World Cup 2006

Jammed to the walls, Italy and France supporters mingled in the Small Bar with people only there for a drink and a game, like myself. Not that I didn't have my team, but I didn't know the football chants that would periodically rise to the rafters, none except the simple and familiar USA USA USA! that began after an on-camera glimpse of President Clinton swilling wine in the crowd. The whole bar erupted into cheers at that point, and the all-too familiar chant resounded for nearly five minutes. Well, another World Cup, another four years until the games kick off in South Africa. Hopefully things will be different, the US will be ready to play and some African teams will be more serious contenders. I was dissapointed that Nigeria didn't make the cut this year, they are usually a great team to watch.

I was the one holding my head when someone snapped a picture of soccer fans reacting to the final goal kick scored by Marco Materazzi, the fifth and final overtime kick, securing the World Cup for the Italians. I was rooting for France: not only because I have spent time there and have thought about it often in the last year as they have gone through upheavals in their suburbs, but because they had a great crew all around; staunch, not as inspired as Brazil or tough as the Italians, but scrappy and acting like a perenial underdog that might pull it through. Ultimately they lost by a single penalty kick, begging again the question that was raised when Brazil took the cup in 1994 of whether or not the cup should be decided on penalty kicks or the rules regarding the final should be rewritten. I think rewritting is called for. The experience of a PSO not only gives the victor a half-hearted victory but the fans an unsatisfying conclusion to what should be a tournament based qualities of the whole team. Can you imagine if the NBA championship was decided on free throws? FIFA should end the game after the second overtime and the teams should play again in the following days.

France football will have to deal now not only with the defeat but with a new troubled icon of football mythology; the violence of Zidane. Zidaned is now an icon to football only; he is retiring afer this World Cup, or I should say, he is retired. His brutal headbutting of Materazzi, the player who ultimately sealed France's defeat, was the final act of his soccer career. As he walked to the locker room from the field after being expelled he must have passed the cup, on display for both teams as they made their way to the field. How sad. Materazzi may have felt Zidane's thump, but how quickly did that pain dissapear after Materazzi scored the final penalty kick, becoming, in a second, the victor, the receiver of the crowd roar becoming a buzz in his blood, of the green field expandeding away from him, and the levy of faces collapsing in.

I have had the conversation so many times it deserves distilling here; why soccer in the US? I don't know honestly, why any one sport would be necesarily more popular than any other. For myself, I grew up watching soccer, dreaming about taking the pitch against the Italians or the Brazilians, mesmerized by the ball's arc and the tension between the player's ability and law of gravity. I can always watch soccer games; the action is constant, the games' ebb and flow decided by moments of unplanned virtuosity. In American football there seems no comparison; long periods of waiting, failed plays that reveal little about the creativity of the players. While football and baseball place emphasis on execution, soccer places emphasis on stamina and mutual creativity. Even in a dead heat, a soccer game will hold my interest longer than the halting action of a baseball game.

Besides this there is the political and social implications of soccer. Why is there not more on television? Partly because it is a sport more popular amongt imigrant populations. The foci of quality playing is in Europe and South America, as well pockets in Mexico, Africa, central America, Asia and only recently the United States. But soccer fans in the US are not the people advertisers want to target, and the advertisers after all decide what gets airtime on main stations. There are still many football, basketball and baseball fans more willing to go out to games and watch them on television. But soccer is gaining ground, with more youths playing than before, meaning more people sharing the vision I had once of the brilliance of the game. I have heard this is one of the most watched cups in the US besides the 1994 games, and perhaps including those.

As I grow older I am moved by another quality of the game, the global quality which is notably missing other major sports. While there are great players of baseball in Japan, for instance, many of the great players come here. We are the epicenter for these major sports, and to indulge them at the expense of others for that reason seems in line with a certain conservative isolationist leaning. Is soccer a game for multi-culti liberals. To a certain extent it is. Is one is as xenophobic as Bill O'Reilly or, apparently, the majority of our Senate, it might be hard to swallow the sport event of the year being dominated by France, at least with all those freedom fries in their mouths. To love soccer is to love not only a game, but a passion shared wide beyond the borders of our political hegemony. It is both divisive and uniting, for sure, to have nations playing against each other, depending on where you place the accent. I tend to place it on the uniting quality, because it seems that otherwise would be capitulating to forces that wish to see the shared passion of different countries forced apart by petty regional differences. I could celebrate the US players as well as those in Iran, and I like to think, perhaps overly optimistically, that the player's dedication to the sport better represent aspirations of the people of Iran and the US than all the political posturing we've seen recently.



WORLD CUP MIX





1///De L'Alouette / RJD2 (The song from the great "dream team" commercials.)
2///Pull Up the People / M.I.A.
3///The Dream of Evan and Chan (Lali Puna Remix) / Dntel (Reminds me of overused leg muscles: part sleepy, part jacked.)
4///Eanie Meanie (Tower of Love Mix) / Jim Noir (The other song from the Adidas commercials)
5///La Realite / Amadou et Miriam
6///Hearts of Oak / Ted Leo & the Pharmacists
7///A Deusa Dos Orixas / Clara Nunez (soccer=samba!)
8///I Do Dream You / Jennifer Gentle
9///Zoom / MC Solaar
10///UK Warriors / Roots Manuva
11///Be Quiet, Mt. Heart Attack / Liars (The Liars in Berlin, perhaps perhaps seeing the stadiums vicariously for me.)
12///Copa Italiano / Joey Polpette