Play Beautiful

If you haven't tuned into the World Cup yet, you really should give it a try. Yes, it's soccer. Yes, you're not used to watching soccer in any form other than little kids swarming around a ball on an indifferently maintained multi-use school field. Still, if you try it just a little, you may find that you like it, and that your horizons have been broadened.

I played soccer for a number of years; it was my primary youth sport. I enjoyed it, became reasonably good at it, made the eighth grade team (and my neighbor didn't ... ha!), my kids play it. I was part of the generation of American kids that established soccer as a typical suburban youth sport. Eric Wynalda, Paul Caliguri, Julie Foudy, Mia Hamm ... those first American soccer stars are all part of my era. Soccer is a sport with which I can identify, perhaps more than any other.

That being said, I never watch soccer on TV. I don't really know the players, and don't really find MLS games to be very exciting. I think I've seen about thirty minutes of MLS coverage total over the past several years. However, the thirty minutes I chose to watch provide the key to why you should tune in to the World Cup.

The MLS game I watched was a key playoff game between the LA Galaxy and ... another team. It didn't matter who. What mattered is that the game itself was crucial for the players. This is why playoff games or series in every sport draw better TV ratings -- the games matter. Generally speaking, the loser goes home. There is something primal about that, something that touches the basic sense of competition that inhabits nearly everyone to some degree. So on a general level, games that end a competitor's season are more appealing than regular season games.

Next, the Olympics have always appealed to me, despite NBC's concerted efforts over the years to squeeze every last bit of true drama out of the Games through time delays and human interest stories. Give me some highly trained, althetically gifted young people wearing the colors of the homelands, competing against others just like them, and I'll watch whatever it is. I don't need to know their names; the purity of competition undertaken for the sake of country is sufficient.

Now we come to the World Cup. It involves soccer teams from 32 different countries, from all over the globe. That's hundreds of athletes whose names I'll never know. It is a win-or-go-home tournament, one that will not occur again for four years. It is a sport that generates great passion among the players' countrymen, who pull mightily for their teams. It involves teams of players whose common bond is not the owner signing the check, but the country of their birth (or, sometimes, upbringing). It involves the sport played at its absolute highest level. The result is competition as pure as can be found on today's sports scene. There is something to be said for that as a primary motivation to tune in, if you have any interest in sport or competition at all.

Plus, in the first round, all of the teams must play three games, so there is a steady diet of games every single day, usually three per day. Like the early rounds of football, baseball or basketball playoffs, the sheer number of matchups makes for great fun for the sports fan. The wonder of the World Cup is that, if you allow yourself to enjoy the basic competition of the endeavor, you can find yourself sweating out a 0-0 tie between presumed powerhouse Sweden and massive underdog Trinidad & Tobago, and understand exactly why the T&T players and fans exulted as if they had won the Cup (and the Swedes moped their way out of the stadium) when the match ended in a deadlock.

No, there is typically not a lot of scoring, but the threat of a score is always present, and play does not stop. In a way, the predictability of the duration of the game is comforting. Games start exactly on time, they proceed for two 45 minute halves (with a couple of extra minutes added on for injury stoppage, typically); it's all very orderly. Television coverage has been excellent: because Germany is the host, one game begins at 6 am here in the west; the next one begins at 9 am, and the last at noon. I've been able to see most of the first games before work, and the last half of the last games over lunch. This is far preferable to the last World Cup, which was held in Japan and Korea; rising at 4 am to watch Turkey take on Angola was much more difficult to justify, and much less palatable to the casual fan.

Try it out. Don't worry about watching the US team, necessarily. Watch Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands or Spain. (The jury is still out on England; they have been very dull so far.) For bonus points, keep an atlas handy so that you can help your kids find Togo or Algeria.

And the best bit of all: listening to US-based television commentators pretentiously attempt to establish their Euro-cred by identifying each country's team in the plural, as in, "Poland are attempting to defeat Germany for the first time ever." Priceless.