Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) (5 page)

Now, before I get to my point,
*
I need to stipulate some things:

• Smoking cigarettes is bad for you.
  
• Drinking too much alcohol is bad for you.
  
• Driving under the influence of alcohol is very wrong and you should never, ever do it.
  
• It is also wrong to steal private property from corporations,
  even for a scavenger hunt
  .
  
• My parents and their friends probably would have lived longer if their lifestyle choices had been healthier.
  

So I am conceding that by the standards of today, my parents' behavior would be considered irresponsible. Actually, “irresponsible” is not a strong enough word. By the standards of today, my parents and their friends were crazy. A great many activities they considered to be perfectly OK—hitchhiking, for example; or driving without seat belts; or letting a child go trick-or-treating without a watchful parent hovering within eight feet, ready to pounce if the child is given a potentially lethal item such as an apple; or engaging in any form of recreation more strenuous than belching without wearing a helmet—are now considered to be insanely dangerous. By the standards of today, the main purpose of human life is to eliminate all risk so that human life will last as long as humanly possible, no matter how tedious it gets.

And the list of things we're not supposed to do anymore gets longer all the time. Just today, as I was researching this essay,
*
I encountered an article on the Internet headlined:

IS YOUR HANDSHAKE AS DANGEROUS AS SMOKING?

The answer, in case you are a complete idiot, is: Of
course
your handshake is as dangerous as smoking. The article explains that handshakes transmit germs, which cause diseases such as MERS. MERS stands for “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome,” a fatal disease that may have originated in camels. This is yet another argument, as if we needed one, against shaking hands with camels. But the article suggests that we should consider not shaking hands with
anybody
. (Again, Dick Cheney, if you're reading this: I am truly sorry.)

If you could travel back in time to one of my parents' parties and interrupt the singing to announce to the guests that shaking hands could transmit germs and therefore they should stop doing it, they would laugh so hard they'd drop their cigarettes into their drinks. They were just not as into
worrying
as we are today.

And it wasn't just cigarettes and alcohol they didn't worry about. They also didn't worry that there might be harmful chemicals in the water that they drank
right from the tap
. If they wanted to order a dish at a restaurant—chicken, for example—they didn't interrogate the waiter about what ingredients it was prepared with, or whether the chicken contained steroids or was allowed to range freely or was executed humanely; they just ordered the damn chicken. They didn't worry that if they threw their trash into the wrong receptacle, they were killing baby polar bears and hastening the extinction of the human race. They didn't worry about consuming trans fats, gluten, fructose, and all the other food components now considered so dangerous they could be used to rob a bank (“Give him the money! He's got gluten!”).

Above all, they did not worry about providing a perfect, risk-free environment for their children. They loved us, sure. But they didn't feel obligated to spend every waking minute running interference between us and the world. They were parents, but they were not engaged 24/7 in what we now call “parenting,” this all-consuming job we have created, featuring many crucial child-rearing requirements that my parents' generation was blissfully unaware of.

They didn't go to prenatal classes, so they didn't find out all the things that can go wrong when a person has a baby, so they didn't spend months worrying about those things. They just had their babies, and usually it worked out, the way it has for millions of years. They didn't have car seats, so they didn't worry that the car seat they just paid $249 for might lack some feature that the car seat their friends just paid $312 for
does
have. They didn't form “play groups” where they sat around with other new parents watching their babies drool and worrying that their drooling baby was behind some other drooling baby in reaching whatever critical childhood development stage they read about in their thirty-seven parenting handbooks written by experts, each listing hundreds, if not thousands, of things they should worry about.

It would never have occurred to members of my parents' generation to try to teach a two-year-old to read; they figured that was what school was for. And they didn't obsess for years over
which
school their kids should attend, because pretty much everybody's kids went to the local schools, which pretty much everybody considered to be good enough. They didn't scheme and connive and nag the school administrators to make sure their kids got certain teachers; their kids got who they got, and if they didn't get the best teacher, hey, that was part of life. The parents didn't hover around the school keeping an eye on their kids and interfering whenever they felt their child was not getting the absolute best whatever. They didn't know every grade their child got on every test. They found out how their child was doing when the child brought home a report card. If the grades were bad, they didn't march into the school and complain that the school had failed their child. They told their child to shape up, and they maybe even—prepare to be horrified—gave their child a smack on the back of the head. They didn't worry that this would scar the child psychologically for life.

