World Cup Nostalgia

The Danish and Brazilian national soccer teams were playing each other on Doris Hansen’s television set the other day, but her mind kept straying elsewhere--to her youth in Denmark, and the world she left behind when she emigrated in 1951.

“You always think back and you find old friends,” said Hansen, 66, of Long Beach, president of the Viking Club, an Orange County social organization for Danish expatriates. “It brings back a lot of memories, and the feelings that go along with them. . . . Every weekend you were out in the parks and watched the local soccer games. You’re brought up with it, so you kind of hang on to it.”

While most of the world will be glued to television sets today watching Brazil and France in the final match of the 1998 World Cup in Paris, the monthlong championship tournament carries special meaning for millions of foreign-born Americans.

For them, the quadrennial tournament is a link to personal pasts, and to a way of life abandoned for the promise of a different future.

“That is simply the pride of our origins,” said Rudy Debernitz of Temecula, a German native and retired German instructor at Golden West College in Huntington Beach. “I have been in this country now 37 years and I’m still a soccer fan. This is the great thing about America. There’s nothing wrong with feeling proud of your origins and feeling an identity with the country you came from. And you can still be a proud American.”

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Some sociologists believe the persistence of allegiance to soccer hints at the dual lives many immigrants feel they live--American now, but inseparably linked to the country of their birth.

“Many people talk about how, even though they’ve been living here for a very long time, their heart is still where they came from,” said Peggy Levitt, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College and an associate of the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, both in Massachusetts. “That’s a feeling that’s really consistent with soccer fans. Both emotions are coming from the same place--a sense of pride and loyalty and solidarity with a national symbol.”

Soccer also is one of the few realms, she said, in which Third World countries compete evenly with developed nations.

“When else do Third World countries get to shine?” Levitt said. “In any other sport, the U.S. or Russia used to dominate. But here Third World countries finally get to be up there. That’s the great thing, of course. It’s a big unifying experience.”

The intensity of feelings might also be related to how comfortably immigrants have assimilated into America, said Joel Perlmann, a history professor and senior scholar at Bard College’s Jerome Levy Economics Institute in New York.

He cited the game earlier this year between the Mexican and U.S. national teams at the Los Angeles Coliseum, in which Mexican fans far outnumbered U.S. supporters and some U.S. players were pelted with debris. It was, for all intents and purposes, a home game on foreign soil for the Mexican team.

“That might have been different depending on how Mexicans feel here,” Perlmann said, “They’re slowly working their way in.”

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Sometimes, the passion has less to do with national symbolism than with nostalgia for lost youth.

Ayatu Bamidele, 37, grew up playing soccer in Nigeria. He has lived in the Los Angeles area since 1985 yet follows the Nigerian national team with near-religious fervor.

“I grew up watching it just like Americans watch and participate in baseball and basketball,” he said. “I played it in junior high and high school. I’ve been following it ever since. . . . It was very rewarding to watch the team get into the World Cup, reaching that level when you know they were not at that level when you [lived] there.”

Like Bamidele, Oscar Ortiz of Costa Mesa grew up playing soccer. His native land, though, was Argentina. When he moved in 1984 to the United States, he left his friends and much of his family behind. But not soccer. At the age of 42, Ortiz still plays nearly every Sunday in a recreational league.

Those games, he said, are constant reminders of home. The World Cup, in which Argentina traditionally does well, makes his homesickness even worse.

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For Croatian Americans, this World Cup carried an element of validation. Croatians have formed a distinct Balkan society for centuries. In 1991, with the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ensuing war, Croatia became an independent nation for the first time in 900 years.

Within the span of three days last week, the tiny country had a tennis player--Goran Ivanisevic--in the Wimbledon finals, and a soccer team in the semifinal round of the World Cup. Ivanisevic lost to Pete Sampras, and the soccer team lost to France.

Still, pride--and a sense of success--held firm.

“Right now, it’s unbelievable for us that we have advanced this much,” said Tony Golen, 67, of Torrance, as about 200 Croatia supporters packed San Pedro’s Croatian American Hall Wednesday to watch Croatia play France in the semifinal.

Golen said the World Cup touches emotions on different levels. He found himself reflecting on his own early years, when afternoons were spent in pickup games, a bunch of ragtag kids kicking around a ball sewn out of old socks. There are dark memories, too, of the killings of his father and brother during World War II, and the burning of the family home.

Zdenko Milin, 58, sat at a table in the darkened back room of the social club, bobbing back and forth and muttering to himself as the game played out on a big-screen television set. He was so euphoric celebrating Croatia’s goal just after the second half began that he missed France’s tying goal a minute later.

After the match, he shook off his sadness to join fellow expatriates in a few rounds of beer at the social club’s bar, and a few renditions of accordion-led Croatian songs.

“I’m happy,” said Milin, who moved to the U.S. 36 years ago. “I’m happy anyway. Such a small country, but we are big now. It’s pride. Proud to be Croatian, that we have a country after nine centuries.

“There is no expression for what this means in my heart.”

* BRAZIL VS. FRANCE

Both have this in common--they really hate penalty kicks. C1