08 Nov South Africa — World’s Most Breakable Soccer Players

Of the strange things that happened while we were overseas, one of the strangest was that the World Cup was in South Africa and that the American soccer team was good enough to get invited. I didn’t give it much thought, though. There was no way our guys would get past the first round. Our country is not famous for the quality of its soccer, and our goalkeeper had Tourette’s. He was supposed to be good at keeping goals but, still, Tourette’s? It didn’t sound promising.

There are things about soccer, things nobody much talks about except late at night when bourbon is involved. Soccer isn’t just boring, it’s evil. They play baseball in Honduras and El Salvador, but have you ever heard of a Baseball War between those two countries? Or tattooed, shave-headed baseball hooligans? Or an umpire being murdered for throwing somebody out of a game? As slow as baseball can seem, fans never get so bored they riot onto the field with knives, swords, clubs, stones, bottles, and fireworks and kill seventy-four people, like happened a few years ago in Port Said.

Also, it’s the only sport I know about where cheating is built right into the system. In boxing, you’re flirting with disqualification if you so much as bite a man’s ear off. In soccer, you can bat aside a sure goal with your hands and all that’s going to happen is that the guy gets to take the shot again. Which isn’t a sure goal at all. I wasn’t brooding too much about missing out on all that when the embassy called with extra tickets to the World Cup and did we want to go? Somehow, America had made it to the second round.

Popular as our team was in certain hearts at the embassy, it wasn’t going to be all that popular in South Africa. We were up against Ghana and Ghana was the only team from Africa to make it to the second round. The hopes of the whole continent were riding on Ghana and, not to put too fine a point on it, the other fans weren’t going to be wearing red, white or blue. And, worse, Ghana had a record to uphold. Four years earlier, it was Ghana that knocked America out of the World Cup.

Late one Saturday afternoon we crowded into the backseat of a beat-up old car belonging to an American lady from Peggy’s office and set out for Rustenburg, a couple of hours on the other side of the border in South Africa. The lady had once been married to a Senegalese and had a daughter named Isotou. She was a cheerful girl, and engaging, and we tried not to call Isotope when we she was around. But it was a hard resolution to keep and, sometimes, I slipped. She didn’t go with us that afternoon. She was four and the game was past her bedtime. Also, being half West African nobody could be sure which side she’d be rooting for, and we didn’t want to take any chances.

The night was warm and the stadium was beautiful under the lights. I was surprised by that. I’d always imagined soccer stadiums were like New York City subway stations, only above ground: brutal, urine-soaked concrete affairs littered with plastic cups and smelling of vomit and stale beer. Our seats were fairly high up, which doesn’t sound like much, but gave us a great view, and the Budweiser and Coca-Cola signs around the field made us feel at home.

After a while the American team trotted out to a smattering of applause, and lined up in rows and began doing stretches and jumping jacks and toe-touches, as regimented as a junior-high gym class. They were decked out in crisp, white uniforms as if they were getting ready for a tennis match. Then the crowd roared and the Ghanaians danced onto the field looking spiffy in rust-and-gold stripes, and they didn’t get in line. They leapt and hopped and pirouetted, warming themselves up, and psyching themselves up, and looking like they were having fun, which our side never looked like it was doing.

The embassy must have gotten our tickets from a batch set aside for Americans because sometime along in there, we noticed that the ladies in front of us were all wearing identical T-shirts, except that each shirt had the name of one of our players emblazoned across the back. It dawned on us that they weren’t just soccer groupies who’d followed the team all the way to South Africa. They were the wives and, probably, had travelled right with the team. Also, there were vuvuzelas.

Vuvuzelas are the kind of thing elephants can hear at a hundred miles. They’re little plastic trumpets that make so much noise they’re banned in some stadiums in Europe as a threat to the hearing of soccer hooligans. But not in South Africa. South Africa is the home of the vuvuzela, and South Africans blow them proudly. But not for our team.

Our guys didn’t do badly for the first hundred-and-two minutes, if not-doing-badly counts when the not-doing comes from luck rather than skill. Ghana scored early and, then, about halfway along, so did we. There was a lot of running around after that and a lot of close calls and the ladies in front cheered and the whole thing was a good deal more exciting than I’d imagined. The Tourette’s guy was as good as everybody said, and made a few spectacular saves. The whole thing ended in a one-to-one draw, which threw the match into overtime. After that, there was more running around until, with only a minute or two left, Ghana scored again.

