Driving rains kept even what locals described as a “nice pitch” empty in Natal.
Editor’s Note: The Yanks Are Coming co-founders collectively saw each United States group stage match at the World Cup. This is the first of two stories on one writer’s experiences in Brazil. Special thanks to Zack Goldman (@ThatDamnYank on Twitter) for editing. All photos (save one from the USA v. Ghana match) courtesy of The Yanks Are Coming.
Neil W. Blackmon
Part I: Natal
A Brazilian tourism website links to an almanac and tells a tale of Natal as a beach resort city of sunshine, where it rains only ten days a year. When we land, though, the rain is falling vertically and being swept sideways in the wind and the trees, supposedly green year round, look black.It’s not yet five in the afternoon but the weather and the fact the calendar suggests its winter means it’s already getting dark. The taxi line is ten deep and there are puddles by the automatic door exits where you can see the mosquitos congregating. The dampness exaggerates the smell of drywall—the airport here opened eleven days before the tournament began—and the duct tape on the baseboards in the baggage claim room appear loosed from the wall, revealing wood without paint. My wife is digging through a suitcase for mosquito repellent and motioning me towards the taxi line when I hear the roar. A TV nearby is surrounded, but I get the gist through screams and the occasional window created when a person moves: Robin Van Persie has scored a magnificent goal, diving in with his head and Spain, the current European and World Champions, are on the ropes. I make my way to the taxi line, practicing my destination instructions in Portuguese.
The new airport isn’t really in Natal at all and for most who visit it takes forty-five minutes to get from the airport to the city proper. This is extended to an hour in the rain, which only increases after the last of the daylight has departed. Our taxi driver speaks constantly to my wife, who does her best to answer the questions she understands. I catch one or two- about her heritage or nationality. Her dark skin and her ability to speak some of the language make her easily confused for a native. This would be a recurring event. Eventually, he gives up. We make it to the hotel, thirteen hours after we were supposed to depart Sao Paulo. The weather delayed our flight from Sao Paulo to Natal twelve hours, and because of that, we missed the first game we were supposed to attend, but I’m smiling. We are here. We are in Brazil.
The sun and skies finally cleared on our final day in Natal, leaving this hotel view.
“Tomorrow, Maybe We Drink Rain Water” – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms
At home in Florida, fog is common particularly in early spring when the cooler mornings disguise the rugged heat that grips the afternoon. Sometimes, the fog turns into rain and the rain comes heavy and stops and turns to steam. In Natal, there are both at once: fog and rain, and you can’t make out the ocean only two hundred yards from our hotel room porch.
The hotel itself, Hotel de Marsol Beach, lacks the luxury of any American hotel but to locals, is considered luxurious. The rooms are spacious and the suites have personal Jacuzzis, which is a nice touch even if they are completely unusable, filled with ants the half the size of pennies and rainwater. There’s two restaurants, one upstairs, one downstairs; one bar, downstairs and outdoors, by the hotel’s three terraced swimming pools; and a large, aesthetically pleasing lobby where the roof, clearly accustomed to 355 days of sunshine, is leaking but the standing water is promptly attended to by the hardworking staff. There’s even a business center, a large room with a sliding glass door, a conference table and a couch, which my wife points out to me. It has three electric outlets, which is a start, should the hotel ever decide to purchase a computer or printer. I’ll use this room, eventually, to put the finishing touches on The Yanks Are Coming’s USMNT vs. Ghana preview. The roof doesn’t leak there either, which is nice.
It rains all evening the first night and repeats the trick the entirety of the following day until mid-afternoon. We don’t dare venture out into the city, despite invitation from a few of the friendly, USMNT attired guests we encounter in the lobby. Instead, we rest and watch the World Cup with other guests, twenty to thirty of us (mostly Mexico supporters, still wearing jerseys and sombreros and chatting about their victory in Natal the day prior) crowded around one high-definition television in the bar area, protected from the rain by two umbrellas and a beach towel. The first game of the day, a Falcao-less Colombia against Greece, provides my first entirely incorrect prediction of the Finals (I had thought Holland would defeat Spain a day prior): the Colombians fly past the Greeks 3-0, a Cuadrado goal in the fifth minute as deserved as a fifth minute goal can be and from there, the Greeks haplessly hoping to limit the goal differential damage. I had underestimated the Colombians technical quality, my wife tells me. It won’t be the first time she’s right.
A bottle of water costs five reais—steep even in the States—and most of it, at least at our hotel, is água com gás, which is maddening to my wife. The rain slows a bit by mid-afternoon, and she is stir crazy at the hotel, so we venture out towards Ponte Negra, the city’s main tourist haven, to take in the afternoon matches. “If we can’t find water without gas,” my wife suggests, “perhaps tomorrow we’ll drink rain water.”
