport's
critics. The tournament
averaged 2.2 goals per game, an alltime low. FIFA has
jimmied the rules a bit for USA '94, rewarding teams with
three points rather than two for a win in the first stage,
a change that should encourage offensive play and increase
the game's chances of
penetrating the hard heads of
Americans.
Nonetheless, soccer will be a tough sell in the host
country. Is it a cultural blind spot that caused the game
to finish 67th, after tractor- pulling, in a recent survey
that questioned Americans about their favorite spectator
sports? Or is it a
national character flaw, the same deplorable thinking that recently
caused the school board in Lake County, Fla., to require
that children be taught that American culture is superior
to all others? Or is it simply a matter of the U.S. sports
fan's dance card
being quite full enough with baseball, basketball and American
football, thank you very
much?
The footyphobes will be out in force this month, most of
them arguing that it's the game's fault, not ours, that
soccer has languished here. There isn't a U.S. daily
without a Soccer Stinks beat guy. One of them, a basketball
partisan at the Boston
Globe, recently dismissed the game because you can't use your
hands. What he forgets is that Cousy learned to go behind
his back and Isiah invented the speed dribble because
basketball has its own curious prohibition, against running
with the ball. Because
soccer's rules won't let you handle the ball, Leonidas, the
Brazilian star of the 1930s, had to conjure up one of the
game's most wondrous moves, the bicycle kick. Prohibition
is the mother of
invention.
At the risk of sounding like some eat-your-peas scold, we
offer a few things the soccer-impaired can do to better
enjoy the next four
weeks:
Treat the whole thing like the NCAA
tournament. Brazil is UNLV, as concerned with stylin' as it is with
scoring. Germany is Duke or Carolina, drawing confidence
from its tradition and system. Argentina is Georgetown,
chippy and unloved. Humdrum Sweden and Norway are the
fourth and fifth Pac-10
teams to get bids—and as such, they'll be heading home early.
ABC's professorial Seamus Malin and Univision's Andres
(Goooooooaaal!) Cantor are Packer and Vitale. And countries like Saudi
Arabia, South Korea and Cameroon are the East Tennessee
States. Indeed, the Indomitable Lions (can there be
anything wrong with a sport that produces a team called the
Indomitable Lions?) were
long shots to reach the quarterfinals in Italy four years ago.
They beat the odds. So find this quadrennial's dark horse
and give it a
ride.
Reexamine your
roots. Chances are you can trace a parent, a grandparent or a
great-grandparent to one of the foreign countries competing
for the Cup. Unless your family has been ensconced in the
Social Register for generations, you and millions of other
Americans can likely
claim as your own some team besides the
U.S.
Soccer is the world's simplest
game. The ref doesn't carry a rule book, for there are only 17
laws, and he has committed each to memory. So don't bother
with the subtle differences between the Italian catenaccio
alignment and the Swiss bolt, or the merits of the flatback
four versus the
lone sweeper. And don't sweat the numbers. There will never,
to the game's everlasting credit, be such a thing as
rotisserie
soccer.
Go. You needn't buy a
ticket. (The event is all but sold out anyway.) Tens of thousands
of fans will be coming to the U.S. just to mill about, to
hole up in a bar, to sample the atmosphere. Find 'em. Chat
'em up. Tell 'em how Pippen is good-for-nothing and Bonilla
is humorously
overpaid, and they'll tell you about some blight-on-the-pitch
lad with a lousy work rate who isn't worth his kit in
transfer fees and should have never been capped. You may
not entirely understand one another, but you'll each be
airing a universal
gripe.
Let's not kid ourselves: The World Cup is here simply
because FIFA believes the time has come to crack the
world's richest consumer market. But whether we're
witnessing a birth or a burial shouldn't be the focus of
the next four weeks. To dwell on that
now would be a little like getting tickets to a Royal
Shakespeare Company production of Romeo and Juliet and
spending the whole evening wondering if Kevin is going to
make it with Winnie on The Wonder
Years.
When we go abroad, then we can turn into misanthropes. We
can be offended at the naked lady in the pharmacy window
and kvetch that the newspapers don't carry the complete
major league box scores. But we aren't hitting the road
this month. We're the
world's host, and our visitors come bearing a cherished gift.
This World Cup thing, it matters to them. As we watch them
demonstrate how much, a surprising thing may happen: It may
end up mattering to
us.
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