CHOW BABY!
Italy bites the dust amid Chompgate
Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini is in disbelief as he shows tooth marks from Uruguay’s Luis Suarez (top, l.). Above, Suarez is seen biting Chiellini during Uruguay’s win Tuesday.
We make the rest of the world chase us on just about everything, including real dumb wars. But we have always chased the rest of the world in fully appreciating soccer.
That changes now, loud and in lights, with this World Cup, the way the beginning of summer has been dominated in this country by the sport, at last. Even when we brought the World Cup here once, it didn’t feel as big as it does right now.
By Tuesday afternoon, when Luis Suarez of Uruguay — he’s had a bit of a problem because he’s bitten opposing players in the past — was accused of turning the Uruguay-Italy match into an episode of “True Blood” by allegedly putting his teeth into Italy’s Giorgio Chiellini, Suarez felt like the second most famous athlete in America after LeBron James.
More people in America are watching these games on televi- sion than ever before. Hockey is over and the NBA is over and for the past week or so, even before the World Cup moves into the tournament’s knockout round, the national pastime in our country briefly, wonderfully feels like soccer.
Claudio Reyna, who will be the director of football for New York City FC, the Major League Soccer team that will play its games at Yankee Stadium starting in 2015, is a World Cup star of the past for U.S. soccer, as well as a member of our National Soccer Hall of Fame. He was talking on Tuesday about the way his sport has exploded this way, in this World Cup.
“It’s like the globalization of soccer has finally happened here,” Reyna said.
There are so many reasons, starting with a basic one: a time zone in Brazil just an hour earlier than we have in the East. And of course there is the speed of it all. Not just the speed and beauty and grace and magic of the game itself, but the speed with which these games are played. If you start watching a World Cup game at 6 o’clock you know that it will be over before 8, with so few commercial interruptions you feel as if you’re watching the Masters golf tournament.
In a twitchy, Twitter, Snapchat world, you better believe it is a huge reason why people are coming to these games in record numbers.
Obviously, the fine American team we have sent to Brazil has created heightened interest here. There have been other times in the past when our team made it to the knockout round. Still: The game against Portugal on Sunday night felt like the biggest any U.S. team has ever played in the World Cup. At least until it is the U.S. vs. Germany at noon on Thursday.
Try to remember the last time there was any game like this, in the middle of the week and the middle of the day in America, that will take sports fans to their televisions and radios like this, hoping that some American player will score the kind of goal Landon Donovan did against Algeria four years ago. Maybe the story for this U.S. team began to be written that day.
And it is more than just an American team with a chance. You have
stars like Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, the two best players on the planet. Messi made an amazing kick in the 90th minute against Iran on Saturday. Then Sunday it was Ronaldo of Portugal making an amazing cross to a streaking teammate named Varela, turning what was about to be a 2-1 victory for the U.S. team into a heartbreaking draw.
But even with an ending like that, a little before eight on Sunday, we were reminded what it feels like across the rest of the world to root as one country for one team, and get a night like this. That game the other night against Portugal? That wasn’t just the beauty of soccer, a sport I came to love watching my sons play in high school. It was the beauty of sports.
It was the way you felt when Clint Dempsey scored that goal off a wonderful pass from Graham Zusi to put us ahead 2-1. And it was also the way you felt when Ronaldo took everything at the end.
“It’s been like this perfect storm,” Reyna said. “Prime-time games and high drama and a lot of scoring and big countries like Spain and England and Italy going home early. On top of that, the tournament seems more wideopen than it ever has before.”
There is no way to plan these things. They just happen in sports on their own. And we get carried along, to a moment like we get on Thursday, when it is the U.S. against Germany with everything on the line. The biggest game in the world feeling like the biggest game in the world.
You know the old saying in this country: Take me out to a soccer game.