Soccer's sublime pace

What? The Copa Mundial, the World Cup, is over?

It must mean the end of the world is not far behind.

Soccer, not very popular in America, is nevertheless the world’s sport. I imagine it was invented by a mom, the world’s first soccer mom, living long ago in the cradle of civilization, trying to work with kids under her feet. She wound reeds into a ball, threw it outside, and said, “Go play.”

The kids were gone for hours. The game has hardly changed at all. All you need is a ball or, if you are a solo, a ball and a wall. Scoring would not have come along until the dawn of the socio-political era, when it became important that somebody win. Still the kids were gone for hours, because it was hard to kick a ball into a goal through a crowd of kids using only your feet. And mom said, “No hands!” She knew a good thing when she saw it.

Soccer is also the world’s natural sport. It follows, even derives from, the pace of the universe. On the seventh day, God rested, and dreamed up soccer as the earthly symbol for a divine design in which things happen slowly. The universe is 12 billion years old now, and still expanding. It has taken human beings millions of years of evolving to become smart enough to know they have been evolving for millions of years. God is not in a hurry, and neither is soccer.

Millions of Americans love soccer; for awhile, in the 1600s and 1700s, it must have been the only sport in town. But Americans developed a natural impatience, with a tyrannical government to overthrow, a Constitution to get up and running, and a continent to conquer. Europeans, Africans, Asians, have had centuries to settle in; Americans for the last 200 years have been damned busy, and it has made us impatient. We want results. We want scoring.

Scoring is inevitable – witness the “survival of the fittest” evidence – but too much scoring is unnatural. That is not an American failure; cricket is a revered, old-world game in which scoring goes into the hundreds. That is clearly unnatural. In soccer, meanwhile, scoring more than a goal a week starts to strain the ancient, natural cause and effect balance, and most of the world’s population understands that. Points are not scored in soccer; they evolve, like the first mutation in a salamander’s gill from which buds an air sac, leading to a couple of brain cell changes indicating to the salamander that life on land might not be so bad, and then vestigial leg and arm buds follow, the first micro-inch of tail disappears, atoms clump into molecules forming a hair follicle, and so on, until finally Italy takes a shot on goal.

Americans are too impatient for that, unaware that in turning their backs, they are ignoring their own history. And, yet . . . . Watching Italy and France in the championship game – was it only three days ago? – there was the strongest desire, in our living room, to let them play on. They had played for 90 minutes, then 30 minutes of overtime, plus minutes lost to penalties, injuries, etc., and there was a nobility of purpose, and a divinity in the design, that begged to be honored, asking them to play on until the last man standing toed in a goal with his last breath, and God applauded.

Instead, they decided it in 10 minutes, on penalty kicks. Americans like to say that a tie is like “kissing your sister.” To soccer fans, penalty kicks must be like getting Sophia Loren into bed, and then her father walks in.