It’s the first Saturday in “World Cup Time” and I am watching Argentina and Nigeria play as I write this. Later today…USA v. England in one of the most anticipated soccer games of the last four years.
Soccer is, indeed, “the beautiful game,” and I love the physicality and grace of the players and the overall flow of the match. I love the beauty and the brutality of the competition. I never played organized soccer growing up, although I played with and to some extent learned the game from the Catholic kids in my north St. Louis neighborhood. In the 60s in St. Louis, just about nobody played soccer except the Catholic kids, for whom soccer was the “eighth sacrament.” So I learned to kick the ball around and watched the Sunday morning PBS games from Germany on our tiny black & white television.
But I didn’t really become a fan until we lived in England in the mid-1990s, and it was there that I was introduced to the likes of the Premiere League and Manchester United, the poet/philosopher/rowdy Eric Cantona, and the great England national team of that era. I was hooked.
[Read more…] about Another World Cup: Some thoughts on the beautiful game