At the end of the World Cup, when I make a list of my favorite essays of the tournament, this will no doubt be on it. Whether you watch alone or in a group or at a stadium, you will know that what you are seeing is being seen by hundreds of millions of people on every corner of the globe, and that your joy, despair, or disbelief is being echoed in incomprehensibly many consciousnesses. Is there anything more ridiculous than this? There is nothing more ridiculous than this, but it’s an extraordinary feeling, too. When something incredible happens — Messi curls a ball around three defenders; Zidane head-butts Materazzi — it’s not just an exciting moment. It’s a bright line connecting you with the human race. No other sporting event can really compare to the World Cup in this regard, and when the tournament is as wild as this one has been, the feeling is even stronger. It’s why you despair that FIFA is a cabal of oleaginous quasi murderers, why their inability to control, say, match fixing is so depressing. They don’t deserve to control this. In an important sense, it has nothing to do with them. No World Cup, certainly not one in Brazil, can stand outside history. The World Cup is history. And now it’s history waiting to happen.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Jul 2014 15:43:21 +0000
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