Goooooooalll!
by Ana Braga-Henebry in Family on Tuesday, June 29, 2010 6:00 AM
Every four years, I sincerely wish to be in Brazil ... where a national holiday is declared every time our national team plays during the World Cup. Where the streets in the entire and huge country are decorated in the patriotic green-and-yellows and every conversation refers to the single most important event in the life of Brazilian for an entire month.
Alas, I live in a country where football is a violent sport, where monstrous-looking players are buried in huge gear, where fluid game play is a rare thing, and where the game is either played with neither a ball nor the foot. Where action is seen for a fraction of the tie, as opposed to the nonstop action of soccer, forbidding to TV commercial breaks.
So I suffer through an ESPN Word Cup coverage where every commentator has a different British accent — some unintelligibly remote — and I long to hear the traditional cries of “Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooal!” so familiar in my childhood.
I am happy to report it has not been hard to transfer my love of the beautiful game of “football” to my family. The kids are even more faithful than their mother when it comes to watching every single match. I hope it has little to do with the Brazilian food I prepare on Brazil game day, or with the fact that to their delight I sit in front of the TV during the games, which rarely happens otherwise.
They have grown up knowing that the world stops every four years and mom and dad actually get cable TV just for that summer. They know their mom is absolutely and utterly unreachable during a Brazil game, deaf and disconnected from kitchen, hospitality, telephone or computer, eyes glued on the screen, hair sticking out, nails bitten and oftentimes tears and screams splurging out of her head. Of course the U.S. presence in the World Cup is another delight, and we cheer and push on the brave and excellent players along!
To justify my ... well, fanaticism, I like to say that football — or soccer, as Americans know it — is a Catholic game, at least to a certain extent, if not in origin. If you have watched an international soccer game, you have seen players entering the field and touching the turf and routinely crossing themselves as of they were entering a church. You will have seen them praying openly on the field, thanking God for a successful goal. Like Mother Church, it is the universal sport, where all are invited and welcomed, from the four corners of the world, from every race or background.
Another wonderful way to justify watching the World Cup is to turn it into a series of geography lessons. A free and wonderful lesson in human and cultural geography! Take the North Korea coach’s complaints about how reporters failed to refer to his country as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (it became a topic of in our house), or the demonstrations of dance and singing from the African fans at the stadiums. And did you know that there are more members of FIFA (208) than of the UN (192)? The reason behind this disparity is a lesson in international politics as well as geography.
I also like to think about how the World Cup, against popular opinion, brings peace. Forget the fans’ brawls: they are reserved for a few countries’ club games, and it is a most rare thing on international fields. The unity obvious in the camaraderie of the countries involved in the love for the game warms the heart.
The love and emotion of the beautiful game is real and contagious and peaceful, as well as the expectation for fair play, excellence, and nobility in the field. I like to compare American football and real football by saying that while the heavy-padded players are expected to hurt their opponents, soccer players receive yellow and red cards for any un-sportsman attitude or action, even if verbal. The ideal is of a clean game, and the more a team gets close to this ideal, the more they are cheered.
Americans in general don’t seem to realize what soccer means in the heart of the global football fan. There is nothing like it in the U.S. compared to a Brazil game day in Rio or in any of the countries where the beautiful sport reigns. The whole country is decked in patriotic colors, banks close, public transportation grinds to a halt. Everyone in a single breath, hearts united. It is awesome. And it remains in my heart, in our American home, just our family, screaming, waving, praying, and celebrating.
Do I push it if I say heaven must be like a great football game? Perhaps. But I’ll say it nevertheless.
— Ana Braga-Henebry has a Masters Degree in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has written myriad articles for Catholic homeschool periodicals, has been writing book reviews for over ten years, and blogs from the family acreage in South Dakota.
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