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K Eids The World Cup final will be played Sunday at 2:30 p.m. sTHE SCORE by Fred Bowen
World Cup: The good, the bad and the loud I
’ve been watching the World Cup soccer championships for the past month. That’s not surprising: Mil- lions of people, including lots of kids, have been, too. It is estimated that more than 715million people will watch the final on Sunday. Here are my thoughts — some im-
portant, some silly — about the world’s biggest sports event. I usually don’t like instant replay. I think it slows down games and gives kids the idea that every call has to be
perfect. But the World Cup should use instant replay, or special referees, to determine what is and isn’t a goal. Unlike other sports where there’s more scoring, one goal is a huge deal in soccer. In the 62 World Cup games played, 44 of the games were ties or decided by one goal. That’s more than 70 percent of the games!
All the controversial calls and al-
most-goals did do one thing: They got everyone talking about soccer. Whose idea was it to give out vuvu- zelas, the long plastic horns everyone blows at the games? The 2010 World Cup will go down in history as the noisiest. Some games sounded as if they were being played inside a bee- hive. The United States had an exciting World Cup. But it is a long way from being among the top teams. The Unit-
ed States basically played even with Slovenia, Algeria, Ghana and a medio- cre English team. The U.S. team needs a real goal scorer such as Diego Forlán (Uru- guay), David Villa (Spain) or Robinho (Brazil). Those guys are magicians with the ball. I am glad that Paraguay lost in the quarterfinals. I didn’t like the team’s careful, defensive style of play and its ugly, red striped shirts. The Paraguay- an players looked as if they should be selling ice cream at a beach. One thing I love about soccer: con- tinuous play. No timeouts! Wouldn’t you love to see continuous play in bas- ketball? One thing I don’t like about soccer: all the complaining to the referees. Some of these guys are crybabies. Why did Ghana get only a penalty
kick when a Uruguayan player batted a sure score away from the goal with his hands? Ghana missed the penalty kick and eventually lost the quarterfi- nal game. Shouldn’t Ghana have been award-
ed a goal? The player from Uruguay cheated when he used his hands. It’s as if a golfer put her foot in front of the hole to stop a winning putt and then gave her opponent another putt closer to the hole. That doesn’t seem right. So who do I think will win the big game? I think Spain’s pinpoint pass- ing will defeat the Netherlands by a goal, or maybe in penalty kicks. I am sure of one thing: I’ll be watch-
ing. Along with 715million other soc- cer fans.
Fred Bowen is the author of 14 kids’ books, including “Soccer Team Upset.”
PHOTOS BY JIM INCLEDON/ ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oscar, a cat with a pair of artificial paws, can run and jump again.
Paws to consider this
Oscar the cat can walk again, thanks to a first-of-its-kind op- eration.
Oscar lost his hind feet in a farm accident in rural England last fall. A veterinarian gave the cat a pair of artificial feet using a new technique developed by uni- versity researchers in London. The cat’s prosthetic limbs were
attached directly to the bone dur- ing surgery. Then a special com- pound was applied that encour- aged the cat’s own skin and bone to grow over the metal. The result has been dramatic.
“Oscar can now run and jump
From left: Paraguay’s Óscar Cardozo looks as if he should be selling ice cream in that shirt; Landon Donovan scored the most goals (three) for the United States; vuvuzelas are really noisy; instant replay would have been nice.
PHOTOS, FROM LEFT: LLUIS GENE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; REED SAXON/ASSOCIATED PRESS; IVAN ALVARADO/REUTERS; WASHINGTON POST PHOTO ILLUSTRATION, IMAGE FROM JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
as cats should do,” said surgeon Noel Fitzpatrick. The good out- come for Oscar is important for people who’ve lost limbs, as the technique is also being tested in humans. “Knowledge about how Oscar’s been treated can be carried over to human treatment going for- ward,” said Mike Nolan, Oscar’s owner. “So that’s good for every- one.”
