The Magic of the soccer
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Americans: It’s time to stay tuned
Publication Northwest Herald
Date June 09, 2006
Section(s) Sports
Page
By SIMEON GASPAROV
Northwest Herald
Why do so many Americans play soccer? So they don’t have to watch it on the TV, goes a British soccer joke. It’s the truth. The United States doesn’t care much about watching this game. Moreover, it seems the global celebration of the World Cup soccer finals, which start today in Germany, still is something unknown, foreign and quite distant.
We still can’t understand this puzzle. What kind of weird spell is cast over the world that makes everybody feverishly await this World Cup? What is this wild, zany enchantment that makes almost everybody on our planet - for one month - breathe, eat, drink, think, dream, suffer, smile, cry, talk and live with soccer? Nothing but soccer - the king of all sports, as they love to called it outside of U.S. borders. Let’s think about it: What is so big about this so-called “grand finale” in the soccer world? Players from all over the globe gather every four years to play, win, lose. So what? ‘It’s just an international sporting event like all the others,’ probably at least 90 percent of Americans will say, and here they will be wrong. World Cup soccer finals are not only a sports event. This is the sports event. It’s a supernatural Molotov cocktail combined with the excitement of Mardi Gras, Brazilian Carnival, Oktoberfest, Super Bowl, a Spanish fiesta, the Olympic games and the Oscars. All that shaken, mixed up and drunk in one shot. It is a stage of celebration and joy where the world gathers in front of TV sets from - without exaggeration - the frozen lands of Siberia to the sizzling deserts of the Sahara.
We in the United States should not be so skeptical about this world craziness and childishly na & iuml;ve silliness. The game is part of our history. Soccer was played on our lands around the banks of the
Hudson River by the Irish, English and Scottish immigrants before the Civil War, before it was even known in Brazil or many other countries that now are the sport’s leaders, according to Jim Haner in his book “Soccerhead - An Accidental Journey into the Heart of the American Game”.
Soccer marks also one of the most magnificent, profound and insightful moments of human history. On Christmas Eve 1914, in the middle of the carnage of World War I, British soldiers brought from their trenches a soccer ball and started to play. On the other side the Germans began to watch, and soon soldiers from both armies left their guns and started playing … soccer. German and English officers and soldiers gathered together, watching the game their comrades played while peacefully sitting and talking with their enemies, showing each other pictures of their families, exchanging little goods, smoking or singing hymns together. It was a moment of wonder and humanity, a moment that proved the world could be, despite the will of politicians, a little bit better.
The only one, who disapproved of this event and wrote against it to his supreme officers was a young, unknown corporal from the 16th Bavarian reserve unit named Adolf Hitler, but that is a different story altogether.
Now let’s open our hearts and let his majesty, King Soccer, rule the world with joy, love and understanding.
Simeon Gasparov is a freelance writer living in Cary. He writes about soccer for the Northwest Herald and can be reached at slgasparov@comcast.net.