July 12, 1998: France 3, Brazil 0
My first World Cup final, among other things
[The superior art of aquatic detritus]
Twenty-seven years ago today, the French national team beat Brazil in the Stade de France to win the 1998 World Cup.
I was in the country at the time, doing dissertation research. I had frankly never to that point given a damn about soccer, which was the only thing I had ever called it up until then. Didn’t even really understand much of the game beyond the most basic. You kick the thing into the goal as frequently as you can, and you can’t touch it with your hands unless you’re the goalkeeper. I had only rarely even seen a soccer ball in my youth, to the best of my recollection, and I would not until that summer have been able to name or recognize anyone other than Pele from among the game’s historic and current stars.
And then that summer the home team—my adopted home team—in the World Cup was destroying opponents 9-1 in their three group stage matches, which is roughly like winning an old best of five baseball playoff series in a three game sweep by a combined score of 30-3, and I was right there in the middle of an entire country of people who knew and cared nothing about the games I’d grown up with but worshipped soccer/football in the same way I did baseball. Les Bleus then won three nailbiters in the knockout rounds, including a dramatic scoreless match against Italy that was decided on penalty kicks (I watched the final hour or so of that one, electrified, from the outdoor seats of a bar I happened to be walking past in Les Halles), and they were in the final.
I tried to imagine what it would have been like if the World Series was really a World Series rather than a championship of only American teams, and so something contested in a different host country each cycle, and if it was being held this year in the US and if the American national team were not obviously the best team in the world because it was not the case that only a handful of other countries even played the game and in any event almost all the really talented players in that handful of countries came to the US to play. I tried to imagine a whole world that loved and played baseball, kids everywhere doing just what I had done as a kid, saving up paper route money to buy a cheap glove and a bat and a ball and playing all spring and summer and fall until the snow came on the diamond at the local elementary school as if the game were the only thing that mattered at all in the whole world. I imagined there were a bunch of countries with storied histories in the sport I loved, some far more elevated than that of my own country, and players elsewhere who compared to or even excelled our Mantle and Mays and Aaron and Clemente and Rose and Carew and Jackson and Seaver and Ryan and Palmer. And then this year the Series (held only every four years instead of every summer, and so that much dearer) is in the US and our national team is playing out of its mind and beating everybody and we draw the country with the most championships in the final, the team that had won the last title and that was favored this time to do it again, and everyone outside the US thinks they will beat us, and easily. And we not only are victorious but we demolish this storied team (3-0 in football, which is a 10-0 one-hitter in baseball) and we win our first World Series right there in front of the delirious American fans.
I thought about what a big deal that would be.
And this is exactly what happened in France while I was there.
I was on a train returning to Paris, where the final was played, from the south of the country that Sunday, July 12, 1998, and there was of course then no way to view video with any kind of mobile device. I think I remember people with the Nokia phones with a little antenna on the train, but they were talking to their friends about the match, not watching or listening to it, as that was then impossible. Some on the train had portable radios that were tuned in to the match, and everyone was paying close attention to the sounds coming out of those little devices.
The whole train nearly exploded with the first two French goals. It stayed 2-0 for almost the entire second half. Just as we arrived in Paris, the third goal was scored. It came in the form of a vast roar I fairly felt as a physical force as I walked up the stairs into the Gare Montparnasse station. I could not see it but later learned that final one was an astonishingly beautiful counterattack goal off a Brazilian corner kick at the other end of the field, scored by a blazing fast Emmanuel Petit in the last minute of play, the delicious cherry on top of the World Cup cake. Petit wore his long blonde hair in a ponytail on the pitch, and I had the same hair color and style at the time, which prompted the football fanatic father of a French friend to invariably refer to me as “Petit.”
I walked out of the train station and into the largest street festival imaginable. A tumultuous sea of people running around yelling, whacking one another on the back, cheering, jumping and gesticulating frantically. It seemed the whole city was there in that neighborhood, singing, dancing, celebrating.
