SUNDAY, JUNE 13, 2010
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Embracing the beautiful game’s ugly side T
soccer from B1
fact, three national teams have combined to win 12 of the 18 World Cups — Brazil five times, Italy fourand Germany (includ- ing West Germany) three. The tournament’s traditional champi-
ons have typically represented nations that during the past century were marked by defeats and setbacks. Spain, for exam- ple, now stands at the edge of a financial precipice — but along with Brazil it has one of the best and most balanced teams competing in this year’s cup. So while soccer is touted as a powerful globalizing force, it has in part earned that status by keeping out or down some of the globe’s most powerful nations. It’s not just that the United States remains in the sec- ond tier of soccer’s ranks. Other big and emerging powers, such as China, India, Russia and Japan, have also failed to leave their mark in the world’s most important sports tournament. China has qualified just once, in 2002, and its team failed to score a single goal. India qualified by de- fault in 1950 but refused to attend when told that its team, accustomed to playing barefoot, had to wear shoes. Japan is cur- rently ranked 45th in the world, right after Gabon, Scotland and Ecuador, and three spots up from Burkina Faso. China, at No. 84, edges out Mozambique and Malawi. The Soviet Union’s best showing at the World Cup was fourth place, in 1966. They’ll be cheering in Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia), Tegucigalpa (Hondu- ras) and Yamoussoukro (Ivory Coast) dur- ing this World Cup, but no crowds will be dancing in the streets of Moscow, Beijing or New Delhi, because none of their teams qualified. And though many in Washing- ton will be tuned in, alas, a disproportion- ate chunk of those fans can be found on Embassy Row or in expat bars. Maybe that would change, however, if America saw through all the glittering glo- bo-babble and realized that the World Cup may be the last place on Earth where the United States can credibly play the role of underdog, the last remaining frontier where the country has yet to triumph over the old order dominated by Europe and its former empires.
I
f good old-fashioned American jingo- ism is not enough to stir the souls of po- tential soccer fans, watching the may- hem and drama that are the results of everyone else’s nationalism, turmoil and rivalries certainly should be. The recent and not-so-recent history of the world will play out on the pitches and in the stands in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Pretoria and the other match sites. This year, both Koreas will play, even as their armies stand at the brink of war. Hon- duras is fresh off a constitutional crisis. Mexico is battling to maintain control in the face of drug violence. Ivory Coast has been split by strife for more than a decade (although it is now united in despair over national hero Didier Drogba’s fractured el- bow). And old tensions — some dating to wars centuries ago — still fester among sev- eral teams: between Japan and the Koreas; between the Dutch and the Germans; and between Argentina and take your pick of Chile, England and Brazil. Such political backdrops have been a
defining part of World Cup soccer since the early days. The second tournament, hosted in 1934 by Benito Mussolini’s Italy, featured a local star who had been banned for life from soccer because of bribery charges but somehow managed to get re- instated in time to compete. Fortunately for all, given Il Duce’s temperament, Italy won the cup. Four years later, at the com- petition in France, the Italian team re- ceived an unsettling message of encour- agement from the dictator: “Win or die.” (Italy won again.)
During the regional qualifying rounds
before the 1970World Cup, riots involving Honduran and Salvadoran soccer fans
PETER SCHOLS/GPD VIA REUTERS Italy’s Marco Materazzi, left, falls after being head-butted by France’s Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup final.
Nasty, brutish, in shorts Soccer is known for violence off the field, but things can
get pretty rough on the pitch as well. Few fans will forget how star French midfielder Zinedine Zidane head-butted Italy’s Marco Materazzi to the ground, got expelled and may have cost France the title in the 2006 cup. But Zidane was keep- ing alive a tradition of onfield violence and abuse. In the 1954 World Cup, hosted by Switzerland, hostilities between top contenders Hungary and Brazil became so in- tense that the Brazilians carried the brawl into the Hungari- an locker room. In the ’62 tournament in Chile, the matches were regularly marred by on-field fighting, the worst example being a bout between the host team and Italy that the BBC at the time called “the most stupid, appalling, disgusting and disgraceful exhibition of football, possibly in the history of the game.”
seem like a mild difference of opinion. And that’s not even counting the excite- ment provided by hooliganism or the game’s recurring theme of dirty play.
