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| Footnotes |
"Everything I know about altruism and man's obligation to man I have learned from football"
Albert Camus
The week after. The World Cup is over. The month long celebration of football and tribal roots ended with a game Croatian team finally being defeated by the powerful and fluid soccer of the French. Since Croatia is now part of our family, we watched each game, especially the last rounds, connected to my son, daughter in law and grandson in Croatia by Viber and What's App. Even watching one game with my mom in her assisted living facility in Trenton. On the big screen in the community room, with workers stealing looks at the game. And on finals Sunday, we gathered at my house for breakfast and football, my youngest and I in our Croatia checkerboard jerseys. After the game, my daughter in law said, "That silver was worth gold..."
And so some final notes...
* I love the way our tribes gather for the games. You walk down Fredrick Douglass, cheers ringing from every bar.
* Over the years, I have watched games with gatherings of Dutch and Italians in bars and pubs and gatherings of our American friends to watch games at 2 am from Korea.
* West Harlem was the center of gatherings for the African teams. When the last African team was eliminated, the cheers turned to France. France is the African team, an African friend said. And those who fear le grand remplacement shuddered. Like the West Indian service workers at anassited living facility rooting for England. The legacy of colonialism and global migration gives us multicultural teams from France, England, Belgium. The current rising star on the world scene is France's Mbappe.
* We choose our teams by friends, connections, experience. I suffered through early rounds with my friends from Uruguay and Argentina. I ached with my German friends for their early exit. My sister's family drew a cheer for Mexico or two. Denmark connections. And then Brazil. I remembered the 2002 final in Newark at a Brazilian club in the Ironbound with my colleague Regi. Sausages and cachaca at 7 am for the final against Germany. When Brazil won, people poured out into the streets from the clubs, the police closed off the blocks and one grand football carnival broke out.
* I was happy to learn that the brief interruption of the final was by Russian punk perfomance protesters Pussy Riot. And Mbappe shard a double high five with one of their protesters. (https://www.stuff.co.nz/sport/football/world-game/105531332/world-cup-final-pitch-invaders-jailed-for-15-days)
* After one game, the commentator said a team lost because of insufficient imagination. A common problem in urban ministry, church work and politics. A friend responded that he's never heard that said about baseball or American football.
* Socialist magazine, Jacobin, designed a unique football jersey for the World Cup. Informed by the work of their friends at Africa is a Country, they adopted the theme Football is a country. They would have been great for watching the games. Unfortunately like many thing related to socialism or the revolution, there have been delays related to production and the jerseys have yet to arrive. (https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/the-jacobin-world-cup-jersey)
* How I miss Eduardo Galeano. His El futbal a sol y sombra: Soccer in sun and shadow, may be the best book ever written about football. Originally published in 1997, he took on the task of updating it with each succeeding World Cup. El mundial, like theology, always takes place in a context. And in clear, concise and sometimes cutting words, he would tell us what was going on in the world surrounding each Cup. He loved the game deeply, even while knowing its deepest faults and how money and greed had corrupted it.
Writing of the 2010 Cup, Galeano wrote:
Many African players worthy of their heritage live and play on the continent that enslaved their ancestors....In one of the ..matches, the Boeteng brothers, sons of a Ghanaian father, played against one another: one in a Ghanaian shirt, the other in a German one. Of the players on the Ghanaian side, not one played in Ghana's national championship.of the players on the German side, every single one played on Germany's national championship. Like Latin America, Africa experts working hands and working feet...
* He quotes German theologian Dorothee Solle, when asked how to explain happiness to a child. She responded,"I wouldn't explain it,... I'd toss him a ball and let him play..."
* At end of the cup, one can feel what Galeano describes as the Irreparable melancholy we all feel after making love and at the end of the match..."
As the Cup began I instinctively went to look for his updated volume, then remembered he died in 2015. I love this book every bit as much as his trilogy on the history of the Western hemisphere as seen from the south, Memory of Fire.
* If you feel, that sense of post-Cup melancholy, pick up a copy of el Futbal...it will fill you.
I go about the world, hand outstretched and in the stadiums I plead, A pretty move, for the love of God..."
Eduardo Galeano
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