Dr. Forbush Thinks

I don’t normally write about sports. But, this is more than just a post about sports. In fact someone might say that this is a post about the “Culture Wars.” After all, American culture is all about Mom, Baseball, and Apple Pie. Then I guess we added American Football, video games and watching mind numbing reality TV shows. But, every time you think that you know what a culture is, it changes. And, this little story illustrates how that might happen on the local level.

The World Cup Semifinal game between Italy and Germany was quite good. My son and I have been following the World Cup this year, watching some games and rooting for our favorites based on nothing more or less than if we have been to the country or if we liked the color of their jersey.

So, with the Italy Germany game I was undecided who I should root for at the beginning of the game. We lived in Germany for three years and have friends from there, but we also have friends in Italy as well. As the game progressed it became clear to me that Italy was playing the better soccer, but they weren’t able to get the ball into the goal.

I should set the scene before I go any further. We were invited over to our friend’s house to watch the game at noon our time. Our friends have three daughters, all of whom had predetermined that they don’t like soccer. As I said before, my son and I have been watching the games, and the rest of the family has stopped by the TV to watch a portion of a game or two and they had begun to catch the World Cup bug. However, it would be a far reach to really claim that they were “soccer fans.” So, when we were invited to go watch the game, our friend’s daughters were a bit upset at my kids who actually thought that it might be fun to watch the game. I actually thought that they might watch a few minutes of the game, then they would be distracted and go play something else.

We got to their house just a little bit late, but since they had TiVo it wasn’t a major inconvenience. We were able to pause the game, set out the snacks and continue the game. In fact, by pausing the game we were able to fast forward through the halftime commercials. It was quite interesting to see the girls begin to pick their favorite player and root for him.

At halftime I was rooting for Italy, because I thought that they deserved the win based on how well they were playing. And, by the end of regulation we were really worried that the game would be scoreless through the overtime and the end of regulation would be decided by penalty kicks. However, Italy continued to play even better through out the overtime, hitting the cross bar and the post in attempts to score. Germany did manage a couple of shots, but we were clearly rooting for Italy.

And, when Italy finally put their first goal into the net with only a couple of minutes left in the game the house erupted with shouts of joy. However, even with all the shouts of joy there was still a moment when we all thought that there was a chance that Germany could capitalize on the potential overconfidence of the Italian team. It was possible that Italy could let down their guard for a fraction of a minute and tie the game. But, while everyone was still in this moment of celebration and guarded optimism the Italian players brought the ball back down the field and scored again. For a moment, some of us thought that it was merely an instant replay of the previous goal, except somehow this one went in on the right side of the net and the previous one went in on the left.

Italy had lived up to its playing and certainly deserved to win the game. It was hard to imagine how I could have gone into watching a game not really caring who had won, and end up so emotionally drained and happy about the outcome of the game. And, it was interesting to see a whole house full of people who had gathered together with little or no history of soccer in their blood be converted into loony soccer fans by just one game.

Unfortunately, I had to work yesterday, so I wasn’t able to watch the France Portugal game. But, the funny thing was that since my kids are out of school they decided to get together with the other family and watch the game. I had to ask them if the game was any good when I came home. They had certainly caught the World Cup fever, because they started complaining about the officiating. They thought that Portugal had several calls called against them when they should have been against France, or that they simply were not penalties at all.

Well, I certainly know what I am doing this weekend. There are two games left. The consolation game for third place on Saturday and the Final on Sunday.


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Don't forget what Stephen Colbert said, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."


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Sports, World Cup, Soccer