he final piece of soccer’s ugly appeal seems tailor-made for American tastes: Top players (and their wives
and girlfriends) have turned the sport into the world’s favorite form of reality televi- sion, a nonstop soap opera. Over the years, footballers have gone from average-size, average-looking, average-paid representa- tives of everyman to parodies of excessive star culture, such as tatted-up David Beck- ham and his linguine-thin wife, Victoria. This is the part of the game where we despair as Argentina’s Maradona goes from undersize soccer genius to bloated, drug-addled misfit, suspended for a year for cocaine use and kicked out of the 1994 cup for using a banned substance — only to show up in South Africa this month as the coach of his country’s team. It’s where we watch as money corrupts and changes soccer in much the same way it distorts most mainstream American sports. Beckham, according to Forbes the world’s top-paid soccer player, made an es- timated $40 million last year in salary and endorsements, while the 20 other best-paid players each made more than $10 million. Suddenly, these conglomerates-in-spikes are more closely marked by paparazzi off the field than by defenders on it. Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo goes on a few dates with Kim Kardashian (explain to the world that we don’t watch soccer, but we watch her), and it is international news. Everyone in England knows that na- tional star Wayne Rooney sought out pros- titutes as a teenager before settling down with wife Coleen. But Rooney, perhaps the second best player in the world after Ar- gentina’s Lionel Messi, has a hard time keeping up with the melodrama sur- rounding former English team captain John Terry and his extramarital affair with his teammate Wayne Bridge’s ex-girl- friend, Vanessa Perroncel. And that scandal hardly achieved the sleaze of several top French soccer players — including national team star Franck Ribery — who this year were caught with an underage prostitute who had been working out of a hot Parisian nightclub. In short, the real-life off-field exploits
Today, Web sites chronicle and debate the worst fouls ever in World Cup play. Their choices range from the merely disgusting — Iraq’s Samir Shaker Mahmoud getting a one- year ban for spitting on a referee during the 1986 cup — to the truly appalling, as when Brazil’s Leonardo took down America’s Tab Ramos in the 1994 tournament, in the proc- ess fracturing Ramos’s skull. Arguably the dirtiest play in World Cup history came in 1982, when Germany’s goalkeep- er, Harald Schumacher, launched himself into the air to wipe out France’s oncoming Patrick Battiston — resulting in a temporary coma, a damaged spine and a couple of missing teeth for the French defender. (No foul was called, and Ger- many went on to win that semifinal match in a penalty shoot- out.)
— David J. Rothkopf
have started to outstrip the tawdriness de- picted in television dramas such as Brit- ain’s popular “Footballers’ Wives” — and the parade of mug shots and legal revela- tions that punctuate “SportsCenter” every night.
O
n the field and off, soccer provides an endless story line packed with the villains, dirty deeds, sex, drugs
and violence that are essential elements of any entertainment hit. No matter the au- dience, there’s an irresistible narrative: For nationalists and for globalists, for revolutionaries and for traditionalists, for lovers of the game and for lovers of scan- dal, there is a subtext and a passionate ar- gument surrounding every match, every goal. For every face in the crowd beaming with joy, there is someone crying through his face paint; for every hug, there is a glare or a shove or perhaps a war. The ancient Greeks said drama is about
contributed to what has become known as la guerra del fútbol — an actual shooting war between the two Central American nations. The conflict had no clear winners, but at least El Salvador earned a spot in the cup.
And the 1986 tournament, held in Mexi-
co, saw a quarterfinal match between Ar- gentina and England, two nations that had recently gone to war over the Falkland Islands. Argentina lost the war but won the soccer battle, 2-1, on two goals — one il-
legal, the other glorious — by Diego Mara- dona. (Maradona’s “hand of God” goal was a blown call so momentous that it makes umpire Jim Joyce’s recent mistake that wrecked a perfect game by Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga feel down- right little league.) Perhaps the most brutal instance of do- mestic strife intersecting with soccer fol- lowed the 1994World Cup. Days after acci- dentally scoring against his own team and contributing to a 2-1 loss to the host U.S.
squad, Colombian defenseman Andres Es- cobar was gunned down outside a bar in Medellin; one theory points the finger at drug lords who were putting money into Colombia’s soccer teams. The grand marketers of the soccer world play down political subplots to im- portant games, but they are a big reason the world views soccer with such passion. National, regional and ethnic grudge matches are played out on the pitch in a way that makes Ohio State vs. Michigan
conflict, and so too is this game. In the same way that drama produces transcen- dence, so too does this game. And that’s where the beauty comes from. Oh sure, you’ll see it in masterful offenses, teams of 11 men thinking as one, midfielders seeing three moves ahead, strikers streaking down the field at top speed, balls defying physics. But much of what is truly bonito about this game is the universality of its ugliness and the extravagance of its highs and lows. It is a heightened reality like any opera, a universal truth like any faith, a game every bit as beautiful and as ugly as the planet that it — perhaps more than anything else — helps unite.
