Paris to the Moon (28 page)

The vague internationalist symbolism—not to speak of the snail-like pace—seemed the right allegory for the tournament. The Coupe du Monde, which includes thirty-two nations, began on Wednesday, June 10, and continues through Sunday, July 12. I set myself the task of watching it all, wanting to figure out what exactly it is that the world loves in a game that so many American sports fans will sit through only under compulsion.

I understand why people play it. When I was a teenager, I lived in London for a while, and I spent most of my time playing soccer, or at least the middle-class Kensington Gardens version of it. I even learned how to talk the game. It was the opposite of trash talking—tidy talking, I suppose you'd have to call it. If you did something good, it was brilliant; something less than brilliant was useless; if all of you were useless together, you were rubbish;

and if a person did something brilliant that nonetheless became useless, everyone cried, "Oh, unlucky!" By the end of my time in London, I wasn't brilliant at the game, but I wasn't useless either. I suppose this was all faithful to the game's English-school-playing-field origins. "Thoughtful ball," a commentator on the BBC would say about a good pass. In the papers you'll read things like "The signs of decline in the still-clever but jaded Teddy Sheringham sadly became too patent to ignore." "For all his apparent world-weariness, Beckham is still young." "[Anderton] has been stubborn to the point almost of self-destruction, however, and it cannot happen again this week." This isn't sportswriting. It's end-of-term reports.

As I began watching the cup games, though, I had a hard time making a case for soccer as spectacle. I found myself torn between a cosmopolitan desire to love a game the world loves and an American suspicion that they wouldn't love it if they had a choice. The trouble wasn't the low scores, although the ribbon of late sports news often sounded like one of those condensed, hopeless, rising-and-falling monologues about marriage in Beckett: "Nil-nil. One-one. Two-one. One-one. One-nil. Nil-nil." The trouble was what the scores represent. The game has achieved a kind of tactical stasis. Things start off briskly and then fritter away into desultory shin kicking, like a
Wall Street Journal
editorial. In soccer the defense has too big an edge to keep the contest interesting, like basketball before the coming of the twenty-four-second clock or the western front before the invention of the tank.

All sports take turns being dominated by their defense or their offense, and fully evolved defensive tactics will in the end beat offensive ones, because it is always easier to break a sequence than to build one up. Eventually the defensive edge will be so enormous that to stay in business as a spectacle, a sport has to change its rules, openly or surreptitiously. The big recent change in basketball, for instance, which took place somewhere between the Julius Erving and Michael Jordan eras, was a silent modification of the rule against traveling, so that now, it seems, a player can take about as many steps as he needs—a fact that only Rabbit Angstrom has officially noted. American football changes its rules every few years to allow quarterbacks to survive and prosper. Even baseball has tinkered with the mound and the depth of the fences. Soccer players, though, have come to accept the scarcity economy—all those nil-nil draws—and just live with it, like Eskimos. The defense has such an advantage that the national sides don't need their offensive stars. In this cup two of the most inspired forwards in Europe—David Ginola, of France and Tottenham Hotspur, and Paul Gascoigne, of England and whatever pub is open—didn't even make their national teams.

Since a defensive system keeps players from getting a decent chance to score, the idea is to get an indecent one: to draw a foul so that the referee awards a penalty, which is essentially a free goal. This creates an enormous disproportion between the foul and the reward. In the first game that Italy played, against Chile, for instance, the great Roberto Baggio saved the Italians'
pancetta
by smoking the ball onto the hand of a surprised Chilean defender, who couldn't pull back in time. "Hand ball" was ruled, which, near the goal, meant an automatic penalty and a nearly automatic goal. The other, more customary method of getting a penalty is to walk into the "area" with the ball, get breathed on hard, and then immediately collapse, like a man shot by a sniper, arms and legs splayed out, while you twist in agony and beg for morphine, and your teammates smite their foreheads at the tragic waste of a young life. The referee buys this more often than you might think. Afterward the postgame did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed argument can go on for hours.