We had to leave the hotel for the first indications of the massive American presence in Natal.
Three Lions and Ticos and Elephants, Oh My
The oceanside highway Hotel de Marsol Beach is situated across from one of Brazil’s larger national parks, the Dunas State Ecological Park. Nearly two hectacres of sand dunes and hills, it insulates the coastal highway from the city center, and, ultimately, the Arena das Dunas, the 400 million reais complex built specifically for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. An enormous series of sand dunes dominates the view as you travel down the coastal highway towards the city center, and I’m snapping blurry photos through the rain-stained taxi windows when my wife points out the seven to eight federal police vehicles surrounding another hotel on the beach. Behind them, a bus slowly prepares to turn into the resort. Pouring rain only five minutes after we’d left the hotel, we’re inspired by what we see around the police cars: thirty to forty Americans, cheering, waiting on a bus, with one big man in the center, waving a flag. The US Men’s National Team is in Natal.
In the city center, the dominance of the American presence in Natal becomes increasingly evident. Given the large number of El Tri supporters at our resort, we’re initially surprised to see this many Americans. There’s something reassuring about it, even if it’s clichéd to see so many of them at a shopping mall.
The mall itself, called Shoppes de la Praia, an odd confluence of Spanglish and Portuguese, has clearly been jazzed up, both in terms of merchandise and security, for the World Cup. There are beer vendors in the middle of aisles, a host of mobile ATM machines, extra portable bathrooms and at least ten guards with machine guns on all four sides of the shopping plaza. From the veranda of one bar, I can see street graffiti art down a side street: a boy in a Neymar Jr. jersey using a Selecao hat to ask a suited man with “FIFA” on his suit pocket for money. It’s the first reminder of many of the cost of being here on so many people I’ll never meet.
The local food is all fried but quite good and we enjoy, for the first time, a meal that isn’t simple “bar food” while Costa Rica and Uruguay play on several televisions positioned throughout the shopping mall. The locals are shocked to see the South American champions struggle—Uruguay are utterly clueless in possession and Costa Rica, playing a back three that really is a back five, eat Uruguay’s two forwards alive and counter ferociously. When Joel Campbell and Cristian Gamboa combine for the equalizer, it seems a just result for the flow of the game. When Duarte buries a set piece to give the Ticos the lead, an American couple at a table near us remarks, “Surelynow, the Uruguayans will be angry and motivated.” They aren’t. Campbell’s brilliant ball to Marcos Urena late in the match gives the Ticos a shocking third, and shouts of “CONCACAF!, CONCACAF!” ring through the shopping plaza for nearly an hour after the game is finished. Three days, three rather surprising results. This is shaping up to be a World Cup to remember.
In the interlude between the Ticos stunning victory and the much-anticipated England-Italy match in Manaus that evening, my wife purchases a fashionable pair of heels, making good on day two of the trip ona promise she’d made to herself to buy Brazilian shoes. It’s while waiting for her to complete that purchase that I run into one of the few American couples at our hotel, Ywang and Amy, from San Diego. They tell me that down the road from the shopping plaza are a handful of night clubs and bars with Brazilian music and food and televisions that will make for good evening location to take in some of the local culture and the England match. You can see these locations and their neon lights in the distance, but it’s the in-between that catches our eyes before we get there.
A market seemingly dislocated from the shopping plaza in time and place, sits just across the street. We make our way over and find it captivating—a collection of island-style street merchants and vendors shops pawning all manner of goods, from Selecao replica jerseys available for 25 reais to dolls of Fuleco, the tournament mascot, for 10 reais to baby clothing and shoes to local art and wood carvings. We wander around seemingly in a different era for nearly an hour before the darkness settles in and the rain returns, a sweeping, wind-driven cold rain that quickly fills the half hardened-mud, half-broken concrete floors of the market with water and soaks our pants and shoes. Promised 355 days of sunshine by a tourism website, my wife and I had forgotten our Florida etiquette and neglected to bring an umbrella with us to Brazil, and we’re drenched just trying to cross the street to a bar that has suitable shelter. Upon entering the bar, we’re quickly informed they are charging 20 reais for entry, despite the fact that half the bar is outside in the rain and there are no tables available. We decline, and clutching the bag that holds my wife’s expensive Brazilian shoes, we hurry through standing street water for the nearest taxi stand. We’ll take in Italy’s 2-1 win over a brave, exciting England and Cote d’Ivoire’s seeming World Cup breakthrough in Recife later that evening back at the hotel, our evening shortened by the deluge. Complicating matters, the rain has now been so persistent and torrential that our hotel room has partially flooded, soaking portions of my suitcase and leaving a puddle by our doorstep. At least we’ve got drinking water, my wife says. Tomorrow will be better.