The Bus Doctor, averting countless vacation disasters bus doctor from C1
bumper-to-bumper traffic, a cinnamon- scented air freshener and a box of tooth- picks on the dash. This man knows about what can go wrong with buses, and why, and how long it’s going to take to get them fixed. He knows the migratory patterns of the nation’s tourists — how June means school kids in matching T-shirts, how August is Canadians, how seniors roll through in September, and October brings the Southerners passing through on their way to Vermont foliage. He knows the companies: Spirit Tours,
Wagon Tours, Superior Tours, Executive Coach, Martz, Quick’s, Conestoga, Scene America — and where you’re likely to find the coaches parked. He knows this because he is some- times the only thing that stands between tourists and a ruined vacation spent stranded by the road instead of strolling through the Smithsonian thinking that the Hope Diamond is less impressive than they thought it would be. He is Bryan Cebula, Bus Doctor.
A one-man operation
What happened was that the high school students from California were out here on their East Coast class trip, the kind that includes presidential memori- als and snow-globe souvenirs, and irrita- ble chaperones placing strips of Scotch tape on hotel room doors, determining who snuck out in the night by which seals got broken. Today was Manassas. The driver of the
charter bus, Thaddeus Hargrove, had taken the passengers there and dropped them off. He planned to set off to Wal- Mart to pick up a few things while the kids were seeing the battlefield. Only the bus wouldn’t start. Forty-five minutes later when the group came back, the chaperone said, “You’re back from Wal-Mart already?” and Hargrove said, “Man, I never left.” Hargrove got another bus to come pick up the kids — they still had to hit Wash- ington National Cathedral — then rus- tled up a phone number that he’d kept on hand for an occasion such as this, a phone number passed between bus driv- ers throughout the Washington region. The Bus Doctor cometh. Cebula fixed the problem — the starter — in Manassas, but warned Hargrove that it would probably fritz out again if it wasn’t replaced soon. He went to buy the new part, and they arranged to meet in Pentagon City. Now, the bus sits under a tree, directly in front of the Metro and the shopping mall.
Ahead of him, Cebula, 51, has parked his truck — big, white, a spare generator
MONICA HESSE/THE WASHINGTON POST WHAT’S UP DOWN UNDER?“You can’t find anybody who wants to do this work anymore,” says Bryan Cebula.
and air compressor in the back — which says “BUS DOCTOR” in block letters. There’s a cartoon rendition of Cebula wearing a lab coat and stethoscope and carrying a power drill, painted on the truck’s side. “Am I okay here?” Hargrove hollers out to Cebula, wondering if the bus should be moved. “The sun’s going to cook my hindparts, but other than that, we’ll be okay,” Ceb- ula says, ambling over to the rear of the charter bus. The Bus Doctor springs open an access panel toward the rear of the coach. He’s diagnosed the problem (the starter), but can’t fix it until the bus has cooled down. He leaves the access panel open to help that process along, then tells Hargrove to go grab a coffee. Cooling could take as much as an hour; Cebula clambers back into his truck and heads to Capitol Hill for another job. This is the life of the Bus Doctor, the one-man operation Cebula runs out of his home in Manassas, where he’s lived his whole life, and his big white truck. If he’s not on his way to a job, then he’s waiting around for one, patrolling the motor-coach hot spots: the Capitol, the Mall and Arlington National Cemetery, where the buses stand shoulder to shoul- der and the drivers shoot the breeze while they wait for their tour groups to return, sweatier and crankier than they
were before. A trip to Washington is not complete unless everyone is at their sweatiest and crankiest. “I don’t want to sound stupid and say I
like the adrenaline,” Cebula says. “But I do like the rush of helping people.” He can fix nothing for days, then five or six in a row. His best year, he fixed 1,300 buses, almost all in the warmer months. Things don’t break down as much in the winter. He’s been doing this type of work since he was about 16, when he got an after-school job washing buses for Colonial Transit. He worked up to changing tires, then graduated from high school and went to diesel school to learn big-vehicle mechanics. Met his wife, Marion, in the office of a bus company; she’s now a CPA for the federal govern- ment.