Boys and young men were on top of bus stop shelters cheering and waving the French flag. People appeared on the balconies of every apartment, shouting at the top of their lungs. One of the first bars I walked past just out of the station was inviting passersby in for a complimentary drink, which I eagerly accepted. My apartment was perhaps a half hour walk from the station, but it took me more than two hours to make the trip because I stopped so frequently to observe or take part in some aspect of the national celebration that had just been ignited. It was as if everyone in France had been invited to, and shown up at, the same party. I have never experienced anything quite like it, before or since.
The next day, L'Équipe, one of the French daily sports papers, had a memorable cover with the title “For Eternity.” I bought one and brought it back to the US with me. It is hiding in a box somewhere in my house, waiting to be accidentally discovered with great surprise at some point in the future when I’m looking for something else entirely.
A reading of Glenn Loury’s recent autobiography. From an email I sent him with the review:
“As the review notes, I found the book quite compelling, even (especially?) in the moments when I didn't much like the version of you being described in it! It made me think a little too closely about other versions of myself that would similarly trouble me, still more so precisely because they are me.
This--getting readers to reflect without the possibility of illusion on their own moral complexity and their own sins and shortcomings--is no small thing to have accomplished in a book. As I'm sure you know, and though I know your position on the faith at present, it's a fundamentally Christian message, though without the Christian redemption. Maybe writing is a form of redemption, or at least a small consolation for its lack.
Hope early days of retirement going well. I think with a great deal of melancholy about the fact that this time is coming for me too, sooner than I think I'd like. All things must pass away.”
The NYTimes is another planet.
They talk to dating couples who are dealing with the question of how to broach finances.
None of the couples are white and heterosexual, which is the normative couple in American society today, still, for another minute or two, at least.
Half of the couples discussed are homosexual. I’d wager that in New York City today, that’s likely what most residents believe is the actual percentage representation of homosexuality in the human population. “Oh, it’s at least half! Everybody at my job is gay except Bob, and he’s an asexual furry!”
One woman is genuinely shocked that men become less interested in her when they learn that she is the kind of person who is perfectly comfortable going into six figure debt to pay for her education.
On a whim the other day, I Googled a guy from my youth who lived down the block from us.
We played touch football in the late 1970s in the street. He and I got into a fist fight once over something that had happened in a game, but, as often happens, afterwards became pals. I remember he had really dreadful teeth, even as a kid, and it was clear to me that his family was at the lowest rung of the socioeconomic hierarchy in this underclass neighborhood, someone so poor that even other poor people like me could make fun of him for being poorer than we were (which I admit I sometimes did, because we were like that then). He was always a kind of archetype in my mind of the white underclass.
I learned that he died two years ago around Christmas.
I found the funeral home announcement at their webpage and on their Facebook page. The photo of him was from his youth, that is, it was exactly the him that I have carried in my mind’s eye all these years. There were no comments at either site. He has several children and many grandchildren, but it appears he never married and died alone.
I thought fondly of him with raggedy tennis shoes and soiled jeans, full of holes in the days when it was not yet fashionable to have holes in your jeans, running down the street to get beneath a Nerf football I had launched. I pray there were many friends and family members at his funeral to wish him well in his continuing journey.
You may 1) just state the obvious fact—"OK, it looks like you’re going to behave like a belligerent toddler, and I’ve already raised my kids, so I’m out”—and leave, or 2) abandon all pretense of decorum and mercilessly play the same game he wants to play but is presuming you will not play, that is, refuse to allow him to say a word and shout his own incoherencies back at him in comedic parody (“Of course! Of course! You can’t be calm about this! Listen to what I’m sayin’! It’s all the stress of being called a word that almost no one who is not black ever uses anymore that forces us to eat the kind of diet that makes us more likely to have serious health issues, that forces us to drop out of high school at greater frequency than any other group and therefore to be less likely to have the kind of jobs that might give us adequate healthcare, that forces us to avoid marriage at rates higher than any other group but to have kids anyway and subject those kids to significant disadvantage including health risks by virtue of that fact! We have nothing to do with those decisions! They’re imposed on us from outside! The stress of being called a name almost nobody actually says these days makes us do it all! It’s a word, almost entirely unspoken except when black people use it, that is doing it all, not us!”).
