Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) (6 page)

SOPHIE
(
when the ball was snapped
): “Fall down!”

This—“Ready” . . . “Fall down!”—would be a perfectly accurate play-by-play call for much of the action in pro football. The time breakdown of a typical three-hour NFL game broadcast is roughly as follows:

• Actual football plays: 12 minutes.
  
• Slow-motion replays shown while the teams hold meetings: 43 minutes.
  
• Close-ups of the backsides of officials peering at a special monitor to review questionable plays: 11 minutes.
  
• Referees announcing “holding” penalties: 14 minutes.
  
• Close-ups of cheerleaders smiling maniacally while making that bizarre hand motion wherein they appear to be violently grating cheese with their pom-poms: 7 minutes.
  
• Viagra commercials: 93 minutes.
  

And then there is golf. I am not a sadistic person, so I'm not going to note all the things that I could note about golf, except to say that if your idea of excitement is watching men in slacks squat on their haunches, trying to envision which way the little ball will roll when they finally get around to actually hitting it, then you will be very, very excited by golf.

“OK,” I hear you soccer critics respond, “what about professional basketball? There's a
lot
of scoring in that sport.” Yes, there is. There is so much scoring that any given individual basket tends to be close to meaningless. That is why, as has been noted by many, you can skip the first 46 minutes of any given professional basketball game, secure in the knowledge that with 2 minutes left, the score, unless it is a meaningless game—which is approximately 87 percent of all NBA games—will be approximately 105 to 102, and that it will take roughly an hour to play those last 2 minutes because there will be 29 fouls, 14 time-outs and 37 Viagra commercials.

Am I saying that I don't like these traditional American sports? No!
*
I'm a traditional American, and I enthusiastically watch, or at least enthusiastically doze on the sofa in front of, all of these sports. I'm not saying they're
bad
; I'm just saying they're stupid. ALL sports are fundamentally stupid. That's why they're popular.

So here are four reasons why I love soccer:

1.
It keeps moving.
There are no time-outs, and (except during halftime) no commercials. This is one of the reasons why the players fake injuries: They're exhausted and looking for a few seconds' rest.

(Just for the record, most soccer fans hate the diving and injury faking. Although it can sometimes be amusing: Some teams have raised it to an art. Not to single out any specific nation, but there are Italian players who spend enough time lying on the ground to be biologically classified as zucchini.)

2.
The skill involved is astounding.
You're watching the offense advance the ball via a series of pinpoint passes, each player knowing before the ball reaches his feet what he plans to do with it the instant it arrives. Suddenly a defensive player, having anticipated a pass, launches himself horizontally feetfirst, makes a sliding tackle and steals the ball, somehow managing to spring back to his feet and control it at the same time. He glances downfield and sends the ball 50 yards through the air, perfectly leading a sprinting teammate, who, outleaping his defender, gets his forehead on the ball and, snapping his head just right, flicks the ball another 20 yards through the air to another sprinting teammate, who traps the ball with his chest and, before it hits the ground, delicately lofts it over two defenders to a teammate streaking toward the goal, who plants his feet as the ball arrives, leaps high into the air, flips over backward and, with his feet well above his head, executes a bicycle kick, blasting the ball with exquisite accuracy—remember, this guy is
upside down
and using his
foot
—at the upper right-hand corner of the goal, where, at the last possible nanosecond, it is barely—just
barely
—deflected over the bar by the outstretched fingertips of a diving goalie with the reflexes of a
Twilight
vampire.

In other words—and you will see plays like this over and over in high-level soccer—these guys have changed instantly from defending to counterattacking, moving the ball the length of the field in a few seconds via a sequence of amazingly accurate, brilliantly improvised passes leading to a spectacular shot that, thanks to a spectacular defensive play, is unsuccessful.

So, no goal. Nobody ever scores in soccer! It's so boring!

Unless you actually watch it.

This leads me to the quality I love most about soccer, and it's the very quality used most as a criticism:

3.
It's really, really, really hard to score.
The nature of the sport is such that the defense usually has the advantage. In high-level soccer, where defenders rarely make mistakes, there are few easy goals; most of them range from very difficult to more or less impossible. You might wait an hour for your team to score a goal; you might wait two; it might not happen at all. The tension builds and builds, and becomes almost unbearable as, over and over again, the team
almost
scores, or is
almost
scored upon.

So when a goal finally comes—if it ever does—it feels SO good. Or, bad. Either way, you
feel
it, more intensely than in any other sport I know of. When your team scores in basketball, it's a pleasant feeling, but a short-lived one, like a satisfying burp. When your team scores in soccer, it's an orgasm.

Which brings me to the fourth reason why I love soccer:

4.
Soccer fans are insane.
You really have to sit among them to appreciate how insane they are. The grandstands at a major soccer match make the grandstands at a big-time American college football rivalry game—say, Ohio State vs. Michigan—look like a meeting of the Rotary Club. There is simply no party like a big soccer party, and there is no soccer party bigger than the World Cup. Which is why I wanted to go to Brazil, despite the likelihood that I would not survive.

Getting to Brazil was not easy. It turns out that if you're a U.S. citizen, you need a visa, which is a special piece of paper you must obtain from the Brazilian government via a process clearly designed to prevent you from ever actually obtaining a visa. This seemed stupid to me: I mean, there I was, an American who wanted to go to Brazil and contribute to the economy by staying in hotels, eating at restaurants and getting robbed at knifepoint. Why would the Brazilian government want to make this difficult for me?

The reason, it turns out, is that Brazil is retaliating against the United States, which, for what I'm sure are stupid reasons, requires Brazilians to get visas before they are allowed to come here and help our economy. So this is a case of two nations harming themselves via a strategy of stupidity and counter-stupidity, which is the basis of most international relations. It's only a matter of time before we go to war.

