No News Is Good News for Soccer Fan
If Japan plays Argentina, Iran faces Yugoslavia and Jamaica takes on Croatia--today must be Sunday.
Since Wednesday, millions of other soccer fans around the world have told time the same way.
In Thailand, they are holding off releasing “Godzilla” until the World Cup is over.
In Mexico, they discussed postponing a legislative session for six weeks until the last ball is kicked.
In England, one poll recently reported that 95% of British men ages 20 to 34 would rather watch the World Cup than have sex with the woman of their dreams.
Nothing that can disturb the purity and uninterrupted flow of “the beautiful game”--not to mention the accompanying beer--is welcome.
Bring on the June gloom.
I for one don’t intend to leave my Ventura apartment much until the final game anyway.
Not with 64 soccer games played by 32 nations from around the globe--as many as three games a day--beaming live and commercial-free into my living room.
I, like the billions of other soccer fans estimated to be watching the event, am busy. Until July. The 12th.
With the marathon culmination of a two-year competition (and you thought the baseball season was interminable), I don’t intend to miss a moment. And if that meant dragging myself out of bed at 5:30 a.m. Friday (I generally am of the 8:58 a.m. commute persuasion) to watch Paraguay battle Bulgaria, well, it only happens every four years.
And for a journalist cum soccer fan on a tight schedule during the World Cup, there is no greater enemy than actual news.
Hopefully, Ventura County will be on its best behavior.
No fires, no floods, no mudslides, no earthquakes, no pestilence, no plagues, no tornadoes and no other members of the Spice Girls quitting the band. Please.
School is out, vacations are in and conveniently, Michael Dally has been sentenced to prison as well as, hopefully, obscurity, and off the front pages. Is it too much to ask that politicians behave themselves so we can have a scandal-free few weeks?
For a reporter who normally thrives on assorted mayhem, asking for a little peace and quiet is almost blasphemy in a newsroom. But the World Cup is an exception, when the world--and my own little part of it--need to come to an almost complete halt for the duration.
For the 1994 World Cup, I marked the occasion by buying a new couch and broke it in by only missing seven of the 52 scheduled games.
For this year’s games, I got a visit to the in-laws out of the way last month.
With no distractions and judicious use of the VCR, I hope to exceed that record. I will not be alone.
Oh sure, my wife has made her own plans to join a support group (not for soccer widows), start an exercise program and maybe tour Baja (I think she was kidding about the last one).
But an estimated 37.5 billion people will join me in front of television screens from Peru to Piru to witness the most-watched sporting event in the world. The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta drew a television audience estimated at a mere 19.6 billion.
Perhaps the fanaticism surrounding the cup in the U.S. hasn’t quite scaled the heights seen in some other countries--no networks interrupted regular programming to carry live the take-off of the national team’s plane for France as they did in Brazil; some newspapers actually printed graphics showing the team’s seating arrangement on board.
But we are catching up.
“General Hospital” will be preempted for some U.S. games, which must be regarded as some sort of victory for civilization. And the No. 9 jersey of Brazilian soccer player Ronaldo, the sport’s equivalent of Michael Jordan, is reportedly the third-best-selling Nike item in New York City, not exactly a soccer hotbed.
Even in Ventura County, a soccer-crazed English journalist has company.
There is, after all, a local connection of a sort.
Head U.S. soccer Coach Steve Sampson lives in the Conejo Valley, even if it’s in Agoura Hills, on the Los Angeles side of the line. And U.S. stars Eric Wynalda and Cobi Jones both played soccer at Westlake High.
Still, over at the Soccer Connection in Simi Valley, sales of World Cup-related merchandise are down compared to four years ago.
Excitement is tempered because the tournament is in far-off France rather than down the freeway in Pasadena, said owner Chris Medina.
But Medina, who regularly sees kids abandon Little League baseball in favor of the faster game of soccer, said interest remains high.
“The 1994 World Cup set the stage for soccer that will never go away in the U.S.,” she said. “It has hit home to every ethnic background, including down-home country boys.”
At the Rose and Crown pub in Thousand Oaks, a bastion of soccer that shows games from England weekly, manager Heather Abbott said 60 people showed up at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to watch the tournament’s first game.
“Business will double,” she said of the next few weeks. “People from South American nations and people from Norway have called wanting to come in. We’ll be showing every single game--I know of nowhere else in town showing them all--and we’ll be open at 5 a.m.”
Abbott expects 100 to 130 people Monday for the England game.
On World Cup eve, I wandered over to the Thompson Boulevard shop owned by the soccer-mad Argentine mechanic my ’83 Olds Omega insists upon regularly patronizing.
Sergio was working late so he could stay home the next morning and watch the World Cup opening ceremonies and first game.
For later games he was hurriedly installing a television set on a high wall near the ceiling of his shop so he could watch games while crawling around beneath cars.
“You see the games in my house alone--no fun,” he said. “You see it with someone else, more exciting.”
He invited me over, deadlines permitting.
Pray for no news.
