July
2006
Jogo Bonito
This Sunday, well over a billion people across the globe will be riveted to the battle between Les Bleus and the Azzurri. Millions of immigrants to America will flood living rooms, restaurants and bars to watch and cheer as well.
And the majority of people born in the United States will be apathetic or openly hostile to a match that most of the rest of the world has been waiting four years to see.
The match in question is the World Cup soccer final between France (known as Les Bleus) and Italy (the Azzurri). But those prevailing attitudes about the sport in this country shed light on some other struggles of arguably more relevance to progressives: the conflicts concerning America’s place in the world and immigration rights.
Soccer is admittedly an acquired taste; it requires watching a number of matches to see the sport as more complex and thrilling than twenty-two athletes bounding across a field, occasionally falling to the turf in melodramatic fashion when fouled, and seemingly never scoring.
But many Americans turn churlish and mean-spirited when asked to acquire that taste. A recent column in The Weekly Standard argued, with tongue only somewhat in cheek, that Europeans – and presumably everyone else but us – embrace soccer’s lack of scoring as embodying what they see as the meaninglessness of life.
Furthermore, Americans are congratulated in the column for embracing sports where we use our hands and brains, as if soccer players and fans are those missing links in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey banging animal bones together prior to the appearance of the monolith (which I don’t remember being red white and blue, but I digress).
American aloofness/loathing toward soccer – even the fact that we call the sport by a different name than everyone else – sends a clear message to people from other nations: We’re the world’s sole superpower, we control economic, political and cultural trends – and we don’t care what the rest of the world likes or thinks.
But developing an appreciation of what the Brazilians calls “jogo bonito”, or “the beautiful game”, confers a wonderful benefit on soccer fans: an ability to transcend cultural, language and racial barriers and reach out to those among us who because of limited English skills or their work can be marginalized from the mainstream.
If you’ve been in a restaurant with a TV in the past month, you might have seen members of the kitchen staff, cleaning people, and others who are often part of the immigrant workforce come out of the figurative and literal background to check on scores and catch a few minutes of action. Talking to these workers and other fans about their favorite teams and the tournament creates bonds that are otherwise difficult to establish and shatter stereotypes in the process.
More than other sports, soccer seems to bring out a strong sense of national pride in its fans, and it’s here that the anti-soccer xenophobes really get bent out of shape.
A Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by conservative radio talk show host John Ziegler several weeks ago complained that the Mexican team’s World Cup ratings on Spanish language TV were vastly higher than the ratings in English or Spanish for the United States squad. Ziegler implied from this data that 1) most Mexican immigrants aren’t loyal to the US, and 2) refuse to learn English, and thus 3) don’t deserve to be here.
But Ziegler ignored that 1) the Mexican team was much more exciting to watch and successful than the American squad, and 2) the Spanish-speaking TV announcers are vastly more entertaining and skilled than American announcers, not to mention that 3) even James Sensenbrenner hasn’t suggested a team/national loyalty test to determine which “illegals” get deported.
Ziegler and others see Mexican team support as dangerous, but don’t complain about the huge crowds that showed up in Koreatown in Los Angeles as early as 7 am to support their homeland’s squad in its three matches. Nor should they: the Korean fans, the Brazilian supporters who literally samba through the stands and in bars during matches, and the English and Italian loyalists seen wearing team jerseys and flying flags from their cars around town are all expressing a connection to their native countries that is part of who they are. Only the most insecure American “patriot” would suggest that such displays are tantamount to hating the United States.
So what does any of this have to do with Progressive Christianity? Perhaps very little. But for those who worry that for all our work supporting immigrant rights marches and protests, too many progressives still view the immigrant – or as Jesus might call them, “the stranger” – in the abstract, the opportunity that the World Cup brings to share moments of joy and passion with strangers from other lands, even for just the 90 minutes of a typical match, is a genuine blessing.