If you're reading this, I'm probably talking to the wrong person.
That's an odd way to begin this post, but if you're reading this, you're likely already tuning in.
Still, as the World Cup begins in earnest, vuvuzelas humming in living rooms throughout the world, I find myself compelled to reach out to those not watching and ask why.
Instead of phrasing the mystery as some sort of rhetorical question, I'll try to explain what this cup is all about. Being an American, I'm exposed to that most unique creature among sporting fans: the person who is completely disinterested, if not baffled, by the World Cup.
Like some quadrennial haze that seems to fall on the sporting world for a month, the World cup is dismissed as an oddity by many Americans; insulated on our own continent the World Cup intrudes, like some trick of the light, a mirage of color and sound and announcers with funny accents. You've gotten some soccer highlights in my Sportscenter, they cry.
And yet, the World Cup is important.
Cue where I fail as a writer, but I can't explain why it's important. Most have tried and failed to show Americans that it's worth the price of admission, but we tend to end up charging the same well-guarded walls with the same tired tactics.
It's the most world's most popular sport.
It's bigger than the Super Bowl.
The Americans are actually pretty good this time.
It only happens every four years.
The rest of the world is watching.
These arguments fall on tired ears, of course, and the last sixty years of politicking aside, your typical American is still very much an isolationist when it comes to sporting matters, the country content to show up every four years, collect its gold at the Olympics, and return home to its own obsessions.
The problem ultimately becomes one of language. Not because we call it soccer and the world calls it football, but simply that for many the game is so ingrained in their souls that to discuss it with someone foreign to it requires the establishment of a middle ground, like building an island amidst a vast ocean of unshared experience.
I think most would agree that is at least has the feel of an Important Event, inviting attention. Even casual observes seem to be turning out more each year, miraculously able to withstand the growing hum of the bee's nest each stadium has become to actually watch the game and observe, hoping to see something akin to what everyone's so obsessed with.
In many ways this is like watching a foreign-language soap opera and hoping to pick up the gist of it. It just doesn't work that way.
The World Cup is unlike what most Americans see on ESPN on a daily basis, though, where the most common touchstone for international competition, the Olympics, seems to trade almost exclusively on individual achievement rather than what each country does as a team.
With a sporting culture obsessed with the cult of personality, this isn't an easy thing to accept, though it's perhaps the greatest aspect of the sport's premier event. The World Cup is not the highest quality football being played on the planet, but it is the greatest football because the stakes are so much higher.
And yet, despite the fact that the game naturally creates these larger than life personalities, it's difficult for American fans to become attached the way we gravitate toward American athletes.
There have only been 18 World Cups since the competition began in Uruguay in 1930, when Uruguay was still a soccer power developing the then-nascent short passing game that has come to define South American sides since.
Each World Cup carries with it an immense amount of gravity as each national team puts on familiar colors and once again picks up the thread of past victories and past defeats.
The Olympics and most American sports tend to be observed from the perspective that athletes are there to best history as well as each other.
The World Cup, however, tends to lend itself to nations attempting to live up to history or, for those countries too new or too poor to have won the cup previously, to move beyond the introductory chapters and write their own stories.
More than anything, the World Cup is important because it is a shared experience. Sons share the experience with their fathers and grandfathers, with stories of past glories being passed on (with only the barest of embellishments, of course), stored away for the sole purpose of being passed on once again.
Beyond that, nations that could exist on different planets for how differently many of their citizens live can all speak the same language, whether with their feet as players or their song as supporters.
As I said previously, the argument "well the rest of the world is doing it" is hardly the most convincing for American ears, but it touches on what makes the World Cup truly momentous.
It is a month where you are guaranteed to witness history alongside half your species. True, it is the history of a silly, little game that is no more special or powerful than any other child's game. Yet it is a game that will turn grown men into blubbering children, that will turn the most solemn creatures into raving lunatics.
But if the World Cup reminds us of anything it's that even though we are a people capable of inflicting unspeakable horror on ourselves and others, at the bottom of it all we were all once just children kicking the final goal by imaginary keepers and through makeshift posts, dreaming of what could be.
The World Cup calls us home to those halcyon days, showing that maybe we weren't all so different once.
And that's a very important thing to know about ourselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment