Waves

Yesterday was a day of waves, waves of colors and sound.  Manchester United against Madrid.  Football (what Americans call soccer).

Barcelona Won 3-1,
Then Set About Killing Their Own Coach

The lads (of any age) were in the tube singing like a men's choir on steroids (or at least a half-dozen pints).  Dads brought their sons, likewise decked out in Manchester scarves and jerseys with game-pins fixed to them.  Waves of club songs swept through the tube, and just when there was a moment of silence, someone would heft out the first bars of another song, and the tide would rise again and beat against everything in the tube station.  But even outside: they filled up pubs across not just London but all of England.  Waves of song and cheering poured out of pubs from blocks away.

The game wasn't until the evening.  This was only the warm up.

Game-Control Central: Manchester Fans during the Game

The waves of sound are even more prolific when the Coup du Monde, the World Cup (the "football Olympics"), is on.  Once, while driving from Glasgow to Canturbury and passing through a number of villages on the way to the main artery, I noticed that the streets were entirely empty of people.  No one existed in these places.  And then, at a stop sign, I heard the sound pour out of a local pub as Scotland made a goal.  Magnificent.  It sounded like an entire stadium of fans.  Unfortunately, Scotland isn't really a team to expect for a World-Cup win.  One can hope.  After all, people root for the Chicago Cubs....

Another time, in London, Joni and I hit a pub in good time before a World Cup game began.  It was when Beckahm was at his pinnacle of play and fame -- and sported the blond mohawk.

Glory Daze for Beckham. What's He Got that I Haven't?  Never Mind....

The pub filled up, and we sat with a couple in town on holiday who had two young boys -- each sporting the Beckham Mohawk.  Cool.  It was a dazzling game.

 Certainly there are complaints about the increasing emphasis that society puts on sports.  Context?  The Romans had racing teams in the circus maximus -- charioteers: the blue team, the red team, etc.  And they had their devotees.  Similar to American sports today, whether football, baseball, or what not.  And in ancient Rome, sports served to keep a certain complacency among the citizens by way of entertainment.  "Give them the circus and let them eat bread" was the word.  In America today it's "give them NASCAR and let them drink Bud."

A friend of mine put it this way: America prides itself in hiding its light under the hood of a pickup.  Too true too often -- not to be snobby about a pickup.  While all focus and no frivolousness makes Johnny a dull boy, all distraction and no concentration on more important issues makes a nation stupid.

I tend to moralize about things and ought rather to merely describe what I'm seeing (and have had to go back and change these posts so as not to make martyrs out of  my readers.  That is, "you know what a martyr is?  Someone whose blogger is a saint.")

But I mean here to say that, despite the arguments that sports are a central part of what T. S. Eliot expressed -- something that keeps us "distracted from distraction by distraction" -- yet there is a grand moment in getting caught up in the game, in the fever pitch of a crowd cheering on the home team, in the crushing feeling at a missed goal, and in the "thrill of victory," which always feels like poetic justice over the "villains" of the other team.

Waves of color, waves of sound.  Sometimes it's grand to get lost in the collective goal of a team.