They didn't worry that their children would get bored, so they didn't schedule endless after-school activities and drive their kids to the activities and stand around with other parents watching their kids engage in the activities. Instead, they sent their kids out to play. They didn't worry about how or where they played as long as they got home for dinner, which was very likely to involve gluten.

If a kid played a sport, the parents
might
go to the games. But they didn't complain to the coach that their kid wasn't playing enough, or make fools of themselves by getting into fights with other parents or screaming at the referee. It just wasn't that big a deal to them. It was kids playing games.

I'm not saying my parents' generation didn't give a crap. I'm saying they gave a crap mainly about big things, like providing food and shelter, and avoiding nuclear war. They'd made it through some rough times, and now, heading into middle age, building careers and raising families, they figured they had it pretty good. Not
perfect
, but pretty good. So at the end of the workweek, they allowed themselves to cut loose—to celebrate their lives, their friendships, their success. They sent the kids off to bed, and they partied. They drank, laughed, danced, sang, maybe stole a piece of an IBM sign. They had fun,
grown-up
fun, and they didn't feel guilty about it.

Whereas we modern parents, living in the era of Death by Handshake, rarely pause to celebrate the way our parents did because we're too busy parenting. We never
stop
parenting. We are
all over
our kids' lives—making sure they get whatever they want, removing obstacles from their path, solving their problems and—above all—worrying about what else will go wrong, so we can fix it for them. We're in permanent trick-or-treat mode, always hovering eight feet away from our children, always ready to pounce on the apple.

Yes, we've gotten really, really good at parenting, we Boomers. This is fortunate, because for some inexplicable reason a lot of our kids seem to have trouble getting a foothold in adult life, which is why so many of them are still living with us at age thirty-seven.

They're lucky they have us around.

* * *

* * *

When I told people I was going to Brazil, they all had basically the same reaction:

“Brazil is a beautiful country!” they'd say. “Don't wear any jewelry!”

Or: “The Brazilians are so nice! Do NOT carry cash!”

And so on. It was always some form of “It's going to be great!” followed by “You're going to die.”

The guidebooks had basically the same message: Lavish praise for the beauty of Brazil and its warmhearted people, sprinkled with warnings not to carry your passport, never to display your phone in public, not to carry too much money, not to leave the airport, etc. There was also advice on what to do when—inevitably—you got robbed: You were to hand over your money immediately when the robbers showed you their knife, which apparently was the standard Brazilian street robbery procedure. Some experts recommended that you carry two wallets, or keep your money in separate wads, so that you could give money to the robbers and still have some left.

I'll be honest: These warnings made me nervous. This is pretty funny when you consider that I live in Miami, which can be a dangerous place, with a segment of the population capable of horrific acts of violence. And those are the
police
. The criminals are even worse.

So you'd think I wouldn't be afraid of mere knife-wielding Brazilian street robbers. But I was. To prepare for the trip, I purchased a variety of robber-thwarting items, including shorts and shirts that had secret pockets, and several hidden pouch things that you attach to your belt and wear inside your pants, thus rendering your valuables invisible, as well as, on a hot day, too disgusting to steal.

Perhaps you're wondering why, if I was so worried, I didn't just cancel my trip, or go someplace that seemed safer than Brazil, such as Afghanistan. The answer is that Brazil was hosting the World Cup, the biggest soccer tournament of all. My sportswriter wife Michelle, who has covered six World Cups, was going to be in Brazil for five weeks, and the plan was for me and our daughter Sophie to go down and spend some time with her.

But there was another reason I wanted to go: I have become a big fan of the World Cup and the sport of soccer. This is a fairly recent development in my life. Like most Americans my age (107), I grew up in an era when, if you were a boy, you played the traditional American sports: baseball, football, basketball, farting and throwing rocks at your friends. In gym class, we sometimes engaged in an activity called “soccer,” but I am putting it in quotation marks because you couldn't really call what we did an actual sport. We did not care, at all, who won. We basically stood around on the field in random semi-motionless clots. If the ball happened to roll into our immediate vicinity, we kicked it, but our objective was to send it into somebody else's vicinity so that we would no longer have to concern ourselves with it. It never occurred to us to try to use the ball to achieve some larger purpose.

In college, during the sixties, I played intramural soccer, but again, it was not highly competitive. Our sole athletic objective, as players, was to fulfill the college athletic requirement. So the mood tended to be very mellow.

