This is not a game to watch alone, in a living room, in a den, in a basement. This is a game — pardon, a match — to be shared, to be enjoyed in the company of friends and strangers and all manner of fellow citizens.
Most of us could not catch a morning flight to Natal, Brazil, Monday. Most of us could not be inside Estádio das Dunas, where the U.S. would play Ghana in the opening game of the World Cup, or in the parks of Rio, where thousands gathered to watch, as they do every match.
So we did the next best thing. This was a saloon game. If you could get home in time, it was the perfect neighborhood saloon game, a place to gather with the people on your block, the folks you take the train with, because this is one of the few games that was unabashedly about “us” and “we.”
“This,” Abe Kim said, “could be a very fun night.”
Abe manages my neighborhood saloon, the Cornerstone in Hillsdale, N.J., and that’s where I come to watch. An early reassurance: The next 500 or so words will not be filled with amateur soccer analysis. I will not kill Michael Bradley (although the impassioned fans at the next table will spend 90 minutes doing that) or second-guess Jurgen Klinsmann (that’s for the guys at the bar, growling about some strategy or another with which they’ve taken exception).
For a night, anyway, I have traded the usual credential around my neck for a pint of Brooklyn Summer Ale in my right hand, and for a chicken wing in my left. This is about God, country and soccer and so the men in the red uniforms are our lads, and the ones in white are The Other Guys, and it makes absolutely no difference that Ghana,
The Other Guy, is a country about one-eleventh the size of the U.S., and …
AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
You know what that was. That was Clint Dempsey, scoring in the very first minute of the match, making a nifty move to separate himself from Ghana’s John Boye (no “Waltons” jokes, please), and he has found the back of the net, and this serves two purposes:
1) It gives the U.S. an immediate lead.
2) It immediately mutes those among us who remain jaded to this sport, who bemoan the lack of scoring and still make nil-nil jokes. This game, we know already, will NOT end nil-nil.
The commotion reaches poor Abe, who was upstairs fetching supplies, missed the goal, returns to the main floor, sees a few dozen customers exchanging hugs and high fives and screaming at the dozen or so televisions, and says, defeated, “Really? They scored and I missed it? REALLY?”
This is a different kind of game — er, match — than most of the big games you usually endure. If you are a Rangers fan, it’s as likely that you watched Friday’s Game 5 in the solitary confinement of your man cave as anywhere else, because when you are that invested, that committed, you can’t entrust yourself to the company of strangers, let alone friends, forget about family.
A Rangers-fan friend texted this to me between the first and second overtimes Friday night: “This is supposed to be fun. And yet I’ve been nauseous for three straight hours.”
This is different. We are all on the same team in these pubs, in these parks, in these eateries where the U.S. is trying to run out the clock. When Ghana doesn’t allow that to happen, when Ghana’s Andrew Ayew ties the game in the 82nd minute there is a gasp, and a few pointed screams, and some griping at the TVs, and some consolation that, well, if the U.S. can’t get three points then one will have to do.
It’s disappointment more than depression. Abe walks by the table. I ask how long it’ll take to convert the Cornerstone back to a baseball bar. He smiles and says something about the great Tony Gwynn and …
AAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
You know what that was. That was Johnny Brooks redirecting a corner kick into the net, a 2-1 lead that will become a 2-1 victory, and the bar is bedlam and poor Abe STILL hasn’t seen an American goal.
“Maybe next game I should promise to stay locked upstairs,” he says.
As business plans go, that’s probably right behind free beer: Guaranteed goals.