Futbol

I’ve been meaning to go to a soccer (it’s hard for me to use the American word now) match for a while. It’s one of those things that you feel as though you’re obligated to do, as part of your “cultural education” or something like that, the same way you feel obligated to see certain landmarks as a tourist. I finally went on Saturday and I discovered why it’s so revealing about the culture here in Argentina.

Soccer matches in Argentina are wildly different from those in the United States in ways that are not captured fully on the television screen. Now, I’m aware of the difference between watching something on television and going to the live event. I go to live music shows all the time both at home and here in Buenos Aires, and I’ve been to plenty of sports game in the U.S. While I’m by no means a huge sports fanatic, I have plenty of memories of my dad taking me to see Cleveland Indian’s baseball games, which are practically the only sports games I’ve ever been to. I can recall vividly the sound that the announcer’s made as he would call out each player that came up to bat and announced the sponsor’s of the game and emphatically announced every home run. I remember my dad buying me overpriced hotdogs and the cheap yellow beer that was everywhere in the stadium (and which I was too young for). I remember everyone standing up during a homerun and the particular way my dad said the word “yeah!” on such occasions. Much like popcorn at movie theatres, cheap beer and hotdogs, and other memories were things that had always been associated with sporting events in my mind.


Imagine my surprise then when I found that you couldn’t even enter the stadium, or come within a certain distance of the entrance with alcohol, let alone buy beer during the game. We passed through at least four security checkpoints on our way into the stadium. I would have an easier time getting a weapon onto a plane (which I’ve done before by accident) than I would have getting one into the River stadium.


The differences between these experiences back home and the game I saw last Sunday cannot be solely attributed to the different sports, as the few soccer games I attended in Cleveland were fairly similar (without the same charismatic announcer). Instead I think that there is a different culture in Argentina around Sports and around other things as well. The next day as we were walking back from my class at the UCA, we encountered a public demonstration of some sort, I’m not sure what exactly. I was struck by the similarities between this demonstration and the soccer match. The riot police were in full form at both events, complete with shields and batons, just as they had been at the soccer match, and they had barricaded off parts of the streets in a similar way. Perhaps even more impressive was that at one point the demonstrators started singing a song that I recognized as being a song sung at soccer matches, that familiar “olé! ole, ole, ole! Ole, ole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnFLK4iBcok&feature=related


Perhaps it’s cliché at this point to say that Argentines are just very passionate people, but it's true. Even the way they speak--they like to use words like “muy” and the prefix “re” (both of which mean “very”) more than someone from the Midwest would find prudent, and they like to use words like frightful (espantoso), terrible, horrible, ugly (feo) and beautiful (lindo) impressive (impresionante) with great emphasis and often with the suffix –isimo for added emphasis. I remember after my first few weeks of class the first time I said that I really liked something my host mother told me that she didn’t think that I had liked anything else because when she asked me I just “yes”, in a thoroughly unconvincing way. I discovered that in order to communicate that I liked something I had to say that I really liked it—bands I liked were not “buenos” they were “re bueno” or “buenisimo” or else it meant that I didn’t really like it at all and I was just answering in the affirmative so as to change the subject.


Tango lyrics are full of stories about men pining over lovers who have left them or coming back home to find their wife in the arms of another man and killing them both. It's that mix of passionate love that is always on the brink of spilling into aggression and violence. A sign at the stadium pleaded for "Pasion sin violencia". Passion without violence.


Maybe we don’t have this same level of passion in the United States, but one thing that seems to be universal about sports is their ability to allows us to connect with people. My dad really loved sports, long after his body was too full of injuries to continue to play many of them he would keep up with the Cleveland teams, watch games on TV and go to the stadium with tickets that some people in the his department would reserve for him. And even though he’s always loved sports, I’ve long suspected that my dad’s real reason for watching sports—I knew he’d far rather play them than watch if he could--was the way they allowed you to connect with people. During the game’s one goal, everyone was dancing and singing and screaming at the top of their lungs, and we high-fived the guy next to us, who we didn’t even know. I remember that my dad used to talk about sports to everyone, no matter where he was, in bars in other cities, to the hot dog vender on the street outside his work you name it. During my summer working in facilities, a job in which I had very little in common with my co-workers those Cleveland Cavaliers games always gave us something to talk about. In this way we were all Clevelanders together. Sports can unite as and give us a common identity more readily than they start fights.

Which reminds me, I hear the Cavs just swept the second team in a row.