True, soccer, the game of nations, has a dark, violent side. The World Cup is, after all, a multilateral competition reflecting, if only allegorically, the destructive power struggles of nation states.
Traditionally, some fans, intoxicated by the pride of victory, or crushed by the agony of defeat, have gone on rampages so infamous that a new word was coined to define their type of violence: hooliganism. No book describes this dreadful phenomenon more starkly than Bill Buford’s 1992 account of British fandom gone awry, "Among The Thugs," or Tim Parks’ recently released book, "A Season With Verona," about a particularly passionate fan club of the Italian team Hellas Verona, representing the most racist, most violent soccer fans on the continent.
Sure, a given. But there’s more to soccer than that. Much More.
A confession: I am not a sports fan, and my interest in football is close to nil, including its American version, a game where overgrown men, clad in what appears to be medieval armor, bang each other into unconsciousness. But even a non-fan like myself found himself gravitating toward the group ecstasy of this year’s World Cup. A soccer match in a World Cup is to supporters of a national team what a call to arms is to soldiers. The game has become, as it were, a parody of our lives, a substitute for politics, an outlet of primal instincts, an expression of national pride, even in some cases the embodiment of our self-esteem and self-definitions as individuals.
What propels us to project onto a game those kinds of passions? To tell a soccer fanatic, particularly one cheering on his national team in the World Cup this year, that he is doing it primarily for the mere fun of the game, perhaps for the catharsis it stirs in him, would be blasphemy. For him it would be reducing soccer to a pastime, which it is not. Surely, the reach, the magnetism of the game goes beyond that. Consider the medley of emotions, the adrenaline rush, you feel as one of the players in your national team approaches the end field, close to the goal of your adversary, and how your fist closes, your back straightens and a coldness as in a light sleep steals over your spine.
There’s more to the World Cup, then, than that.
As nations meet for the games every four years, a harmonic transformation takes over in the global dialogue of cultures. For there, civility rules, even among disputatious nations. There, on the football field, for a mere ninety minutes, Argentina and England, say, can recreate the Falkland wars and lock horns over it; Senegal, the former colony, is an equal of France (as it turned out at the end, it was an equal and then some); Japan could get a cheap thrill out of defeating Russia, a country that in its imperial heyday had occupied Japanese territory; and the US, fighting a tenacious enemy in the German team, could see how well its team could project the tactics of homeland security and the postures of unilateralism on the playing field. And all conflict is then resolved, albeit pacifically. On the playing fields of soccer, as in no other place, nations are effectively saying that they want to be part of one another. For consider how egalitarian the game is, how its outcome is determined by the ballet-like grace, the mental agility, the pin-point passing, the skillful motor response (born out of years of hard training and practice) of the players, and not by military prowess, economic hegemony and political influence.
Deep down in all of us, who passionately watch soccer, equally passionately want to see its rules and competitive spirit, not to mention its ethos, projected on our own objective reality in daily life. At a seminal level of relating to soccer, I say the game validates peace. It speaks of humanity at its best, of peoples sublimating their innate predisposition for aggression through a game that transcends national differences and glaring inequalities, a game that does not involve killing and death.
You got to take your hat off to the British for inventing soccer and exporting it to the world. (Trust the darn Brits, though, true contrarians throughout their history, to come up with a game where use of the most dexterous part of the body, one’s hands, is forbidden during play, at pain of a penalty.) And the reason it has caught on worldwide, and become the most popular team sport ever, is because it hits a chord in all of us, because of that intangible something in it that speaks to us, about us, from us. And it will endure because of that — unlike the "sports" that characterized more violent times in human history, such as contests between gladiators and lions, that for centuries were an enjoyable pastime of urban populations in the Roman Empire, and medieval amusements such as public hangings, cockfights and bearbaiting. (The Puritans, being Puritans, put an end to bearbaiting in Britain in the 1570s, not because it caused bears pain, but because it gave men pleasure.)
Oh, the glory, the pathos, of soccer.
Think of those poor Mexicans who had, since the 1840s, suffered the United States’ land-grabbing and big-power arrogance, but who knew that there was one bit of territory, traditionally sacrosanct and inviolate, that the gringos could not conquer: The 8,625 square yards of a soccer field. Well, that stronghold fell on June 17 when the US defeated Mexico 2-0. American soccer fanatics from my neighborhood in Arlingon, fellows with long resumes of soccer zealotry pre-dating this month’s World Cup finals, congregated at Summer’s, a sports hangout three blocks from my place, for the start of the game at 2.30 a.m. And I was there to hear their exultant roar at the end of it at 4.00 a.m.
To paraphrase Robert Duval in "Apocalypse Now," in that scene that prepares us for our encounter with Mr. Kutz’s heart of darkness later in the movie, there’s nothing like the smell of two-to-nil in the morning.
Imagine, if you can, that is, if you are able to that, dear reader, what it all meant for the Mexicans. Like all our neighbors south of the border whose native language is Spanish, Mexicans have traditionally taken the game so seriously that a soccer player in the World Cup is exhorted to be mindful, at all times, of "la garra de camisa," the symbolic "clutch of the hand on the shirt," where his nation’s emblem is sewn, over his heart, as it were.
Oh, the horror, the horror!
Then there was the day I watched England defeat Argentina (on the 20th anniversary of the Falkland’s war, no less) at Angles, my favorite hangout in Washington, and the English waitress there, knowing I was an Argentina fan, eyed me gleefully at the conclusion of the game. "We won!" she gloated. "It was from the British Isles that modern sports went forth to conquer the world."
"Don’t push it, I said."
See, it’s all fun and games. Just fun and games, for crying out loud, as nations compete peacefully on the playing fields instead of violently on warfronts, and we, the spectators, project what we want to project on the whole exercise.
See you there on Sunday.