Climate fixes, from volcanic ash to breakfast cereal climate from B1
er. One of the least crazy possible meth- ods is the Pinatubo Option, in which we would somehow cloak the Earth’s atmos- phere in a layer of reflective particles, which would block the sun and cool the planet just enough to maintain some kind of climatic equilibrium. Depending on your point of view, this
sort of action is either urgently necessary or the global equivalent of playing Rus- sian roulette. It’s probably both. Would we come out on the other side with pleas- ant summers and mild winters, the seas and the skies in perfect climatic har- mony? Or would it end up, as Jeff Goodell writes in “How to Cool the Planet,” “like a bad sci-fi novel writ large”? In the dis- aster movie that could be our future, will Manhattan be crushed by giant icebergs or flooded by a warm tropical tsunami? Certainly, human history is rife with
such experiments gone wrong, in which “solving” one ecological problem created awhole bunch of new ones. Take the cane toad, imported to save Australia’s sugar crop from a destructive type of worm. In the absence of natural predators, the poi- sonous toads quickly spread everywhere, driving out native species.Or of more im- mediate concern: Some of the chemical dispersants being used on the gulf oil
spill are likely to be more toxic and envi- ronmentally damaging than the crude oil itself.
Apart from a handful of self-styled
rainmakers, whose colorful history Goo- dell recounts, humans haven’t tried to mess much with the climate. Curiously, however, climate research was strong on both sides of the Cold War, as the Soviets tinkered with ways to make Siberia more temperate, while the Americans looked into the implications of “nuclear winter.” (Also, Lyndon Johnson spent millions on a secret program to try to make it rain on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.) One of the leading advocates for geoengineering was the late Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, archpriest of the Nuclear Age and clearly a guy who liked to think big. But the thing about climate and weath-
er is that they are highly unpredictable — and they never abide by our notions of fairness. If we cool off Washington’s sum- mers, will we also disrupt Asia’s mon- soons, which help supply food for billions of people? For whose benefit would the climate be changed? The scorching Euro- pean summer of 2003, for example, was terrible for the elderly, thousands of whom perished — but it was a great year for Bordeaux. And what if countries used climate control as a weapon against their foes?
“Depending on your perspective,” Eli
Kintisch writes in “Hack the Planet,” “the uncertainty surrounding the Pinatubo Option feels like either an ethical deal breaker or a regrettable price for an idea that might save the human race.” (Al- though, according to Kintisch, a Pinatu- boized climate would probably be more stable than one in which warming is left unchecked.) We won’t know until we try it.
science is as inexact as 19th-century med- icine, leeches and all. The closest we’ve come was a strange but entertaining ef- fort to seed the oceans with iron filings by a now-defunct startup company called Planktos. But as the climate heats up, and if scientists’ predictions of scary, sudden changes come true, such options are go- ing to look more attractive. Especially the Pinatubo Option: We could scatter parti- cles into the stratosphere with a fleet of high-altitude planes, for the (relatively) low price of a few billion dollars. Or, as another scientist has suggested, we could seed the stratosphere via miles and miles of hoses, held aloft by blimps and spray- ing tiny particles into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Other scientists have looked at methods of “cloud brightening,” with much the same goal.
W
e’re still a long way from that point. As the ecological theorist James Lovelock puts it, climate
Though they cover similar ground,
“How to Cool the Planet” and “Hack the Planet” take somewhat different ap- proaches to the topic. Goodell, also the author of “Big Coal,” is more of a storytell- ing, big-picture guy who hobnobs with the likes of Lovelock and Bill Gates. Kin- tisch, an editor at Science magazine, is less facile with his prose but delves deep- er into the science and the politics behind geoengineering. Goodell hangs with the generals, while Kintisch hunkers in the trenches. Yet both books leave some big ques- tions unanswered, such as: How would
dia off coal — another prerequisite to cut- ting CO2
. “Our approach to dealing with
global warming so far,” Goodell writes, “has essentially been to ask everyone on the planet to come together, understand what is at stake, and do the right thing.” But human behavior isn’t always driven by fear of long-term consequences, as anyone who’s ever had a hangover knows. We’ve been doing as we please for centu- ries; it’s a lot to expect us to change our consuming, polluting ways enough to make a difference.
Both books lead the reader to conclude that, sooner or later, we’re going to reach
Will Manhattan be crushed by giant icebergs or flooded by a tropical tsunami?
this work in practice? It’s still early, and geoengineering remains largely hypo- thetical. Very little basic research has been done, thanks in part to obstruction by environmentalists, for whom the idea of quick fixes is anathema. It shouldn’t be. Reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere — or even just
slowing the rate of growth — is going to require drastic cutbacks in our sacro- sanct “American way of life.” That seems about as likely as weaning China and In-
for the quick fix. It could be a well- thought-out, globally agreed-upon plan to stabilize our climate — or a last-ditch effort to stop Earth from turning into Ve- nus. As both books make clear, in their words but also in their brevity, the sci- ence is still very hypothetical. Call it cli- mate-hacking, planet-cooling or geoengi- neering — it’d sure be nice if, when the time comes, we knew what we were do- ing.
bookworld@washpost.com
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