elder brothers?

The journey begins

It’s hard to believe, but in just over one month I will embark on the journey of a lifetime — a trip to South Africa to see all seven rounds of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Simply put, this is one of the things I need to do before I die. I just can’t believe the part where I actually follow through and make the dream a reality. To help make sense of the madness leading up to and during the World Cup, I will be dispatching my thoughts and opinions on this site in real-time. I invite you all to join me on my odyssey and get a taste for what “Futbol Fever” feels like firsthand.

How this all started

My first World Cup memory comes from 1990. Although I was a loyal and avid soccer player throughout my entire childhood and adolescence, I was not what you would consider an avid “fan” of the sport back then at the tender age of 8. But I was not alone among kids in my country; nearly no one my age had ever really seen high-quality soccer played before, mostly due to the fact that no American television network would show live soccer on TV. Case in point: my first memory of seeing top-flight soccer came during the 1990 World Cup in Italy…in the form of tape-delayed highlights. Every :20 and :50 mark of the hour, my neighborhood friends and I would be glued to the television for a brief, 2-3 minute highlight package and score update from CNN Headline News. It was in these fleeting moments of sports curiosity that I first got a glimpse of “Milla Magic” — a virtuoso series of game-winning performances from a 38-year old, dancing Cameroonian striker named Roger Milla. I had never seen this old man play before, and I had absolutely no idea where the country of Cameroon even was located on a map. What I did know was that I liked rooting for an underdog, I couldn’t believe how differently professionals played than we did in our backyards, and I loved how much passion the people in the stands seemed to have. Unfortunately for me, I did not see another soccer highlight on television again until the next World Cup rolled around four years later.

These isolated viewing experiences aside, everything kids like me knew about soccer came from playing it ourselves. And in the backs of our minds we also knew that in places far, far away they cared about soccer a lot more than we did.