Vuvuzelas vuvuzelaed, America pulled out all the stops and the whole team raced down to the Ghanaian end of the field, including the Tourette’s guy, and it was looking like we might score again when an official way down on the far end blew the play dead.

The wives in front of us slumped in their seats. I think they’d gone through this before. One of the Ghanaians was rolling in agony from what looked like, judging by the way he was holding his knee, a career-ending, if not permanently crippling, injury. Strange, we thought, nobody had been within fifty yards of him. How could he have gotten hurt?

Doctors hovered over him, stretcher bearers ran out and gently, in case the knee was about to become detached from his thigh, lifted him onto the stretcher and carried him to the sidelines. Where he leapt from the stretcher and danced around making victory signs with his fingers while enough vuvuzelas caught the spirit of the thing to panic every elephant from Rustenburg to Cape Town.

For such an athletic group of guys, every time the American team looked as if it were about to score the Ghanaians showed themselves to be amazingly injury-prone.

                                 They sure don’t look fragile

By the time the game was over, the wives in front of us were slumped so far forward all we could see were shoulder blades aimed at the beautiful, African night sky.

Or, almost over. The referees formed a little huddle, worked some kind of mathematical equation, consulted among themselves, and concluded the game had run out of time too soon. So they backed the clock up four minutes, and our guys got another shot at scoring. Or they would have gotten a shot but they couldn’t get anywhere near the goal before a Ghanaian, all alone on some isolated part of the field, would keel over. Ghanaians were falling like sprayed flies.

It was their good luck that the referees only added four minutes. If they’d tacked on six or eight, the whole team would have wound up in the morgue. Then there would have been articles in the papers the next day about the dead springing back to life. Years later, one of those TV specials about unexplained mysteries would do an entire episode on it.

The Ghanaians got their comeuppance a few days later, in a poetical sort of way. The next round was against Germany and the Germans out-cheated them. A Ghanaian kicked the ball dead straight at the net with the goalkeeper nowhere to be seen. It would have been a sure goal if a German who shouldn’t have been anywhere near that end of the field hadn’t blitzed forward and batted the ball aside with his hands. In basketball, that would have been an automatic goal. In world-class soccer, it only meant that the Ghanaian got to try again. And he missed. In soccer, cheating is good. You do it right out in public, and it wins you games.

The last four minutes in Rustenburg took the rest of the evening, what with all the injuries and stretcher-bearing and emergency medical attention but, eventually, the game was over. By then, the wives were slumped so low you couldn’t see them at all.

This is the time, I thought, when the hooligans come out. The time when the taunts begin to fly, and the fists. I was pretty sure we could make it to the car, but not entirely sure. Violencewise, South Africa is top of the line. And it was hard to imagine that all of the passion pent up in the crowd was soccer related.

But I’d underestimated the people surging around us. They might have been brutalized for a hundred-and-fifty years by white settlers then swindled for a generation by their own kind, but they were still Africans. Laughing, courteous Africans, beer in one hand, vuvuzela in the other,

singing and clapping one another on the back and, sometimes, asking if we were Americans, then offering us beer and breaking into soccer songs we hummed along with and pretended to know the words to.

We would have gotten home quicker if we’d spent the night in town, but that wasn’t going to happen. Every hotel in the district, every hotel south of the Zambezi had been booked solid about three minutes after South Africa announced one of the games would be played in Rustenburg, so there wasn’t much we could do but head for Botswana. Besides, Botswana was expecting us. They’d kept the country open all night so we could get back in.

You’ve been caught in traffic on the way home from a big game in America? Try being on the only stretch of two-lane blacktop leading away from a World Cup soccer match sometime. It was dawn before we reached the border, and we crossed out of South Africa just fine. Then hit the Botswana side. This was our fourth border crossing. The one leaving Botswana, the one into South Africa, the one getting out of South Africa and, now, the last one. The one back into Botswana. That’s when an immigration official actually looked at the passport that the lady from Peggy’s office had crossed all those borders with. The one who owned the car we were in.

It wasn’t her passport, it was little Isotope’s, the passport of a four-year-old girl who, frankly, didn’t look a lot like her mother, what with her dad being as black as her mother wasn’t.