The ball has stopped wars and started them, whipsawed financial markets and
sent shivers of ineluctable joy and cardiac arrest rippling across entire
countries at the same moment.
And the way it rolls at the World Cup means everything.
Because of it, a tenuous truce between the government and rebels in the Ivory
Coast holds firm, politicos in Mexico worry voters will ignore a presidential
election, and several more in Ecuador gladly shelved their campaigns for the
coming month.
"Soccer is first. The craziness surrounding soccer is second," Latin American
writer and social critic Carlos Monsivais summed up recently. "Then there is the
rest of the world."
From Friday until July 9, the globe will spin according to the rhythms of
that ball. Teams from 32 qualifying nations will kick it in a dozen German
cities for the singular honor of hoisting a cup. The trophy stands 14 inches
tall, weighs 14 pounds and is made of 18-karat gold. The real measure of its
heft, though, can be found in the scene it depicts: two human figures holding up
the Earth.
More than the Olympics and anything short of actual war, it crowns the
world's reigning superpower for the next four years.
At least a third of the planet will tune in at some point, making the Super
Bowl -- what Americans still stubbornly call "football" -- seem like a
pre-party. Everywhere but at taverns and cafes in practically every place but
the United States, business will get done only when broadcast schedules allow.
"On June 14 at 4 p.m. we expect an epidemic of unexplained illnesses to
appear," Ukrainian Prime Minister Yuriy Yekhanurov said, referring to his
country's opening match against Spain, its first-ever in the World Cup.
In the home of the defending champion and only five-time winner, Brazil, both
the mood and the economy could hinge on the outcome.
On the eve of the 2002 Cup, a study by HSBC Bank found the stock markets of
developed countries that won the World Cup since 1966 outperformed the global
average by 9 percent. And a working paper by three business professors cited
recently in the Washington Post found "an economically and statistically
significant negative effect on the losing country's stock market."
Wall Street, however, need not worry.
Even when its team does well, as in the 2002 tournament, America is
singularly oblivious.
Writer Adam Gopnik tried to explain why by contrasting the boundless optimism
of American sports -- plenty of scoring, action for its own sake -- with the
low-scoring, often defensive mindset dictated by the game the rest of the world
calls football.
"The World Cup is a festival of fate -- man accepting his hard circumstances,
the near-certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about
a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal," he wrote in the New
Yorker. "Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for
Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ballfield."
This time around, the U.S. team is bolstered by a handful of world-class
players and promoted by sponsorship dollars from Nike.
This time around, there are expectations, muted though they might be.
In Japan and South Korea, the Americans successfully surfed a wave of upsets
all the way to the quarterfinals. But it's both the curse and blessing of soccer
in America that not enough people back home even noticed. A team used to being
ignored suddenly turned up on magazine covers, network TV and President Bush's
call list.
The Germans, staging the Cup for the first time since reunification, have the
opposite problem.
