TV Rec: FIFA World Cup
I grew up watching all of the football because my dad wanted a boy, duh. Until I turned 15, and promptly forgot everything I knew in a fairly unimpressive act of symbolic patricide. The World Cup was the only soccer thing that stuck. Every 4 years I tell myself I'm not really into it, and every 4 years I get absolutely swept up in the madness. I thought about it, and here's 3 reasons I could come up with why the World Cup is different and worth about 64 x 2 = 128 hours of your time.
1) It's the closest you'll come to a live Iliad. Every tournament has its own hard-won victories and devastating defeats. Old enemies face off, new rivalries emerge, underdogs rise up, legends are born, and heroes bow out with a bang. Soccer is notorious for being low on action, but when it’s the World Cup and something does happen, it's instantly historic. Maradonna's Hand of God, Bergkamp's perfect goal, that time Suarez bit a guy 😁. These tales are passed down from father to whomever they wish was their son, like details of an epic battle witnessed by a privileged few, which is kind of ridiculous, because we all have television. And over the decades, they tend to pick up even more meaning. What other sport can traumatize an entire generation by virtue of a botched penalty shoot-out? Every time Holland faces off against Argentina, you can still hear veteran football viewers all over the country channeling John J. Rambo: "Do we get to win this time?" (Answer: shut up.) You people know how suspicious I am of narratives, but the World Cup is more of a mythic anti-narrative. It's a truly unpredictable story shaped by a combination of chance and the ability of a couple of hundred dudes to control a ball with their feet. The game is soccer, but the World Cup meta-game is a world-wide, master-less Dungeons & Dragons campaign for people who would beat you up of they found out you played Dungeons & Dragons. This is why it makes no sense to only show up for the last few matches, like you're a head of state who needs the votes. No, start from the beginning and watch everything. So when it's the 92nd minute of a quarter-final and the scrawny forward of this year's surprise break-out team plants a promising free kick square into the wall, failing to tie against the Goliath country everybody thought was going to win anyway, you'll, you know, give a damn.
2) Man tears. I've said this before, but it merits repeating. There's no greater reservoir of raw manly emotion than the FIFA World Cup. Especially in the last few games, where after every match, you'd be hard-pressed to find a dry eye among these macho-to-the-max, spitting, swearing members of that fairest of genders. Other football competitions revolve around pockets of praise and an obscene paycheck, but the World Cup is different. It's not about the money at all, and about the glory only. Letting down a bunch of supporters and trying again next year is not the same as having the hopes and dreams your entire blood tribe resting on your perfect, perfect shoulders. The risk is eternal shame, the reward nothing less than immortality. Hence that delicious, exhilarating cocktail of tears and testosterone. I wish I could inject the stuff straight into my bloodstream and sustain a horny-emotional high at all times. But until someone finds a way to sell it in syringe form, I’m gonna have to soak up as much of it as I can through my eyeballs and live off of that for the next for years.
3) I only realized this recently, but it actually might be the real reason I love the World Cup so much. It's a massive international event that the United States has little to do with. That is kind of amazing, if you think about it. It's chauvinist, but not American chauvinism for once. It's jingoistic in this quaint 19th-century Europe way that makes it kind of adorable. Like that episode in The Office where they go nuts playing office games when the boss is out. Or a pagan carnival, where the commoners of the world get together to crown their own king. Ok, so possibly it's also the mother of all capitalist spectacles. I mean, there's Coca Cola and McDonald's, mind-boggling corruption and shameless consumerism. In the end though, all of that pales in comparison to the sheer amount of countries and people that pour everything they have into this month-long, gigantic global party. The entry ticket of which, incidentally, is finding the closest bar with a television. How is a girl supposed to resist? 🎉
For those of you who can’t stand all of this, here’s Triumph roasting football and football fans gathered in little expat bars around NYC back in 2014. “I think I see soccer as a metaphor for your life - little or no goals.”