Because I’m a patriot, among other reasons, I stopped by the theater at McMenamins Old St. Francis School late Saturday morning to watch the USA vs. England World Cup match. I opened the door and couldn’t see a damn thing in the darkened room, other than the massive screen displaying the 1-0 score (England was a head at the time) so I stood about six inches within the door, completely blind.
Then my eyes adjusted, revealing the place to be packed like a Justin Bieber concert on Bieber Day in the Republic of Bieber. You couldn’t even walk to the bar unless you wanted to rub bellies with a line of dudes standing at the back of the room wearing an array of soccer jerseys and those scarf things that soccer fans tend to wear around their necks. They cheered at moments that seemed mostly mundane and drank merrily.
With claustrophobia setting in and nowhere to sit, stand or breath, I exited the theater, where sitting next to the door was a local TV reporter who gave me a “crazy in there, ain it?” sort of look. Yes, it was crazy. Crazier than the football (the tackling, concussion-enducing, helmeted kind) games the venue houses in the fall and winter. Crazier than some concerts than have been there. Crazier than a lot of things.
It was then that I realized then that Bend likes soccer. A lot. And this makes sense. Bend is the sort of place that would like soccer. We’ve got plenty of European imports in addition to the throngs of Northwesterners who grew up playing and ultimately loving a game that has never caught on in this country as it has in the rest of the world. We’re forward thinking like that.
I hurried home and watched the rest of the game and actually leapt from my couch in excitement when the English keeper decided to let the ball go into the goal, apparently as a long-overdue apology for taxation without representation and/or ruining the Gulf of Mexico. I held my breath in the last minutes, hoping the US could hang on.
Then, against everything I’ve ever been taught by teachers, coaches and the cast of The Cosby Show, I cheered because of a tie. I was jazzed, not because we won, thus proving that we’re better than England, but because we tied, indicating that we’re precisely as good as England at soccer. I’ve spent a good ten years of my life (since a couple World Cup infatuations in ’94 and ’98) doing everything within my power and rights as an American to make fun of, if not completely detest, soccer.
And that, my friend is becoming a lot harder than I could ever imagine, which is why I’ll admit that I’ve come to sort of, kind of like soccer… for the most part.
That is, except for the damn buzzing horns.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2010.
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Mike — Is there some reason you have to bold face random words for no apparent reason? It is SORT OF like those PEOPLE who find the need to put THINGS IN UPPERCASE because they think it adds POWER to THEIR WORDS, when in REALITY, all it does it make it very, VERY DIFFICULT to read. Perhaps you SHOULD TRUST the power of the WORDS THEMSELVES to deliver your MESSAGE, not not resort to SOME typographical TRICK.
Hey Gus, first off, thanks for reading — even the bold print!
The bold face is meant to make certain phrases stick out and is essentially a design element of the blog and something we do in print for columns like Sound Check.
And I don’t use caps, because caps are obnoxious.
Again, thanks for reading, Gus. We’ll see what we can do with this bold stuff in the future. (By the way, I would have bolded “bold stuff” but the comment function doesn’t allow that.)
Gus = lame.