This past week, I should have been haunting Brooklyn’s British ex-pat soccer bars, nestling myself into a corner with an afternoon pint or two, watching as the Champions League semi-finals began. I should have devoted myself to top-flight, high-stakes international soccer, but I didn’t. I didn’t go to Floyd on Atlantic Avenue, nor did I take the L train to the sweet Williamsburg bar kind of near the Eighth Street stop, the bar normally full of, I think, Liverpool fans. The loud crescendos of British men shouting their teams’ fight songs wasn’t what kept me away—I love those stupid songs, wish I had one of my own to sing. Work wasn’t really the problem, either. Wednesday, certainly, I could have found a way to ditch my office hours and get over to Slainte, the Irish soccer bar on Bowery where I once saw a pair of Turkish young women screaming in unrestrained glee when their national team scored a jaw-dropping goal against the Czech Republic. But no, this week I went about my business as though the Champions League games weren’t being played, as though these bars weren’t full of alcohol-fueled fanaticism.
Why have I been avoiding the full blossoming of my own fanatical potential? I always tell myself it’s because I don’t have the time. I’m afraid of Champions League immersion—I don’t need another unmitigated sports-related obsession on my hands. Baseball and football ought to be enough. And don’t I waste sufficient energy every spring weeping over my beautiful, ruined NCAA basketball bracket?
The pleasures of watching great soccer are indisputable. That’s why I’m so jealous of my friend Austin, editor of the Modern Spectator and an online soccer columnist for ESPN the Magazine—he’s been watching this year’s Champions League action because, well, he has to. It’s his job. So on Wednesday afternoon Austin got to see the spectacular goal-keeping display of Arsenal’s Manuel Almunia, while I waited to read about the game in the paper the next day, wishing I knew what the name “Almunia” sounded like as it tumbled from the lips of the commentators calling the game.
One of the pleasures of watching top-notch soccer is the inevitably diverse jumble of names from all over the globe that are woven together in the verbal tapestry of the game-call. It’s music to me and has been for a long time. As a young kid, I often heard my older brother and his soccer-obsessed friends trumpeting the names of foreign footballers who’d come to the States to play in the then-glamorous NASL, the professional soccer league that lured the likes of Pele and Franz Beckenbauer to America in the 70s. The NASL fizzled in the 1980s after too-rapid expansion, but in my child’s mind the league and its mélange of aging European and South American greats was as fascinating as good science fiction. In fact when I think back, I kind of associate NASL stars with the heroes in the original Battlestar Galactica series. I’m sure that, as a boy, I had nightmares in which Johann Cruyff and Giorgio Chinaglia were trying to save me from the Cylons. Perhaps that’s why I felt a mix of awe and terror when I found the website of this NASL uniform collector. The images of these old jerseys gives me the Borgesian sensation of glimpsing a vanished land whose history will never be written.
That may be the real reason I don’t allow myself to dive into the Champions League soccer matches as much as I’d like to. I’m always looking for the symphony of players’ names to include a few Americans, a couple swashbuckling cowboys with more heart than skill, but that’s not the way it works when Arsenal plays Manchester United, or when Barcelona plays Chelsea. (For some reason I’m not willing to count the names of American goal-keepers like Tim Howard—the thought of an American goalie being pelted by the international crème-de-la-crème seems so, I don’t know, representative of North America’s submissive position in the global soccer hierarchy.) Heart and skill are prerequisites at the Champions League level of play. Indefatigable but lead-footed cowboys need not apply.
I don’t follow the current American soccer league, MLS, although I have written about it before. But I do love the story that’s coming out of Seattle right now. Freddie Ljungberg, the talented, tenacious Swedish midfielder who has played in the British Premier League and has also been a Calvin Klein underwear model (surprise, ladies!), has become an American soccer sensation by moving to the Pacific Northwest and playing for the Sounders FC. I haven’t seen the team play, but I feel a strange urge to go online and order a shiny new Sounders jersey with the Viking moniker “Ljungberg” splashed across the back. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll have my own website full of weird American soccer memorabilia. What would the title of that Borges story be, I wonder?