Q. How mellow was it?

A. I once smoked a joint on the field
during a game.

After college I pretty much forgot about soccer for several decades. I was vaguely aware that abroad it was popular to the point of fatal riots. But I never watched international soccer.

This changed in 1998 thanks to my wife, who went to France when it hosted the World Cup. My son Rob and I joined her in Paris for the last three weeks of the tournament. It turned out to be the best party I ever attended. I've been to Super Bowls, World Series and the Olympics; I've been part of vast boisterous, barfing mobs in Times Square and Bourbon Street. But I'd never seen anything like the summer of 1998 in Paris. The streets were packed with happy, face-painted, flag-draped fans from all over the world, singing, dancing, chanting, mooning
*
and making a valiant effort to consume all the alcohol in Western Europe. These people had
unbelievable
partying stamina. They went hard all night, every night. I'm sure most of them died soon afterward from bodily abuse. But they had a LOT of fun while they lasted.

Another wonderful aspect of that World Cup was seeing the French undergo a transformation from a people who were too reserved, sophisticated, intellectual and just generally French to concern themselves with some childish game into batshit soccer maniacs. The French team that year was not favored to win, or even do particularly well; when Rob and I arrived, the locals we spoke to generally sneered at all the rah-rah patriotism of the foreign fans. The sneering began with the taxi driver who drove us from the airport, who, having determined that we were Americans and therefore yahoos, said, “To you,
ze sport
is very important. We do not care so much about
ze sport
.”

We heard a lot of that. But the French team kept winning, and with each win the French people found that they cared more about
ze sport
. By the time they got into the final, everybody in Paris, including the
Mona Lisa
, was wearing blue, white and red face paint. In the final game, France played Brazil, which was heavily favored. But the French team—led by a wondrously talented player with the wondrous name Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane—won, and Paris went completely insane.

Rob and I were among the million or so beyond-ecstatic people celebrating on the Champs-Élysées that night, and random French persons kept hugging and even kissing us, despite the fact that we were American yahoos. It was such a wildly happy night that the devastated Brazilians—there were thousands in Paris—soon ceased despairing about their loss and commenced partying. (The Brazilians are party people; more on this later.)

But it wasn't just the partying that got me into the World Cup; it was also—in fact mainly—the sport of soccer. I had never seen it played at the world-class level. All of the soccer I'd watched, aside from the pathetic school games I'd played in, involved my kids playing what we Americans call “youth soccer.” I am not knocking youth soccer. It's a wholesome family activity that involves a tremendous amount of family togetherness in the form of families spending a lot of time together in confined spaces such as cars. There is so much togetherness that sometimes you sincerely want, as a family, to strangle each other.

My daughter Sophie plays on a “travel” team, which means that every weekend we travel approximately 200 miles to play in a tournament against other travel teams, which have also traveled long distances, sometimes coming from the very same city where we originated. The reason we travel these distances, rather than just stay home and play each other there, is that the games must be played in a place where there is a reasonable chance that somebody will be struck by lightning. All youth soccer tournaments—this is a strict rule—must be played in a locale with a 95 percent or greater probability of violent thunderstorms. If we truly want to end the drought in sub-Saharan Africa, all we have to do is schedule a youth soccer tournament there. The entire region will be underwater within hours.

So our youth soccer experience involves spending many hours in parking lots during heavy downpours, huddled together, as a family, in our cars, waiting for lightning to stop striking the field. On those rare occasions when the weather permits the girls to play, the parents, most of whom could not personally kick a ball without spraining both ankles, stand on the sidelines and yell contradictory instructions—“Go to the ball!” “Spread out!” etc.—which the girls wisely ignore. Every now and then one of the teams scores a goal, at which point all the parents of the opposing team yell, “Offside!” Offside is an important soccer rule that nobody really understands, so everybody yells it a lot. When the tournament ends, the parents experience either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, while the girls resume taking selfies.

I enjoy watching Sophie's games, because she is my daughter and I love her and I would happily watch her peel turnips. But I am frankly not interested in watching youth soccer unless one of the youths playing is my child. Whereas I think that big-time international soccer—the kind I saw for the first time at that 1998 World Cup—is the best sport there is.

I realize that many Americans disagree with me on this. Many Americans think soccer is awful. Among the main criticisms are:

• It's foreign.
  
• Many foreigners are involved.
  
• These people call it “football.”
  
