The statue of Christopher Columbus, at Columbus and Lake Shore Drive, seemed to be pointing the way to Soldier Field as we walked over from the CTA stop at Roosevelt Road. There was something appropriate in that. The crowd had such a distinctly international flavor that it was almost as if we were all part of an allegorical reenactment of the entire huge process of settling the United States, manifest destiny and all that, the mass of us swarming toward that great gathering place in the New World, which in this case turned out to be a match in the World Cup soccer tournament.
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We were fortunate enough to see the game between Germany and Spain, which on paper, as we say here in the States, was the best match of the first-round games scheduled for Chicago. Our friend Mark, a soccer buff who worked for a time at Radio Free Europe in Munich, had ordered the tickets aeons ago, with plans to invite an old-time expatriate Briton RFE comrade over. (Cup games were scheduled at nine venues across the nation, but Chicago had the opening ceremonies, and as the Germans were defending champions from 1990 they were set for the opening game and were sure to be assigned Chicago as one of their playing sites.) But the buddy couldn’t make it–his travel money was invested in a Budapest fixer-upper–and so Mark meted out the tickets to his local friends, both soccer aficionados and the merely curious among us.
Yet there was also a huge concentration of Spanish fans, just behind us, at the south end zone, er, goal net. They were all dressed in red and yellow uniforms, so that Kevin, one of our seatmates for the day, said, “They look like they’re from Burger King.” There were Spanish fans seated right in front of us–a man took his shirt off and had his wife rub suntan lotion on his back, and she gave his love handles a playful little tweak as she performed the task–and there was a group of German fans right in front of them, so we were able to observe both factions at close quarters. The Spaniards did not sing along with their national anthem; the Germans did. Yet once the game began, neither side was quiet for long. The Germans chanted, “Deutschland, Deutschland,” punctuated with a boom-boom-boom motif on a bass drum located somewhere nearby. The Spaniards chanted “Es-pan-ya” and periodically broke into refrains of “Ole! Ole! Ole-ole-ole!” What with the few German hooligans we saw sitting down under the stands singing for beer money (“Roll Out the Barrel” was a popular favorite with them), soccer fans immediately established themselves in our mind as the singingest bunch in all of sport. Fans of the Cubs and Harry Caray don’t even make the international charts.
One such moment was the first Spanish goal. The Spaniards drove down the middle and then passed out wide right to Andoni Goikoetxea, or was it Jon Goichochea, or was it Juan Antonio Goicoechea, or was it Andoni Goicoechea? Those were the various versions of the same name in the official program, the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and a Sun-Times photo caption of the following day. If he played in the U.S. for long he would almost certainly get a nickname like Go-Go. In any case his goal was a beauty, with an element of kismet. Cutting around a German defender and into the right corner, he lifted a high shot toward the goal. Or was it merely a centering pass? It went up, held its line, passed over the goalie’s head, and dropped into the net, bouncing off the inside of the left goalpost–fantastic shot.
The main question is not why soccer isn’t popular here. It’s how it got to be so popular everywhere else. Next to baseball, in which each player separates himself from the rest in precise order, soccer is chaos. Next to basketball, it is boring.
