Six o’clock in the morning–what an ungodly, uncivilized hour for a major sporting event. Not that one can’t be ungodly and yet civilized, something Europeans seem to specialize in, or godly yet uncivilized, a uniquely American specialty. But to be both–that’s just plain nasty. Yet six was the hour I dragged myself out of bed, at the beck and call of my almost-teenage daughter, to watch the World Cup final on Sunday–before the morning papers had even arrived. Understand, first of all, that my daughter is a soccer fan while I most certainly am not–except where the idle pursuits of daughters are concerned–which is why she got the assignment to set her alarm and wake her grouchy old bear of a sports columnist father. A dutiful columnist, I might add, and so if one in four people drawing breath on the planet was going to watch the championship game between Brazil and Germany–a statistic the ABC Sports announcers kept pounding home–I supposed I had to pay it some sort of mind.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Call me not a fair-weather but an end-of-the-day soccer fan. I thankfully missed the U.S. resurgence, catching only the loss to Germany in the quarterfinals, a game that served to confirm my low opinion of the sport. The U.S. outplayed Germany yet got nothing for it–except the right to come home and renew the tub-thumping about how soccer is once again gaining popularity on these shores. Which may be, but at the rate it’s gaining, it will merely surpass the popularity of bowling and pitching pennies by the 2006 World Cup. I maintain it’s a dreary game that translates poorly to television. As a contest in which one team tries to beat the other at putting an object in the other’s goal, give me ice hockey–if not football–every day of the week (at least between October and the end of the Stanley Cup playoffs). In both soccer and hockey the scoring and the scoring chances seem to come out of nowhere, sometimes thanks to patterned play, sometimes thanks to chaos, but hockey is so much faster and the smaller rink so much more conducive to TV coverage that it’s really no contest as to which is more appealing. Watching both semifinals last week–at the almost equally nasty hour of 6:30 AM–I kept thinking, as Germany finally ended the home-field run of South Korea and Brazil shaved Turkey on a distinctly unpretty, trickle-in goal by the “great star” Ronaldo, that no red-blooded, hands-on American should have any interest in the sport. All things being equal, I’ll take even lacrosse.
This, after all, was to be the Brazilians’ day. After Ronaldo missed his early chances, and the Brazilian Kleberson clanged a shot off the crossbar, and the Germans’ Oliver Neuville sliced a free kick from just outside the box around the defense and toward the Brazilian net, where goalie Marcos got just enough of his fingertips on it to deflect it off the post–Neuville responded by maniacally scratching his head as if he had just come down with a case of flesh-eating dandruff–the game was still scoreless midway through the second half. But when a German defender fell just outside his box, leaving the harried Ronaldo alone for a moment, Ronaldo controlled the ball and passed to Rivaldo on what looked to be a textbook give-and-go. Rivaldo didn’t give it back, however, instead firing a low, spinless knuckleball right at Kahn. It handcuffed him. While he blocked it he couldn’t catch it, and Ronaldo ran up to kick in a garbage rebound goal that even Phil Esposito might have disdained. Twelve minutes later, Ronaldo put the game away with more style. He took a crossing pass that went under the legs of Rivaldo, who drew the defense only to let the ball roll by untouched, and guided a pinpoint shot along the grass and into the lower right corner of the net.
After the Cubs’ Roosevelt Brown climbed the wall trying to stab the line drive, and Konerko rounded the bases and the fireworks exploded over the left-field bleachers, I have to admit I felt giddy. Sox fans, who held a narrow advantage over Cubs fans in the record regular-season crowd of 46,027 at Comiskey Park, went ape. But my excitement was tempered by the contempt I felt for the Cubs in blowing an 8-0 lead–and in squandering their immense promise for the season.
