The Beautiful Game

I only listen to the game in Spanish. To be honest it’s the only channel we have reception on the TV but still it’s the best way to hear it. The sudden speed change in the announcer's voice when one team (Which one? Who cares? It’s the same either way) gets closer to the goal and you don’t need to understand every word because you know the gist, you know exactly all that matters: if the player misses it’s Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, if he gets it in, it’s the same with a G in front. This is Football 101 and I’m calling it football because I refuse to stand with the disrespectors who call it the other name, the one that makes you think station-wagons and green fields in the valley and fat presidents who try to intervene when it’s not their business. I know the sport has a shady side (understatement) and there were some hideous decisions made throughout (shameful!), I know too there have always been thugs and hooligans doing bad things, but that’s not what I feel when I watch the game, when I see the spiritual level of emotion from players and fans alike, I just see deliverance.

Is that extreme? Even if it’s just a momentary swell, there is something about it that feels liberating. Even if you are at home alone organizing a bookshelf while listening to the game, you feel connected. So no, it may be temporal, but I don’t think it’s extreme. I once interviewed a couple of friends who had just graduated, both had played football while at college and were good enough to be asked to try out for the US Team. Though neither one qualified in the end, they decided to take a trip around the world together and visit as many countries and cities and tiny towns to find pick-up games to play. And they filmed it. They went to a prison in Bolivia where they played with murderers and rapists, to a tiny town in Kenya where they played with moonshine brewers, and a city in South Africa where they played with construction workers on their lunch break. On the field, whether it was dirt or grass or sand or streets, they were just people playing together. The ball itself was an instant unifier, an automatic in. As a kid on a street in Tehran said, “You can see any game in any alley and go up to whoever’s playing and say, Can I play? And they will say, Yes, come.”

How we dream of that kind of simplicity. And if we can’t have it exactly, can we just be a witness for 90 minutes? It is part of the very reason that makes it different from other spectator sports and events, that simplicity, and though the pros take it to levels of mathematical and artistic genius, chances are if you have a foot you can kick a ball. If you have two, you can run. Most likely you will never sprint up and down the field for two solid hours, twinkle-toeing through a jam up, or heading a fast ball into a net diving sideways off the ground, but if you have an ass you can sit and watch, and if you have a voice you can sing and chant with the crowd. And it is the same around the world, at every level, no matter how teeny tiny or mega-star power commercialized the team is.

Then there are players who lift it the game to the level of myth: Vozinha from Capo Verde who drove a night-shift bus to support his family (He is one of us!) and then led his team from 65th place to battle the champs. That loss was painful but our hearts were united in support of his dignity and courage. Am I being dramatic? Yes I am! That’s part of the beauty: the operatic level reactions and soul-crushing devastation of bad calls. Some of it (Iran, Egypt) even felt like crimes were committed. Still, should you turn off the game if your team is down 4-0? No you should not.

I would argue that the most uplifting part of the game is the acceptance of the good and bad together. That part is not easy, far from it, and yet I saw it again and again. Players stepping onto the field after a loss to bow to the fans as a way of saying thank you. Members of opposing teams hugging, shaking hands and laughing despite intense and exhausting matches. These things are barely possible in everyday life, especially these days, and it’s a simple and beautiful reminder: two opposing things can be true at the same time.

Go Spain.

(with apologies to all my Argentinian loves, I always go for the underdog)