USA v England: Remembrance Of So Many Things Past

Part I in a series about the South Africa 2010 World Cup and the meaning of life in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

By Andrew Jenner

The older I get, the more time I seem to spend remembering – the World Cup no exception. I was seven when Roger Milla led Cameroon to the quarterfinals of the 1990 tournament in Italy. My family lived in Africa then, when Milla captivated the continent. The neighborhood kids and I spent most of the summer imitating the corner-flag hip-shake jig he danced after he scored the decisive goal against Colombia in the second round.

In ’94, I followed the US team with the religious devotion of a sixth-grader who fully expected to one day be playing for the national team (a dream that died sometime in high school, I think), worshiping all the icons and their heroics: Alexi Lalas’ grunge rock hair, Tony Meola’s mullet and spandex, Ernie Stewart’s improbable goal against Colombia, Tab Ramos’ skull fracture courtesy of a vicious Brazilian elbow.

The memories go on and on. Emmanuel Petit sealing the French triumph in ’98; waking up for the 2:30 a.m. EST kickoffs from Korea/Japan ‘02; the Zidane monster headbut in ’06 – things that will stay with me as long as anything else when my mind begins to crumble with age and dementia.
US soccer fans in general have been remembering more than usual recently, ever since the fixtures were drawn and the June 12 opening match against England was scheduled. If you’ve paid any attention at all the lead-up hype to South Africa 2010, you’ve surely heard about the historic 1-0 US upset over England in 1950 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the tournament’s first round. Maybe you’ve even seen the scratchy pictures, or a bit of jerky video reel.

Memories – mine, theirs and ours, of simpler times. Black and white photos from 1950 have given way to streaming online feeds. My days are mostly spent turning cogs and whittling away at to-do lists; I haven’t had much time lately to practice my Roger Milla hip shake. I spend Saturday morning dashing around like mad, A to B to the shower to the car to the game, distracted and feeling a bit unprepared.

The game itself is an exercise in memory. I watch with friends from high school. We pass the afternoon reliving our own soccer careers with the EMHS Flames (during the late ‘90s glory days when we owned the Virginia Independent Conference). As the play flows back and forth on the TV screen, Kyle and Mike and Weldon and I yell at the US players in our best Coach Bauman imitations. We wonder if we still have the skills to keep up with high school players today. When the US goalie gets kicked in the ribs and writhes around on the field for a few minutes, Kyle – who specialized in backup goalkeeping during high school – commiserates with the second-string American keeper, whom the cameras catch looking shell-shocked at the prospect of actually having to play.

If you care at all about the World Cup, you already know the facts of the game. After Ricardo Clark bones his defensive assignment and allows Steven Gerrard’s fourth minute goal, the US regroups and plays a commendable rest of the half. England goalie Robert Green makes a horrific, JV mistake and Clint Dempsey ties the game just before halftime. The second half goes by in a blur, a few chances, a few misses, the final whistle, a 1-1 tie, Alexi Lalas (grunge rock hair long since tamed and assimilated) and the rest of the in-studio analysts dissect the result and analyze its implications. Not good, not bad, certainly not the repeat upset we’d dared to hope for.

The 1-1 tie is a hard result to get worked up about, a frustrating, unresolved sort of score. Outside, June sun glares down as hot as ever. The thunderheads don’t make it past the mountain ridges. Frustrating, unresolved sort of weather.

As the afternoon peters away toward evening, I am preoccupied with the to-do list again, the minutiae of tomorrow’s daily grind, the things I have to do and the things I can push off until later. Somewhere in the mix, I arrive at a sinking, empty sort of premonition that all this bric-a-brac is going to make South Africa 2010 harder to remember than all those other World Cups that haunt my memory.

But as a US soccer fan, at least I know I’m not alone tonight. All of us are thinking about some sort of golden past right now.

Andrew Jenner is a freelance writer from Harrisonburg

This post was submitted by Andrew Jenner.

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