European defenders of the game tend to put on haughty, half-amused looks when the sport is criticized and assume that the problem lies with the American doing the criticizing, who is assumed to love action for its own sake. When you point out that ice hockey, the greatest of all games, shares with soccer the basic idea of putting something into a net behind a goalkeeper and has the added bonus of actually doing it, they giggle: "Oh, dear. In ice hockey you can't see the ball, or whatever you call it. You can't follow it. Besides, they fight all the time." It does no good when you try to explain that you can always see the puck, and anyway, better to fight like heroes than to spend all your time on the sidelines bickering about who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds, the way soccer players do, even though—as a
Tom Stoppard
character once pointed out—there is absolutely no doubt on the part of those two players about who touched the ball last.

European soccer apologists tend to overanalyze the triumphs of their heroes. In Brazil's game against Scotland, Ronaldo, the Brazilians' star, took the ball, faked right, and then spun around to his left, leaving a defender fooled while he rushed forward into the gap. Then he let go a weak shot, and it was over. A nice move—but exactly the same move that Emmitt Smith makes three times a game with three steroid-enraged three-hundred-pound linemen draped on his back (and then Emmitt goes in to score) or that Mario Lemieux made three or four times a period after receiving radiation therapy for Hodgkins lymphoma and having three Saskatchewan farm boys whacking at his ankles with huge clubs (and then Mario would go in to score). In the papers, though, that moment became a golden event. Rob Hughes, the estimable soccer writer for the
International Herald Tribune,
treated the three seconds of actual activity as though it were the whole of the Peloponnesian War, or a seduction by Casanova. "Receiving the ball from Cafu on the right, Ronaldo lured Colin Hendry, Scotland's biggest and most worldly defender, to him. 'Come closer, Big Colin, come to me,' the Brazilian seemed to say. And Hendry bought the invitation. Tighter and tighter he came until, suddenly, Ronaldo swiveled 180 degrees. . . ."

Soccer writers seemed as starved for entertainment as art critics; anything vaguely enjoyable gets promoted to the level of genius. In the old days, at the Kitchen, it was the rule that three recognizable notes sung in succession by Laurie Anderson heralded a new, generous lyricism. Ronaldo's magic was like a performance artists lyricism: It existed but was apparent only against a background of numbing boredom.

In the first ten days I watched, by my count, sixteen games, including odd, hallucinatory matchups out of some fractured game of Risk: Denmark against Saudi Arabia (1—0); Croatia against Japan (1-0); Nigeria against Bulgaria (1-0). There were a few players who stood out from the general run of bowlegged men in shorts. There were Englishmen (I root for England, from residual Kensington Gardens chauvinism): the pained, gifted O. J. Simpson look-alike Paul Ince; a speedy, tiny boy with a shining morning face named Michael Owen, only eighteen and just off the Liverpool bench. The French players were dogged, unelectric, powerful, and, as many people pointed out, mostly not ethnically French, with lots of "exotic" names: Zidane, Djorkaeff, Karembeu. Though their countrymen long for the dash and elan of David Ginola and the vanished Eric Cantona, they see the functionary logic of this harder-working, intelligent side. There were the Argentines and the Germans, who never seem quite as glamorous as, say, the Brazilians and the Dutch, but who have a brutal purposefulness. Between them they have won four of the last six cups. And there were moments of wonder, when a previously unknown—and probably soon to be unknown again—ballplayer would shock himself and his teammates with a single stunning moment. A young Cameroonian named Pierre Njanka, with no major-league experience, made his way through the entire Austrian team, his eyes wide as he ducked and swerved, stumbling forward, out of control, hardly believing what he was accomplishing, and then scored. He may spend the rest of his life defined by that run.

But such moments were mostly drowned in tedium and then by something worse. By the time the English players arrived on the scene, on Monday, June 15, everything was already ruined. Hooligans had invaded Marseilles, where England was opening against Tunisia, and not merely got drunk and beat up shopkeepers but overran a beach where Tunisian families were picnicking (there is a big Tunisian community in the South of France) and beat up kids and moms there. Everyone had known that they were coming. One source said that the authorities had done their best to keep out the hardboiled Category C hooligans, but some of them had managed to sneak in—a rare case of England's having a deep bench.

