In Latin America it is known as futbol, in the US as soccer and elsewhere as football. But to billions of fans everywhere it is known as the jogo bonito, “the beautiful game” that, once every four years during the World Cup, brings disparate nations from around the globe to confront each each other peacefully on the playing fields as opposed to violently on war fronts, and a spirit of amity and egalitarianism prvails (football hooligans not welcome).

We are all familiar with how the action we watch on those 8,625 yards that make up a soccer field generates such fever pitch passion, such group ecstasy and such a communal sense of national reference. But where does the healing power of the game — and the term is used here in its therapeutic sense — come from? And if you think that question is better left to a neuro-psychiatrist to answer rather than a lowlly columnist, agreed. But consider this: In 1964, in the hellish prison on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and hundreds of other political prisoners were incarcerated, suffering unimaginable punishment during the era of apartheid in South Africa, the inmates did something extraordinary that helped them ward off insanity.

They united in an act of protest against their white supremacist captors, requesting the right to play soccer, on an abandoned patch of land nearby, during their exercise periods. Denied that request repeatedly, as Chuck Korr and Marvin Close wrote in their book, Moe Than Just a Game, they nevertheless persisted, risking beatings and food deprivation, by going back month after month with the same result. Finally, after four years, they were allowed to form a structured league, complete with a name, the Macana Football Association, and formal schedules, championships and the rest of it. After their release two decades later, they were convinced that that the game contributed greatly to their ability to remain whole in one of the ugliest hellholes on earth.

Oh, yes, soccer is not just an all-consuming obsession for billions of people around the world, but also a game that is “more than just a game,” a sport whose rules are wired to our neurological system, as it were, much in the manner that chess, maths and music are. It speaks of, about and from our common humanity.

Yet Americans snubbed it, relegating it, where they relegated it anywhere at all, to a distant also-ran behind American football, baseball, basketball and hockey. (To be sure, the world reciprocated the sentiment by by ignoring American sports as equally dismissively.) Then the World Cup came to the US in 1994 and Americans caught the bug, finally managing to overcome their stubborn indifference.

In fact, today if you’re a kid growing up in America, soccer is one of the defining experiences of your childhood years. In this year’s World Cup in Brazil, for example, the US national team has acquitted iself remarkably, and American supporters have arrived in the country in the thousands, reportedly purchasing more tickets to the tournament than any other national group, Brazilians aside. And watching the celebrations in Washington last Monday after the US won 2-1 against Ghana (with the second goal the result of a spectaculat header by John Brooks, the team’s center back) you would have thought the Washington Red Skins had won American football’s Super Bowl against the hated Dallas Cowboys.

Americans have, at long last, discovered soccer, a kinder, gentler sport, fast paced and physical, like dance, but never violent, like American football, where brawny players, dressed in what looks like medieval armor, bang each other mercilessly and break each others’ bones effortlessly. In fact, in soccer, as officianadoes of the game know, muscle-bound players lack the ballet-like agility and zen-ness neded to play the game.

It wasn’t always like that. Here’s a case in point. When the fourth World Cup was held in Brazil in 1950, Americans took little notice — all the pity, because the American soccer team there at the time was destined to make world history. A measure of how marginal soccer was in the US then was the fact that though the event made headlines around the world, it was barely noticed or reported at home. The momentous event in question was, of course, the America 1-0 upset victory over mighty England on Jue 29 in Belo Horizonte. The overconfident English team were so convinced of an easy victory over “the pathetic Yanks” that the team manager decided to leave the legendary Stanley Mathews in Rio so as to spare the superstar the tiring journey to Belo Horizonte and thus save his energy for a more exacting game later against a more worthy opponent. Then, the horror, the horror, it happened!

But the event was barely reported in the sports pages of American newspapers. In fact, no America newspaper, other than the St.Louis Post-Dispatch, bothered to send a reporter to cover the World Cup that year. Sadly, the great accomplishment of the American players, of beating the heavily favored English team, remained largely unknown by the American public. Pity the poor players who returnd home from Brazil to no parades, no welcoming comittees, no cheering crowds, no acclaim or even recognition.

But a lot of water, as they say, has gone under the bridge since 1950, or more accurately since 1994.

“If you fly across the state of Oregon on Saturday morning, every field is filled with kids playing soccer,” Nike founder Phil Knight recently told USA Today. “Someday, they’re going to grow up.”

Knight, of course, was not refrring to the correlation between sharp minds and healthy bodies but to how all that would translate into the sale of millions of NIke sneakers each year. And when the World Cup USA organization, responsible for the staging of the 1994 World Cup in the United States, was established, it had specific goals in mind — all centered on maximizing profits for itself, for FIFA, for television networks and for the nine cities that hosted the games.