It’s Not a Game, It’s a Religion

Listen, did you ever hear of a World Series War? How about a Super Bowl War? The Final Four War?

Can you imagine the United States marching into Canada because the Toronto Blue Jays beat the Phillies or Braves in the World Series? Picture us bombing Ottawa because they just won a mere playoff game over, say, Detroit?

You’ve heard of the Gulf War, but what if we had a Golf War? What if England blockaded our East Coast ports because we’d won the British Open? Opened unrestricted submarine warfare on us for a Tennis War if Pete Sampras won Wimbledon again?

Of course, it’s far-fetched. Of course, it won’t happen.

But let me tell you of a sport in which it actually did happen--World Cup soccer. It actually started a war. That might be all you have to know about World Cup soccer and the passions it arouses.

It’s not a game, it’s a religion. A holy calling. For God, country and glory.

It was 1970 when the so-called “Soccer War” complicated life on the planet.

Wars used to be started when archdukes got bombs thrown at them, or subs sank ocean liners, or territorial disputes erupted or ideologies clashed.

This one started over a game. Honduras and El Salvador were trying to qualify for the World Cup, when such brawling broke out that it spilled over into all-out armed conflict, the Soccer War. Salvadoran troops invaded and after two weeks of bloody fighting, 2,000 lay dead and thousands more wounded.

It was hardly soccer’s finest hour, but it was indicative of the feelings that run so high in this quadrennial international blood-letting. Let no man think World Cup soccer is merely another game, a sporting event, an afternoon in the park. It’s World War III.

Can you picture President Clinton pulling the Philadelphia Phillies to one side before the World Series and promising them new Mercedes-Benz cars if they triumphed and, alternately, threatening to fire the coach if they didn’t?

Well, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has no compunctions about doing something similar. The George Steinbrenner of the Middle East, he fires coaches (and players) at will. If his interventions are subject to criticism, well, Saudi Arabia is in the World Cup, isn’t it? And England isn’t.

You can see the World Cup is not exactly sport.

Soccerites don’t get paid like their American athletic counterparts. Like Americans, they are venturing into the areas of bonuses and other rewards. But, in general, Brits earn around $75,000 a year, with bonuses ranging around $1,000 per individual achievement and, sometimes, almost double their salaries for the equivalent of a league pennant. German players of star quality earn around $200,000 a year with incentive bonuses.

Italy pays the highest salaries. There, star players can average $1.5 million. Spain has entered the bidding field for central European stars lured out of Bulgaria and what’s left of Yugoslavia with $2-million contracts.

In South America, the ante is lower, with players getting no more than $60,000 a season plus bonuses.

In Africa, the players seem to be raised for export only. Hardly a European club is without an African or two. Recruitment is easy. The condition of the pay scale on the Dark Continent can be seen in the activities of the Cameroon squad, which threatened to boycott its game with Brazil last week. (Brazil didn’t seem to notice whether the Indomitable Lions showed up or not, beating them, 3-0, which, in soccer, passes for a landslide.) The Cameroon players were mutinous because a government representative who was supposed to show up with a satchelful of bonus money for them seemed to have been delayed in transit. That, too, is World Cup soccer.

The Cameroon soccer foundation countered with a demand that the suspected clubhouse lawyer in the case, the goalkeeper, Joseph-Antoine Bell, be removed from the team. The lack of faith of the Cameroon players in their federation is understandable. Its electricity in the recent past has been shut off for non-payment of bills. They don’t want to be the first team in the history of the World Cup (which hit the soccer fields 60 years after Edison’s invention) to have to practice by candlelight.

Of course, a certain amount of eccentricity is to be expected of a sport whose participants regularly hit the ball with their heads. I mean, how’d you like to get banged over the head 10 or 15 times a game with a 14- to 16-ounce leather-covered (or high-tech plastic-covered) sphere inflated to 13 pounds of pressure? Some brain damage is to be expected.

The biggest mystery to Americans is the lack of scoring, which has degenerated from a 5.4 average in the 1954 games to about 2.2 today. My granddaughter, Danica Erin, took notice of this for me when she observed the dimensions of the goal.

“It seems big enough to put a lot of balls in,” she said.

Exactly. It’s eight yards wide by eight feet high. You think Wayne Gretzky wouldn’t like to have that target to shoot at? Instead of his net, four feet high by six feet wide? You would think 20 goals a game would be poured through an opening you could drive a car through. But the weekend games produced four shutouts and one 2-1 game. Clearly, World Cup needs a World scorer. A Babe Ruth.

Although the whole world participates, only six countries have won World Cups in the 64 years of its existence. One of them--Argentina, Brazil, Germany or Italy--figures to win again this year. The two others--England and Uruguay--aren’t even here.

World Cup has many pluses, not the least of which is no TV commercials. Play is continuous. No timeouts. Nothing stops the clock. Like that battery rabbit, it just keeps going and going. No out-of-bounds stoppages, no endless meetings of officials to discuss the rules. None of the ludicrousness of pro basketball, in which the last 40 seconds of a game can last up to a half an hour or more.

The clock keeps moving right through every incident, including that of a player lying on the ground, either injured or faking it, and whatever playing time is lost is tacked on at the end of the half or the game. In our pro football, a phalanx of doctors and trainers scrambles onto the field if a player has a cut lip, and the clock stops while a grateful television seizes the time to slip in a half dozen or so commercials, network promos or similar nuisances.

It has not yet become the Dodge Truck or the Pizza Hut World Cup.

The host country has won five of the 14 Cups. Might not be the way to bet this year. These Yankees are not Murderers’ Row.

But these coaches will do anything to win this real World Series, this true Super Bowl. In a book on the history of the sport, they tell the story of the striker who took too many balls to the head and fell.

“He’s got a concussion. He doesn’t know who he is any more,” the coach was told. “Good!” he answered. “Tell him he’s Pele.”