Though headlines about English hooligans sweep the world, they don't do justice to the terror involved. "Lager louts" and "hooligans" sound vaguely quaint, but these guys are cruel, violent, and twisted by inarticulate hatred in a way that terrifies the French and makes them wild partisans of the Scottish team. The persistence of English hooliganism—the Englishness of hooliganism—can maybe be explained by the possibility that at some half-conscious level a lot of English people are proud of their thugs and approve of their behavior. This approval consists of a toxic combination of sentimental left-wing anti-Thatcherism (a kind of
Trainspotting
pride that at least the thugs aren't businessmen) coupled with a romantic right-wing chauvinism (it's an English tradition to go to the Continent and hit foreigners). In the Marseilles attacks most of the thugs turned out not to be poor kids, or unemployed kids; they couldn't have afforded the passage over. The thugs were, apparently, mostly postal workers (what is it about mail?), and they were not going to be damaged in the eyes of their mates for having gone over to France to beat people up, or for being sent back from France for having beat people up.

***

Despite the reports of violence from provincial fronts, Paris itself has been relatively blase about the cup. The streets are peaceful, the mood is calm, the atmosphere pastoral. The boulevard Saint-Germain has never been so quiet. The morning after the giants' march, for instance, with Scotland and Brazil about to begin at the Stade de France, the only evidence I saw of anything unusual was the appearance of two Scotsmen in kilts waiting for a taxi on the rue du Bac. Expecting to hear a war cry ("Ay, we'll leave them samba-dancin' laddies guid and bloody"), I tentatively wished them good luck. "We'll need it!" one said feelingly, and the other chimed in, "It's simply a privilege to be playing Brazil." They turned out to be lawyers from Hong Kong—Scottish lawyers from Hong Kong, but lawyers. They talked about the Brazilian esprit, and then got in their cab and, in perfect French, ordered the driver to go to the Stade de France.

I saw Italy beat Cameroon, 3—0, from the back of a bar in Venice. Watching soccer in Italy, you have the feeling that you have wandered into a family drama more complex and intense than you can understand. Each player—Vieri, Di Biagio—was greeted with a combination of hoots, cheers, and tears so personal and heartfelt that it was almost embarrassing for an outsider to witness. With Italy into the eighth-finals (eighth-finals!), the papers, from left to right, were bursting with pride. italia padrone! read one headline. "Italy Rules." The curious thing was that Italy played one of the dullest defensive games of all—the famous "blue chain." But this didn't seem to bother anyone. Whatever people were watching for, it wasn't for fun.

Just afterward I spoke on the phone to an English friend, a big World Cupper.

"How are you getting on with the cup?" he asked.

"It's a bit—well, don't you think it's a bit lacking in entertainment?" I said weakly.

There was a pause. "Why would you expect it to be entertaining?" he asked, reprovingly.

Perhaps that was a clue. I came back to Paris resolved not to be entertained. I watched a double-overtime confrontation between an overmatched Paraguay and an overpressed France. The Paraguayans, who looked worn out from stress, essentially surrendered the idea of scoring and kept dropping back—kicking the ball out, heading it out, willing it out, again and again. It was obvious that their desperate, gallant strategy was to force a nil-nil draw, over 120 minutes, and then "go to penalties," the shoot-out at goal where anything can happen and anyone can win. The nil-nil draw wasn't a "result" they would settle for; it was everything they dreamed of achieving. When the game finally ended, as Laurent Blanc (a traditionally French-sounding name) stumbled a ball into the Paraguayan net, what was most memorable was the subdued triumph. The French celebrated, but they did not exult; the Paraguayans cried—really cried—but they did not despair. They did not seem ruined or emptied out, as American losers do. They seemed relieved. The tears looked like tears of bitter accomplishment. We knew we were going to lose, the faces and the back pats said, but, hey, didn't we hold it off for a while?
("Heroique, heroique,"
murmured the French commentator.)

The next morning I slipped in a tape I'd made of the fifth game of the NBA finals, for purposes of comparison. It was a French broadcast, and the commentators announced that the game was a test of truth—
une epreuve de verite—
for the Utah Jazz. To my surprise, I was, after a week of starvation, used to the austerity of soccer scoring. All those basketball points seemed a little loud, a little cheap. Points coming in from left, from right, cheap points, inspired points, stupid points—goals everywhere you looked, more goals than you knew what to do with, democratic goals, all leveled and equal. It was too much, like eating whipped cream straight. And why had I never before noticed the absurd, choppy, broken rhythm of deliberate fouls and time-outs in the last two minutes of the game?