Tuning In the Really Late Show
It is 4:18 a.m. Thursday and a line of horn-honking cars with men and women hanging out open windows waving Mexican flags is crawling into the parking lot of the Pico Rivera Sports Arena.
This is a traffic jam. In the middle of the night.
The two-lane road leading into the arena is packed tighter than the 405 freeway at rush hour, and the Mexico-Italy game is set to start in 12 minutes.
The people in the cars are antsy, chanting “Mex-i-co” out the windows and craning necks to see where the parking lot is. A big-screen television is set high in the corner of the arena. Stereo speakers are all around. The TV broadcast booms through the parking lot, a pregame show in Spanish to entertain the people stuck in cars.
It might seem like all of Southern California has been consumed by Laker three-peat, but there is room in the sporting heart for more.
Yes, said a factory worker from East Los Angeles, he could have watched the game at home. “But this is sports,” Jose Batista says. “We should be together for this, you know. What fun is screaming by yourself?”
A couple thousand Mexico fans seem to agree with Batista. Men in their work clothes, women pushing baby strollers, teenagers with faces painted red, white and green, run from their cars to the concrete seats. A roar goes up as the ball is kicked.
And when striker Jared Borgetti heads in Mexico’s only goal in a 1-1 tie that gives Mexico a Group G-best 2-0-1 record and a place in the second round, it feels as if Borgetti made his move right on the bumpy, dusty dirt down below.
Batista is right. This is better than home.
A firecracker explodes. Drums beat. Flashlights light up the dark night. It seems like everybody has a flag. “Mex-i-co!”
World Cup fever had crept stealthily into our house in the middle of the night, and ours is not a house of soccer fanatics. We had heard of people who were taking all their vacation time so they could stay up all night to watch soccer, then sleep all day. What a silly thing to do, we thought.
It is always fun to root for underdogs, and it didn’t take a soccer expert to know that Senegal beating defending champion France was a pretty big upset.
But there were Laker games to watch, a resurgent Angel team to follow, a gutsy Dodger team to check on.
But now we turned purposely to the games every night. Now we were setting alarm clocks to make sure we didn’t miss big games. When the U.S. took a 3-1 lead over Portugal, there were screams in our house. Now we are addicted. We couldn’t miss U.S.-South Korea and even from television, the guttural noise from the red-clothed hometown fans draws the hair up from our arms. When the Koreans tie the score late and do a rude group imitation of speed skaters--homage, they said later, to the South Korean speedskater who felt cheated out of a gold medal by Apolo Anton Ohno in Salt Lake City--it is confirmation that athletes everywhere can be boorish. This is refreshing--and a little scary.
There is a strong anti-American feeling from the Korean crowd and it is startling. Sometimes it’s hard for Americans to understand how much residents of other countries, as much as they like American ways, really don’t seem to like us very much.
It is why all the columnists and commentators who mock the World Cup, proclaiming proudly that we Americans have baseball, basketball, football, hockey, golf, tennis, etc., and don’t need this stinkin’ soccer, so badly miss the point.
The point is that we should be part of something that so consumes the rest of the world. Prisoners in Thailand riot for the right to have TVs to watch this. And Thailand didn’t even qualify.
Driving home from Pico Rivera after the Mexico-Italy game, I got off the freeway in Santa Ana along 17th Street. In every little taco stand and doughnut shop, men and women were clustered around small TV sets or gathered on the street listening to radios. They were hearing postgame reports and discussions on who Mexico might play in the next round. The U.S., maybe.
So many of our sports--basketball, baseball, even football--are becoming global and are being embraced by fans and participants who aren’t afraid of learning about something new. Joining in can be fun. Listen to the voices of Laker fans. Look at their faces at today’s parade. They are from Mexico and Japan and Korea. They have learned about the NBA and now they love it.
If Mexico does play the U.S. in the next round, it wouldn’t be terrible to find out where Batista and his buddies decide to watch the game and join them.
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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com