To apply for our visas, we had to go to the Brazilian consulate in Miami, which permits people to submit applications in person between the convenient hours of 10 a.m. and noon on weekdays only. Michelle and I got there early, but there was already a crowd ahead of us, overflowing the small waiting area. There were three service windows, only one of which conveniently featured an actual human being. She was a polite but strict lady whose job was to patiently explain to the people who shuffled forward, one by one, documents in hand, that unfortunately their application was incomplete. Many of these people were making repeat visits to the consulate, but somehow they still didn't have all the items—some of them pretty obscure—that the polite but strict lady required.

POLITE BUT STRICT LADY
(
reviewing documents
): I'm sorry, but this is not acceptable.

VISA APPLICANT:
But yesterday you said . . .

POLITE BUT STRICT LADY:
I said you needed to provide the original liner notes for the 1965 Dave Clark Five album
Having a Wild Weekend
. These, unfortunately, are the liner notes to another of their 1965 albums,
Weekend in London
.

VISA APPLICANT:
But this is the sixth time I've been here! Can't you just . . .

POLITE BUT STRICT LADY:
You will also need to provide the thorax of a juvenile wolverine.

I exaggerate, but only slightly. If the United States ever gets serious about securing the border with Mexico, all we have to do is post this lady down there under a sign that says WELCOME TO THE USA. Nobody will ever get through.

Nevertheless, we eventually managed to get visas, and the day finally came when Sophie and I flew to Rio de Janeiro (by then Michelle was already in Brazil). We arrived early in the morning and took a taxi to our hotel, which was a little tricky because the taxi driver—I find this to be a recurring problem in foreign countries—did not speak English. Brazilians speak Portuguese, which is somewhat similar to Spanish, as we see in these examples:

I'm not particularly good at languages. The only Portuguese word that really stuck in my brain—don't ask me why—was
borboleta
, which means “butterfly.” Fortunately, Sophie speaks Spanish fluently and has a good ear for languages, so she was able to serve as my interpreter in Brazil. With her help, the driver figured out where we wanted to go, and he managed to get us to our hotel without hitting or getting hit by anybody.

This was impressive, because Brazilian drivers view traffic laws as mere suggestions, not meant to constrain a driver who sincerely believes he needs to pass other motorists by driving—we rode in a taxi that did this—on the sidewalk. I rode in another taxi driven by a driver who, as far as I could tell, was not watching the road at all because he was watching a soccer match on a TV screen installed in his dashboard. I didn't say anything, because all I really could have said was
“Borboleta,”
which he might have misinterpreted.

When Sophie and I got to the hotel, we were informed that our room would not be ready for several hours. We decided to pass the time by taking a walk around our neighborhood. This presented a problem, because I was carrying cash, credit cards and passports, all of which I had planned to leave in our hotel room safe to thwart the knifepoint robbers lurking outside the hotel waiting to pounce.

So I went into a men's room and changed into my special anti-robbery, secret compartment shirt and shorts. I also put on
two
secret underpants pouches. I put a small decoy wad of money in an outside pocket to hand over to the robbers, then divided up the rest of my valuables and concealed them in various places on my body. When I lumbered out of the men's room, I was a man of mystery bulges, a human cash piñata. I was also nervous about going outside with Sophie. I had my hand in my pocket, clutching my decoy money wad, ready to throw it at the first Brazilian who got within 10 feet of us.

You probably think I was being ridiculous. But guess what, smarty-pants? Guess what happened to Sophie and me
almost immediately
when we left the safety of the hotel? I'll tell you what: Nothing. Nobody robbed us, at knifepoint or gunpoint or needlepoint or any other kind of point. Nobody paid any particular attention to us at all.

And nothing is what continued to happen to us—that day, and the next day, and the rest of our time in Brazil. Virtually all of the many Brazilians we encountered—and we were not always in nice touristy neighborhoods—were friendly and helpful. Brazil turned out to be one of the most consistently
nice
countries I've ever visited. I wanted to stay longer, and I'll definitely go back. I'm not saying there's no crime in Brazil, or that you shouldn't be careful if you go there. I'm just saying that there's crime everywhere—Washington, D.C., for example—and the threat in Brazil seems to be a tad exaggerated.

My unwarranted nervousness about knifepoint robbers got to be a running joke between me and Sophie. We decided that we could probably make a decent living in Brazil by meeting newly arrived American tourists at the airport and showing them a knife, or even, if they looked especially nervous, a photograph of a knife, maybe even just a receipt for one. Assuming they'd read the same guidebooks I did, they'd hurl money at us and sprint back to their planes.

Anyway, once I relaxed a bit, I started noticing that Rio is a beautiful city, with dramatic mountains popping up scenically all around, and miles of lovely ocean beaches occupied by thousands of mellow Brazilians displaying literally acres of butt cheeks. I refer here to the women of Brazil, who favor very small bathing suits.

Q. How small are they?

A. They look like eye patches for mice.

One standard-size American woman's swimsuit would, if cut into pieces, provide enough fabric to make bathing suits for the entire female population of Rio. And it's not that all the women there are of supermodel caliber; it's just that they don't feel the need to cover much of themselves. I say, God bless them.

Rio is a mellow, casual city. The only men I saw wearing suits and ties were chauffeurs; everybody else seemed to be in flip-flops and T-shirts. The overwhelming majority of the T-shirts, at least while the World Cup was going on, were copies of the yellow jerseys worn by the Brazilian national soccer team. We saw them on everybody—men, women, children, babies, grandparents, store clerks, statues and literally dozens of dogs (Brazilians love dogs).

Everyone says the Brazilians are “passionate” about soccer. This adjective is inadequate. It's like saying the sun is “warm.” Many sports fans are passionate. Brazilians are on a different level entirely.