Games people play June 14, 2006

ONE prime minister warned that he expected an epidemic of illnesses to suddenly hit his country, or at least people saying they had developed all sorts of afflictions and could not go to work. The government and rebels of the Ivory Coast have laid down their arms temporarily after being exposed to it. And the candidates of Mexico have scrapped their campaign plans for the July 2 elections over the next weeks for fear no one will watch them.

Is it a virus more deadly than Ebola? Is it a pathological mania that has suddenly beset the world? Is it an alien invasion?

It’s worse, it’s the World Cup.

Largely unbeknownst in these parts, the world has ground to a halt. It has done so because of a crazy sport -- he “beautiful game,” as the Brazilians call it -- or fanatical religion called football. Yes, football. It is not soccer, as a reader corrected me once, which is what the Americans insist on calling it, reserving the term “football” for their Super Bowl version of it, which has as much to do with the foot (my reader said) as chess does to the hand.

Contrary to rumor, the World Cup, and not the World Series -- which is what the US calls its baseball finals, and which too has much to do with the world as George W. Bush has to intelligence -- is the greatest show on earth. Michael Jordan’s monumental contributions to thrusting basketball onto the world stage notwithstanding, it’s Pele’s favorite game that continues to fire the world’s imagination. For half the world’s athletes, the ultimate goal in life -- the word “goal” itself comes from it -- is to be able to play in the World Cup. To win it, well, it isn’t just the next best thing to heaven, it is heaven.

To talk about it in these gloriously metaphysical terms is by no means an exaggeration. It truly has caused heaven and hell on earth: wars and economic disasters on one hand and truces and moral rejuvenation on the other. Honduras and El Salvador fell into war in 1969 because the three-game elimination match for the World Cup between their countries proved troublesome. That war claimed 2,000 lives and rendered thousands homeless. Germany itself, the current host of the Cup, has the “miracle of Berne” writ in its history, which was when it won the World Cup in Berne, Switzerland, 1954. The feat did not just revive the German economy, it revived the German spirit which had fallen to the pits after Hitler.

In at least half of the world, including the most powerful and influential part of it, excepting the US, everything has been pushed to the background. The results of the World Cup games are the news, relegating all others down the line. “Has the whole country gone mad?” asked a letter-writer in a British newspaper, sparking a debate about the true significance of football in society or indeed in world affairs. In Britain, it was enough to throw the Kashmir crisis to the government’s back burner, Tony Blair preferring to send off the “lads” than to attend to his diplomatic duties. For one dazzling moment, governments have suspended politics, wars, and time itself and gone fishing. Or better still, to watch the games.

I personally am thrilled no end by it. There is something almost biblical about it, specifically the part where Jesus Christ says we will need to become a child again to enter the kingdom of heaven. This is humankind collectively becoming a child again, looking at the world with the awe and wonder of a child’s eyes, and barging into the gates of heaven with the force of it. This is humankind stripping down to short pants, or girl skirts, again and thrashing about in the mud in wild abandon, the shouts of playful glee and carefree-ness thundering across the earth. It is magic.

Certainly, it is awesome in humankind abandoning at least for one fleeting moment its other games, the more churlishly childish ones as opposed to this wondrously childlike one, the ones that produce hell where the later produces heaven. The churlishly childish games of acquiring wealth and power by whatever means, those means now taking on the truly frightening aspect of a video game: The Iraq invasion was carried out that way, with no flaming bodies hurtling to their deaths -- such as assailed the horrified eyes of Americans during 9/11 -- to strain conscience, only bleeps in consoles and the flashing sign, “Game Over,” to strain the eyes.
By contrast, in the childlike game that is the World Cup, everybody wins. Even the so-called losers, the ones who get defeated in the field of battle by stronger opponents, never really lose at all, lifting as they do the spirits of their bedraggled countrymen, the better to soar on their wings through the tempests of life. Nations win, even if the governments of the teams that lose tend to flounder in the wave of frustration that beset their land, their mere appearance in the game of games, in the game of life, being a boundless joy enough in itself. Certainly humanity wins, in one blink of the eye of eternity showing once again the best that it can be, showing once again the angel that resides, or is held prisoner, in its beastly form.

What is football really but the seemingly ridiculous activity of frenetically trying to bring a ball from one side of a field to another without using one’s arms and attempting to kick it to a net while others equally frenetically try to prevent it? But then what is life itself but the seemingly ridiculous activity of making the best of one’s sojourn on earth as though one’s deeds could possibly matter while Fate or Improvidence tries laughingly to thwart it?

For one dazzling moment at least, humankind is trying to make sense of the absurd, give a goal to the pointless, triumph magnificently in the game called football, also called life.

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