This is mean-spirited, but still kinda funny (and never mind the logical inconsistency of the diagram long enough for my observation). How many of those people are there, after all?
I would like to think I am not one of them, though I’m not completely sure of it.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I will make fun of the unsophisticated musical tastes of others without much provocation, at least when those others are would-be “intellectuals.” I once so enraged a small group of faculty here by decimating Taylor Swift after they had tried to push the idea that this was popular music of significant seriousness that none of them have spoken to me since.
But I am certain that if everyone on the planet tomorrow started liking all the obscure music that I like, I would still like that music even when it was no longer obscure. And I would be very pleased indeed to share it. I would think of it as an instance of the world finally figuring out I had been right all along.
A team of 14 year old boys again dominate a women’s national soccer team.
Who still needs more evidence to prove the point? Can we stop now? Just let women play against women, and let them enjoy the game, and everything’s fine. Really, it is. It is simply not necessary for women to be at the same athletic level as men, just as it is not necessary for men to be as capable of compassion as women are. It’s okay. We’re different. That’s perfectly okay.
Feminism sets itself up for defeat by demanding the impossible.
Rooting around in my local used bookstore the other day, I found a $1 copy of a book on snakes that I owned when I was a boy and had not seen in a half century. The sheer ecstatic, child-like joy when the cover appeared before me and the whole thing flooded back into my mind.
I’ve long wondered what it is in some, relatively rare human minds that makes these particular elements of creation appear so irresistibly beautiful, while many more of our race need only to hear the name to react in abject fear. From as early as I can remember, I adored snakes. I still do. I greatly prefer them to dogs, frankly—or at least to that subcategory of other peoples’ dogs that never seem able to stop barking and growling rabidly at me from behind the fence when I’m just walking by quietly minding my own business.
The piece of Christian mythological imagery with which I will never reconcile is the personification of evil in the Garden of Eden with the serpent. I understand the deep evolutionary reasoning regarding why the authors of those texts would have used such a symbol. In our deep history, aversion to snakes would have been beneficial, as some small percentage of them (and it’s higher in tropical parts of the world where we were concentrated for most of our time as a species) are sufficiently venomous to kill us.
I want a religious universe with the possibility of development and progress in our symbolism of evil. I think we do better today, if we have to pick something from the world of life on the planet to represent the Devil (and if we’re not going to pick that damned dog down the block who will not shut his godforsaken yap), to go with something truly awful that they didn’t even know existed back then when they were unjustly condemning snakes. The Ebola virus (Orthoebolavirus zairense), or maybe Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague bacterium.
Leave the snakes out of this conversation. They’re almost all entirely harmless, they never, ever bark at you, and they are aesthetic perfection itself. Far from the least of my parenting accomplishments is the fact that my youngest daughter considers baby garter snakes to be among the cutest things in the animal kingdom (an objective truth).
Good Lord in heaven.
Political crazy is political crazy, regardless of where it comes from. This guy should be in front of a firing squad or at the end of a hangman’s noose tomorrow to send a message to the rest of the lunatic fringe on his portion of the right. (But, as is so often the case, the relevant jurisdictions lack the courage to do what ought to be done with this monster).
Talk crazy all you like. Act crazy and you invite your own destruction. Any effort to try to “understand” this demon is a demonstration that you have gone off the sanity cliff yourself.
I’ve heard this solo a thousand times in my life. Still react just the way she does here, every time.
Nick Kristoff bringing up young leftist writers to think the correct thoughts.
It is dogma on the left that what goes on culturally in Sierra Leone is not the affair of the people there, but rather of American feminists, who should do everything they can to impose their superior worldview on those poor benighted souls.
One of my obscure loves that I would happily see become the preference of every teenager in America.
I think if the melody at the beginning were on a loop, it’d take me a few thousand years to get tired of hearing it.
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