Sarong, So Right

As the World Cup and all things soccer slowly fade from the American public's mind, I'm just starting my own education on this ball-kicking phenomena known as the beautiful game. Let me say, for the record, that I'm just about as American as they come. Raised in the Midwest on corn and parades. A grandpa who would rather die than drive around in a car built by any nation from the dippy Axis powers. Or as he called them, "meatheads."

He would've appreciated the match between Germany and Italy. But that's beside the point.

Funny enough, Russ and his family have a long history of soccer-love. Russ's dad, George, superstud and soccer beefcake, was so talented that he tried out for the national team in the seventies. But he said that it was all political and thus, was shut out from ever putting on the (very bland) uniform of red, white, and stripes. Russ and his brother grew up with soccer in their blood, so they played a lot. Russ was a goalie and when I really want to get a rise out of him, I state that goalies are simply the laziest players on the team. You should see the indignation, the pursing of the lips, the shaking of the index finger. I find great entertainment in this.

But I - American as Peanut Butter, as my friend Danielle would say - didn't grow up around such soccer love. I grew up around parents who yelled and shrieked at the Bulls, the Bears, and the Cubs. Chicago fans ARE just as scary as all the rumors. I remember lying in bed some nights as a kid, listening to the Rebel yell of my parents as they watched those games and wondering how someone could get so worked up about a stupid game. I don't know that I would've known the difference between them being slowly murdered by intruders and Michael Jordan shooting a game-winning three pointer.

My first encounter with soccer was a bit violent: Within the first five minutes of playing the game, I kicked at the ball and ended up missing it, kicking a fellow player in the shin instead. She had to be taken to the hospital because her leg swelled to the size of a purple Japanese lantern. She walked around in a splint for the next few weeks. It might not have been so traumatic if twenty minutes later, I hadn't pushed against another girl and she hadn't sprained her ankle. Again, more weeks-long splints. Let it be said: I am clearly suited for American football with all my brutishness and injury-infliction.

Despite all the emergency sirens in the background, I had a good time playing soccer. And when I met Russ, I could see that he was clearly in love with that kicky little black-and-white pentagonal ball. So, I did what any good person would do: I faked it until I made it. (That rhyme doesn't sound nearly as good in the past tense, by the way.) I indulged his need to watch Fox's Soccer station whenever we were in the same room as a cable TV. I hung at British pubs when they showed the Euro Cup or Manchester United. I kicked around the soccer ball with him, though I did not get anywhere near the shin-ankle area.

But never did soccer really take hold in me until recently. And it wasn't even the World Cup games, which we watched at our local Brit-Cal pub with a bunch of other regulars, although that just sweetened the whole finally making it thing. For me it, of course, took a writer and that writer would be Nick Hornby.

Let me say that I don't love all of Hornby's work -- I'm not a Nick slut. I started A Long Way Down and closed it in frustration after 50 pages. I wanted to like it, but in this case, I couldn't fake it or make it. I was just annoyed by the style of the book. But that wasn't the case when I opened June's National Geographic to his essay on what makes soccer such a great sport. The whole issue was dedicated to soccer and what's more, there were journalists and writers representing and writing about different countries, giving us (soccer-ignorant) Americans insights into why it's such a big deal everywhere else but here. The introduction to all these essays, written by Sean Wilsey, was hilariously accurate: "There are many beautiful things about being an American fan of men's World Cup soccer—foremost among them is ignorance. The community in which you were raised did not gather around the television set every four years for a solid, breathless month. Your country has never won. You can pick whatever team you like best and root for it without shame or fear of reprisal. You have not been indoctrinated into unwanted-yet-inescapable tribal allegiances by your soccer-crazed countrymen. You are an amateur, in the purest sense of the word. So with the World Cup taking place this month in Germany—and the World Cup is the only truly international sporting event on the planet (no, the Olympics, with their overwhelming clutter of boutique athletics, do not matter in the same way)—you can expect to spend the month in paradise."

It made sense to me, coming from a family with a dad who only owned shirts with Chicago sports team logos on them and a mom who decorated in Cubs paraphanalia. Had I decided to root for the Detroit Pistons in basketball or the Green Bay Packers in football or anyone else in baseball, there would've been both shame and reprisal. Maybe disowning, too. After I moved to Los Angeles, my dad once told me that we would always be on good terms, so long as I still rooted for the Bears. "But the Bears suck," I said. "They've sucked ever since they won the Super Bowl." And then I got a classic piece of fanatic sportsman wisdom: The Bears, he replied, were like an ugly kid. You know it's a trainwreck and you love it anyway.

But it was Nick's article, "Faded Glory: Taming the Hooligans," about fanaticism, the riots and the tears and the tear gas after games, about how embarassing and yet, how deliriously addictive it is to love a team as much as he loves England. Also, how complicated it gets when your sports team gets tied up in your national identity. We don't have that so much over on this side of the pond. Our sports teams are only bonded to cities and states and the whole state-supremacy thing sort of died with the Civil War. So we can be fanatical about our sports team and how it defines our city, like say, how the Bostonians define themselves by the Green Monster or how Angelinos define ourselves by our contempt of the Angels, but the Red Sox - no matter how many curses they break or cute butts they show off - are only ever going to be a small part of the whole that makes up our national face.

My recent fondeness for soccer has a lot to do with liking the idea of a national face. One that isn't militaristic or bossy-pants. I'd like to be able to root internationally for some part of my country without being caricatured and for me, soccer is a pretty good deal. At this point, America's team is more like the Bears, the ugly child, a little harder to love than the beautiful teams like Argentina or Italy. But ugly or not, it's nice to feel like cheering. I like events where we, America, come in as the underdogs instead of the favorites. It makes a win that much more thrilling and, I think, it makes the rest of the world like us just a teeny bit more. It's saying that you'll wach and participate, even if you're not the best, because it's great to see the best in action. Which I think is the whole point of soccer and just a little subversive. But in a good way.

The last thing that Hornby said was that whereas the face of soccer used to be rough and tumble, images of Terry Butcher with a messy, blood-soaked head and uniform, it's now represented by David Beckham in all his mohawked and sarong-ed spelendor: "The England fans...were still singing their 'No surrender to the IRA' song, and there's more than a suspicion that they'd rather be watching Terry Butcher and his fixed bayonets than David Beckham, a man who, after all, has been photographed wearing a sarong. But then, that's England all over at the moment. We'd still rather be bombing the Germans; but after 60 years, there's a slowly dawning suspicion that those days aren't coming back any time soon, and in the meantime we must rely on sarong-wearing, multimillionaire pretty boys to kick the Argies for us. We're not happy about it, but what can we do?"

Obviously, I'm more in the tradition of Butcher -- inflicting pain on others, racking up head wounds, messing up my clothes. But I appreciate those who can spruce it up, flash a little teeth for the cause. It should be encouraging to us as Americans, just entering the game. If a sarong and smile can represent the face of soccer, the possibilities really are infinite.