Every four years, I enjoy the World Cup season. That sentence has been carefully crafted, so as not to be a lie. Instinctively, I’d have written “look forward to” or “anxiously await”, but in actuality, the World Cup has a way of sneaking up on me, making it all the more enjoyable when the games finally roll around.
World Cup everywhere at InfoComm
I’m not what you’d call a soccer “fan”. In fact, even as I have a game on right now, I’m more often than not looking the other way, or only occasionally checking the score in the top-left corner of the screen. I usually witness goals for my first time in slow-motion, having only been alerted to look up when the announcer and audience get noticeably louder. Why is it, then, that I take so much comfort in the World Cup, and soccer in general?
I remember very well the last few days of my junior year of high school. Teachers had pretty well given up for the year, and there was more and more “free play”, so to speak. I was in Spanish class one afternoon (last class of the day, if I recall correctly) and one student was talking about how much he was into the World Cup. It was being hosted by the United States that year, and one of the stadiums was less than an hour from our town. This student had tickets to some of the local games, and was watching on TV as well. For whatever reason, I was intrigued enough to head home and turn on a game. I was hooked. As school let out for the year, the games were perfectly timed in my life. I had no job, just a dumb kid on summer break.
Every day there were several games played, and in between them I would head outside to our screen house, devouring the works of Michael Crichton. It was a fabulous summer, the last one of my childhood. I frequently would fall asleep during games, and periodically when eating a new processed food, I still get the taste of a delightful snack called Pop Chips that only existed for a brief time back then (not the same as today’s Popchips), which my mother would serve me every day. It was a simple, beautiful life. I learned the players’ names and stories, read magazines, and ordered the full set of trading cards by sending a personal check to some guy on a Prodigy bulletin board (pre-eBay, my friends). This was the first time that a sport honestly meant something to me.
That was 1994, my entry point to the world of soccer, and it was probably the most hard-core I’d be able to be, as my life changed and other priorities took hold. The following year, when the Major League Soccer premiered, I did my best to follow the league, and attended the first New England Revolution game in Foxboro. As an interesting aside, that game is the earliest known time that my wife and I were in the same place at the same time.
1998’s games took place while I was between college years, and working at General Cinema in Framingham, Massachusetts. The games were during the day, and I generally worked night shifts. Somehow I still managed to see nearly every game that year, and had great “sports guy” conversations with my friends at work. I’ve never been a sports guy, so that was particularly fun for me.
Come 1999, though, soccer took on a very different meaning for me. When I began dating my future wife, I noticed around her home that there were many signs of soccer being a large part of their family culture. Her father was a player and coach for years and, aside from his family, I think it’s the most enjoyable part of his life. He knows every player from every league, from every year. I could never be that into the game. But I love that he is, and because of that, I think soccer has taken on a much more sincere, more personal meaning for me since joining his family.
A recent game on my office LCD
2002, 2006, 2010 all took place when I was a working adult, with little time to enjoy any of the games, except when checking a score as I walked by a restaurant window on a lunch break. This year, I’ve done my best to keep up by running the games on the LCD in my office, and had a ball checking out various games as they played during the InfoComm conference I attended in Las Vegas last week. At night my wife asks me “what games did you watch today?” and I seldom can remember. It just doesn’t matter who won, or even who played, anymore. In the same way that overhearing a baseball announcer in a bar can remind you of the start of spring, being near a TV playing a soccer game, these days, reminds me of my new family and how happy it makes me to be accepted into it. For me, that makes it “The Beautiful Game”.