• It's not football!
  Football
  is football.
  
• You can't even use your hands!
  
• It's boring.
  
• Nobody ever scores.
  
• If anybody ever
  does
  score, it doesn't count because he was “offside.”
  
• Whatever the hell THAT means.
  
• It's SOOOO boring.
  
• Seriously:
  Nobody ever scores
  .
  
• Sometimes the games end in ties.
  
• TIES, for God's sake.
  
• Why do they even bother using a ball?
  
• Despite the fact that nothing ever happens, the fans spend the entire game jumping up and down like prairie dogs on cocaine, while bellowing allegedly clever songs in foreign languages to the tune of “Oh My Darling, Clementine.”
  
• The players are foreign.
  
• They sport haircuts that were apparently administered by a blind heroin addict in the men's room of a Bulgarian disco in 1978.
  
• Some of the players use only one name. There are famous Brazilian players named “Fred,” “Hulk” and “Kaka.”
  
• Kaka
  , for God's sake.
  
• Also they are complete wusses. Whenever they collide with something, such as another player, a tallish blade of grass or an unusually dense patch of air, they try to draw a foul call by hurling themselves dramatically to the turf, grabbing a random knee—it's always a knee—and adopting the agonized facial expression of a man being castrated by irate lobsters.
  
• If they don't get the foul call, they're back on their feet seconds later, miraculously healed from their near-fatal pretend injury.
  
• On those seemingly random occasions when the referee
  does
  call a foul,
  nothing happens
  . The players simply resume running around and falling down.
  
• But sometimes—for what appears to be exactly the same foul—the referee makes a big show of sternly displaying a yellow card to the player, looking not unlike a person brandishing a crucifix at a vampire. When this happens, the result is: Still basically nothing.
  
• But on certain very special fouls—which, again, often do not appear to the naked eye to be any worse than any of the
  other
  fouls—the referee shows the player the dreaded Crucifix of Doom red card, and the player receives the most feared punishment in all of soccer: A normal haircut.
  
• No, seriously, the red-carded player must leave the game, which means his team has to play the rest of the game with fewer players, which means it is
  even less likely
  , if such a thing is possible, that they will ever score a goal.
  
• Sometimes the referee squirts a line of what appears to be shaving cream onto the field and the players line up behind it holding their hands protectively over their family jewels, looking like the waiting room at an express vasectomy clinic.
  
• The scoreboard clock counts
  up
  , instead of down, as God clearly intended.
  
• Also, unbelievably, the scoreboard clock
  doesn't show the official
  time
  . The official time is a secret known only to the referee, who keeps it on his special referee wristwatch that
  nobody can see except him
  .
  
• Also the referee has the power to add some semi-random amount of minutes at the end to compensate for time wasted by players suffering comically fake injuries, which means that in the crucial final minutes of a close game
  nobody knows how much time is actually left
  . Instead of watching the scoreboard, everybody is watching the referee, who keeps frowning at his wristwatch, like a middle-aged, shorts-wearing commuter whose bus is late.
  
• And NOBODY EVER SCORES.
  

These are the main criticisms leveled against soccer by American critics. In response to these critics, I say: Fair enough! You make some excellent points.

Oh, if I wanted to, I could make some counterpoints regarding popular American professional sports. For example, I could note that if you're watching a baseball game, you can get up pretty much anytime you want and go do something else for a while—use the bathroom; make dinner; obtain a degree from dental school—without missing much action, unless you count players spitting, scratching and adjusting their packages. This is especially true if the game involves a “no-hitter” or a “pitcher's duel,” which are special forms of high-voltage baseball excitement in which one or both of the teams never even
threaten
to score.

Or I could note that a great deal of professional football consists of the players huddling—which is essentially holding a meeting—or else just standing around waiting during the many, many time-outs required so that the viewers at home can watch Viagra commercials. Even when a team does run an actual play, most of the time it's a running play for little or no gain, meaning that it lasts about five seconds, during which very little is accomplished other than pretty much everybody on the field falling down. Then it's time for: More meetings! And on those infrequent occasions when a play gains serious yardage, it is typically called back because of “holding,” which is an infraction defined as “something that happens on every single freaking football play.”

Years ago, when Sophie was two, she watched part of an NFL game with me. After a few minutes she got the hang of it and started delivering a running commentary, as follows:

SOPHIE
(
when the teams lined up
): “Ready.”