The final authority The Capitol Hill job turns into a two-
fer. The Department of Transportation has set up a checkpoint, and officers are waylaying buses that don’t pass on-site safety inspections. Two frazzled-looking drivers stand by their coaches, clutching the tickets that describe the mechanical problems.
Cebula glances at the papers before slipping neatly under the first bus. A quick brake adjustment. The second may or may not be broken after all. Officers wondered if a tie rod
was doing something it wasn’t supposed to be doing; the driver, who is piloting a group of Chinese tourists, says the bus is just a brand-new model, behaving exact- ly the way it should. Cebula assesses the situation, agrees with the driver. “That’s why we called him,” says Oscar
Garibay, one of the officers. “Everybody knows the Doctor. He’s the final author- ity.” There are other ways to get your bus
fixed, sure. The big companies — the Greyhounds, the Martzes — all have in- house guys, and there are plenty of me- chanics in the area. But if it’s 4 a.m., and you’re in God-Knows, Va., and you got a load of passengers who paid good money and used good vacation time, and they don’t want to hear anything about “me- chanical difficulties,” then your options are limited. “You can’t find anybody who wants to do this work anymore,” Cebula says. The young kids “don’t want to get their hands dirty, don’t want to work nights.” Last year, after decades of weekend work, Cebula made a deal with his wife. For one weekend a month, he would let his calls forward to the answering service and not go out on the job. “But you can still hear when someone calls. It does a little half- ring before it goes to the service.” His ears perk up. He can’t help but wonder who’s on the line. For whatever reason, buses never got
the respect of planes and trains, even though they’ve got the comfy chairs, the back-of-seat televisions, the free water bottles, even though they provided 762 million passenger trips nationally and moved those people a total of 65 billion miles (ABA’s census, again). People treat them as traffic hazards,
eyesores, nuisances. Traffic cops give drivers tickets if they’re caught idling for more than a few minutes.
Idle conversation On a different day than the Capitol
Hill job, the Bus Doctor is again back at Pentagon City. He’d been driving past when he spotted a couple of drivers he knows standing in front of the Ritz hotel: Warren Knott, whom everybody calls Preacher Man, and L.A. Johnson, whom everybody calls Quickdraw. (Earlier that day, he chatted with a driver named R.H. Campbell, whom everybody calls Soup, and they reminisced about ’96, when they they met up in Atlanta, dead- heading empty buses down to Georgia.) The three men chat about the issues of driving a bus today. “They say they want green buses,”
Preacher Man says, “but they ticket you when you try to regenerate,” to burn off the leftover carbon particles in an eco- friendly manner. This process takes time, which the traffic cops, bus drivers say, treat as idling and ticket. “They need a lot,” says Quickdraw.
They need a big parking lot where the buses could go, so they wouldn’t have to clog up the streets, circling and circling, trying not to idle. Preacher Man and Quickdraw are both
on librarian duty today — the American Library Association is at the Washington Convention Center and the two men have been tasked with ferrying attendees back and forth between the convention and their hotels. “They’re a good group,” Preacher Man
says of the librarians. Not so bookish as he would have expected, and they were all nice and polite, undemanding, happy to be in Washington. The breeze having officially been shot, the Bus Doctor decides it’s time to get back in his truck, take one more spin by Arlington, and see if there’s any business to be had there. He starts to pull away in his truck, but
Preacher Man and Quickdraw call after him. There’s a driver back there who has something wrong with his door. It won’t open from the inside. Cebula grabs a ball-peen hammer and
goes off to see the problem. “He’s fixed all of us at one time or an-
other,” Preacher Man says, looking on. “He’s the best. If he can’t fix it, it don’t need to be fixed.”
hessem@washpost.com
KLMNO FRAZZ
THURSDAY, JULY 8, 2010 JEF MALLETT
TODAY: Partly cloudy
HIGH LOW 94 74
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN SPAETH, 9, WASHINGTON
TODAY’S NEWS
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