You can build a fence around the United States, but you cannot keep out soccer.
On a Sunday morning in Colorado, down the street from a church, you can see how the passions, sounds and faces that define America are changing. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s an eye-opener as potent as the cerveza cooling the throats of more than 100 screaming soccer fanatics. It’s an education as gentle as the warm breeze blowing through the open front door of a Denver taberna called Aztec Sol.
Inside, the saloon’s brightly painted, cinder-block walls rattle with Spanish and English, both languages shouted in frenzied cacophony. Everybody, from children waving tiny tri-colored flags to a grandpa tipping his straw cowboy hat, celebrates a soccer ball’s crazy dance from the head of Zinha to the back of the net, scoring a goal that puts an exclamation point on Mexico’s 3-1 victory against Iran at the World Cup.
“You know the funny thing?” says Juan Martinez, smiling at the television. “We live in a time where there’s a lot of tension between Mexicans and Americans. But, in this place, you look around at all the different faces, and there are no borders, no walls, no fence between us.”
In America, we are still learning to speak the language of soccer, a game, like all sports, that cannot be truly appreciated until its passion is felt in the heart.
“I wake up, my eyes wide open, on the first day of the World Cup at 5:30 in the morning, hours before the first game. I cannot control myself. The emotions are too powerful,” explains Colorado Rapids coach Fernando Clavijo, a native of Uruguay who immigrated to America as a 16-year-old, humbly went to work as a janitor, then grew up to be elected to the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame.
“I’ve been in America since 1979. People like me, who came here from a place where everybody loves soccer, that’s where the passion for the game in this country has grown. When I first played for the U.S. national team, every international match we played in America was like a road game. But, over the past 25 years, soccer has changed the United States in an incredible way. And it’s a beautiful thing.”
Convinced we live in the only nation that matters, however, millions of Americans raised on baseball and apple pie still take one look at soccer and say: “Ick.” When the World Cup comes knocking every four years, they tell the game to go away.
There’s no scoring in soccer, so how can it possibly count for much in the USA, where real men eat cheeseburgers and overprotective moms sign up tots for kickball until those kids are old enough to play a real game?
There’s a danger in this arrogant thinking as exposed as the tail feathers of an ostrich with its head stuck in the sand.
Snoring on the sofa, your old Uncle Sam does not get soccer any more than he wants to understand the rest of the world.
“This is a nation of immigrants. Why does it not want any more immigrants?” says Martinez, a 40-year-old cook who arrived from Mexico a quarter century ago. “I love this country. The people of America are really kind and generous. But the government is not.”
Here’s a news flash: Soccer has put down deep roots in America, grown by a new wave of immigrants who are slowly reshaping the nation’s culture, one ethnic neighborhood at a time.
The influence of the Broncos in Denver is as obvious as 75,000 spectators standing in unison at our local NFL stadium. The World Cup’s power is harder to see in Colorado, but very real among Latinos, Asians and Europeans whose sporting voices are seldom heard by the mainstream media.
Soccer came late to me, a taste acquired after my 40th birthday. But part of my joy for the game was the discovery that despite all the limitations imposed by middle age, a new passion can be found, even by eyes in need of bifocals.
Nobody is demanding America to fall in love with soccer. I know. We don’t take orders for anybody.
But, as any futbol nut holding down the bar with a sweating bottle of Negra Modela at Aztec Sol can tell you, the World Cup is the greatest melting pot on Earth.
“During the World Cup, life revolves around the soccer ball,” said Rapids player Nico Hernandez, born in Argentina.
It’s a beautiful game in a world too big and beautiful for America to be left out.
Staff writer Mark Kiszla can be reached at 303-820-5438 or mkiszla@denverpost.com.
