At the start of the second half, David Beckham, the blond midfielder who was at the time engaged to Posh Spice, was expelled from the game, leaving England, like the Spices, a performer short. Though England scored on a corner, the goal was ruled out by the referee for a meaningless, barely visible (but undeniably real) elbow. Nothing happened in thirty minutes of overtime, and the game went into the self-parody of soccer: a series of penalty kicks. With England needing only one more to tie, David Batty, of Newcastle, stepped up and, rushing his shot, fired it right into the diving goaltender. The Argentine side rushed out into the pitch, weeping with joy and exhaustion.
The game had been marked by everything that can exasperate an American fan: the dominance of defense, the disproportion between foul and consequence, the absurd penalty shoot-out, the playacting. (In England they will be arguing did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed about the first Argentine penalty for years.) But it had been as draining as any contest I’d ever seen.
Soccer was not meant to be enjoyed. It was meant to be experienced. 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. 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. But soccer is not meant to be an escape from life. It is life, in all its injustice and tedium: We seek unfair advantage, celebrate tiny moments of pleasure as though they were final victories, score goals for the wrong side. (In the first three nights of the World Cup, three of the seventeen goals were “own” goals: A player would head the ball away and watch it backspin past his own goalkeeper, his face a rapidly changing mask of decision, satisfaction, worry, disbelief, and despair.) A bad play or call in baseball—Merkle’s boner or Denkinger’s call - hurts, but usually there’s a saving air of humor. “We’re due,” “It’s our turn,” “Wait till next year” are the cheers of American sport. We are optimists and look to sports to amplify our optimism.
In soccer tomorrow is a long way off, even in ordinary circumstances, and four years in these special ones. By then everything will be different; there are no second chances in the World Cup. It is a human contest on a nearly geologic time scale. Grievances, injustices rankle for years, decades, forever. But along with that comes, appealingly, a sense of proportion. Accepting the eventual certainty of defeat in turn liberates you to take real joy in any small victory, that one good kick. If American sports are played in paradise, soccer takes place after the fall. Even its squabbles have their echoes: Did he fall or was he pushed? It’s the oldest question.
Finally, on a stray, leaking cable channel, I got to see highlights of Detroit and Washington in the Stanley Cup final. I turned it on with joy and then found, to my shock, that… I couldn’t see the puck! It was too small, way too small—a tiny black spot on a vast white surface, with huge men in bright-colored sweaters hulking over it. When a goal was scored (and goals do get scored), I knew it only by the subsequent celebration. I squinted at the set and called in Martha, a purebred Canadian, and asked if she could follow the puck. “I could never follow the puck,” she told me.
Had I been corrupted by the Old World’s game or enlightened by it? Another of the old, unanswerable questions. All I knew was that I was looking forward to the next big match, between France and Italy. Anything might happen, or nothing at all.
Although France didn’t win the World Cup until just before midnight on Sunday, the celebrations in Paris started hours before the game began. By two o’clock in the afternoon the beeping of horns along the Seine had become a din, and the kids with their faces painted red-white-and-blue, heads poking up through the sunroofs of Peugeots racing along the quays, had become a menace. Win or lose, the crise was already over.
Cars are cars all over the world, of course, and horns are horns, and a victory celebration in Paris doesn’t sound much different from a victory celebration in New York or, for that matter, from a traffic tieup outside the Holland Tunnel. Even the theme song of the French victory was not the “Marseillaise” but Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”
Anyway, the whole point of the celebration was that it wasn’t a champagne occasion. It was bottled water and cheap booze and a lot of beer. What made it memorable was that, for once, the carnival atmosphere of the Latin Quarter and the Marais spilled over into official French culture, and kept right on spilling. (By Tuesday morning, it had even spilled over into the garden of the Elysee, where a visibly blanching President Chirac greeted the players to a chorus of “We Are the Champions,” sung, in best Freddie Mercury English, by the crowd thronging the team.)
At one-thirty in the morning after the victory, you could take the world’s most beautiful walk—beginning at the Institut de France and moving across the pont des Arts and around the cour Carree of the Louvre and then to the Tuileries and the Champs-Elysees—and feel as if, in the presence of so many happy people, the grand siecle itself had gone a little lopsided and blissed out. Misrule ruled. A man wrapped in a tricolor was relieving himself against the front wall of the Institut de France—discreetly, with maximum esprit de corps, but, still, relieving himself. Someone was selling beer out of a cooler, violating about twelve hundred French laws in the act, and someone else had one of those pin-ball arcade love-o-meters set up. (Everybody’s hand was hot;
even an American writer saw his score shoot past “Casanova” and all the way up to “Chaud Lapin”—“Hot Rabbit!”) Kids were singing; men were grabbing politely at girls, presumably with a memory of 1944, when the girls were said to have grabbed back. This time they didn’t, but it didn’t matter.
Many people had talked a lot about the ethnic mix of the French team, which was composed of players of Algerian, Basque, and Ghanaian descent, among others, but the players themselves seemed a lot less self-conscious about this than journalists did. French identity is not that hard to achieve; if you speak French, you feel French. What is hard for an immigrant or an outsider in France to achieve is French institutional acceptance, a place in the crowded, ancient French iconography. The faces you saw on the World Cup team—the faces of Zidane and Djorkaeff and Karembeu—are already part of French society. They just hadn’t been integrated before into the French self-image, and now they were.
It’s natural for people to hope that the victory of a multiracial team might be the beginning of the end of Le Pen and the racist National Front, but it probably won’t be. The ability of sports to solve social problems is limited—the Dream Team didn’t change black income levels—and anyway, Le Pen blandly claimed the victory for himself. It was a reassertion of French glory, he said, and who is more glorious about France than he? The logic of nationalism always flows downhill, toward the gutter.