On
Soccer
21 November
I have spent the last three or four nights
wondering what I am going to do about the sports column; not the whole night,
just the part of it I allot to unrealized projects.
The first thing you do is you write to people
asking if they want to do some soccer coverage and, when nobody shows interest,
at first you feel discouraged and then you feel challenged. You know the taste of it and your experience
tells you that with a bit of luck it will all work out well in the end.
Later on you see on TV that England, the
country that gave David Beckham to the world, has failed to qualify for the
European Football Championship in 2008; the equivalent of a major national
tragedy even for an complete layman. You see people crying on the streets, you
see the trainer saying goodbye to disappointed supporters, you see the players missing
goals and then you see them with tears in their eyes, and by the time you see
David’s beautiful face pale with sadness, you feel like crying too. Then you remember that it is not your funeral.
You remember the sound of live football
broadcasts in those forlorn Sunday afternoons of your childhood, in the houses,
on the streets, in the parks; the hysterical yells of the commentator that only
spoke to you about loneliness, about the isolation and the intentness of men in
sweat-stained tank tops trying to imagine the game just by listening to it,
beer in the hand.
Then you remember that once you went to a match
in a huge stadium, and because you couldn’t see very far you kept missing the
ball and did not understand much, but as you witnessed the tremendous displays
of emotion, men dying and coming to life again within minutes, you finally
realized with fascination that it is the magic of THE GAME that wakes the child
in man.
The interest in soccer is regularly relived at
some point during the European or the World Championships; the nearer your
national team makes it to the finals, the more of a supporter you become. I have been driving a couple of times through
the city in frantic convoys of honking cars feeling sorry that I didn’t have a
flag to flutter while leaning out of the window, and ended up in pubs drinking with
a bunch of Romanians in the uniting euphoria of victory and hope.
This is the power of the game. For the civilized world it is a remnant of
war rituals and, as a consequence, it brings up equally elemental behavior.
If your national team does not make it to the
final you pick one up along the way, because once you are in it, you can’t
stop; you need to carry on until the end. Sometimes I end up torn by loyalty conflicts,
like when the French, the team I was supporting because of the Latin
affiliation, were playing against Germany, a country that has been my home for
so many years. I remember watching the final
at the last World Cup in a superb evening in Timisoara, my hometown in Romania,
on a huge screen in the Union Square, with lots of friends, all supporting France,
and lots of wine. The Romanians make a
similar fuss about football as the Indians do about Bollywood
films.
Talking about the Latin affiliation, although
the game was invented by the English it seems that the players in the Latin
countries have brought it to excellence and created soccer legends like Pelé; Eusebio, Maradona, Ronaldo or Ronaldinho, to
mention just a few.
However, by the time you hear that David
Beckham went to California (this is the first football piece of news all the
European women got too), you understand that it can’t be only the person; it
must be the game.
Soccer is finally making it to the States. In a short time we will share the same
suffering across the ocean; we will fly on wings of the same euphoria. One game for all!
23 November
Due to deadline I get an article from Nicky. She’s an amazing reporter, but I decide to
leave mine in as well. We are doing it!
27 November
Unexpectedly Scott sends me an article on
same topic, different view. Deadline is dead.
Moving on.
What did I say?