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“The Beautiful Game: Why the World Loves Soccer,” National Geographic, June, 2006
What I’m Reading — Posted by pbutts | June 03, 2006 22:46
National Geographic’s cover story feature for the 2006 World Cup is a must read. Click here to read online, or get a copy of the magazine for a more leisurely reading of this collection of essays on the world’s most popular sport.
The connection between politics and sport comes up in several of the articles, including an article on one of this year’s Cinderella teams, Cote d’Ivoire, which will be in it’s first World Cup while the country is in civil war, and an article on the Angolan team which is also bringing together the people of a war-torn country.
Other articles are more philosophical like Robert Coover’s piece, “Morality Play: Soccer as Theater.” Coover contrasts soccer with sports that Americans traditionally favor where statistics are king:
“Which in turn suggests another of the game’s dreamlike qualities: its ahistoricity. One is left at the end, not with data, but with impressionistic images of bodies in motion. Nothing of importance can be statistically recorded about a match except corners, shots, goals and saves (the American effort to record assists is admirable but—since it’s sometimes a complete mystery, even with TV replays, who’s scored the goal—a bit desperate), and these will tell you almost nothing about the game itself. The player who actually wins the game may be the one who moves into space at the opposite side of the field, drawing a defender, forcing a new configuration upon the defense and making virtually inevitable a goal which was before impossible, but no one—not even he—may be aware of this. It’s all narrative, and thus subjective: no two match reports are ever alike, even the goal-scorers are often different from newspaper to newspaper. Each is a story, a sequence of ambivalent metaphors, a personal revelation couched in the idiom of the faith. No game I know of is so dependent upon such flowing intangibles as “pattern” and “rhythm” and “vision” and “understanding.” Which may all be illusions. And at the same time it is also a very simple game: like dreams, almost childlike.”