El Tri fans congregate and sing old Mexican songs, two nights after their victory over Cameroon.
A Mexican Cantina
The driving rain means we don’t dare go anywhere else that evening, but the partial flooding of our hotel room also ensures that we spend what remains of the night outside of our hotel room. It’s a forced condition that becomes one of the more memorable evenings of our stay in Brazil.
Japan and Cote d’Ivoire are on the television at the hotel bar but the attention paid that match, by most there, is somewhere between white noise and the half-glances you see from the coworkers you invite to your Super Bowl party who couldn’t care less about the NFL. My wife and I try to resist our surroundings, and focus on the match—“It’s Yaya Toure in his prime at a World Cup,” I tell my wife, but the atmosphere at the bar makes that nearly impossible.
Because Mexico’s next match is in the relatively close northeastern city of Fortaleza, which you can reach from Natal on an omnibus and which has fewer hotels than resort-heavy Natal, most the Mexico fans at our hotel have remained. Now a full day and a half removed from their team’s opening match victory over Cameroon, a group of these fans have commandeered the hotel bar. They’re still decked out in Mexico jerseys—Oribe Peralta and Luis Montes (respect!) the most common—and they occupy at least fifteen of the twenty or so tables in the bar area. It’s evident immediately they’ve been out there most the day; both the volume of their voices and the pyramid of Skol and Brahma cans at each table a living testament to their revelry.
If we’re going to sit up and drink with this many Mexico fans, my wife and I decide we’ll do it with US jerseys on. It’s the 2010 World Cup Bocanegra for my wife and a custom-made Landon Donovan with #24 that I had designed for the tournament after Donovan’s roster omission for me. We’re immediately booed and hissed at as we walk into the bar, but it becomes clear they’re only joking when we congratulate them on the victory over Cameroon and they chant “Don-o-van, Don-o-van!!” back at me every time I get up to get drinks.
Sometime in the second half, before Cote D’Ivore equalize and quickly take the lead over Japan, one of the Mexican fans, a Pachuca accountant named Enrique, disappears into his hotel room and emerges, minutes later, with a boombox straight out of an early 1990’s Dr. Dre video. He dons a sombrero, puts a cassette tape in the boom box and cranks the volume. An hour’s worth of old Mexican folklore songs. The music is loud enough to entice a handful of American supporters to the bar, just to see what is going on. With reinforcements now present, I dance a marionette to one song, to rousing applause. “Don-o-van!!” “Don-o-van,” they chant. I manage to swallow every urge to mention dos-a-cero. Why ruin a memory and moment that could only happen at a World Cup? Thousands of miles from Columbus, a drunken, karaoke sing-a-long between a handful of US fans and a throng of El Tri supporters caps our second full day in Brazil.
Constant rain and unfinished road projects in a Natal favela cause a mudslide, unleashing sewage and trash into the sea.
The Flood
It’s still pouring rain the next morning at breakfast when we hear about the flooding. Wholly unprepared for this type of rain, the city’s well-built roads are almost all isolated in the city center and near the tourist destinations. Like so many of the host cities at the 2014 World Cup, the government promised Natal’s locals infrastructure improvements but never delivered, ensuring that the favelas, which dominate the hilltops, were left with the same choppy roads and less-than-stable building embankments. One road scheduled to be improved where ground was broken but the road was never completed, instead leaving just dirt and barricades, has caused a mudslide. The mudslide has collapsed homes and rained trash and sewage from the hillside favela onto the coastal highway below. It is recommended, my wife reports, that tourists avoid that area for the day. As if the weather would dictate otherwise, we think.
We’d resigned ourselves to another day stuck at the hotel when the rain finally stops. The sun is threatening to come out. A US Soccer post on Twitter, shows the team taking a walk on the beach. With more rain in the forecast, it’s a great idea. Best get in beach time now, we think.
The Beach
We create images and scenes in our minds of places we will visit and events we will attend, and those scenes and images aren’t ever quite right. A wedding you look forward to attending may end up being worse than you drew it up in your head. A sporting event may be better. But it isn’t ever the same, and honestly, that’s a good thing. Otherwise we’d have no need for lived experience. Brazil was no different.
My wife and I had these images in our mind, shaped partly by television and documentaries we’d watched about Brazil but also by our own sense of imagination (or lack of imagination?) about what Brazil would be. One recurring image was one of children playing soccer anywhere and everywhere they could. They wouldn’t need shoes or grass and they would play for hours on end, almost as if they’d been designated to do so by their parents. And they’d all play wonderfully, a mix and match of future Garrinchasand Rivaldos and Neymars.
Perhaps there were such places; perhaps Natal was one of them, and we didn’t see it because most the taxi drivers would drive the long way rather than take the shortcuts through the hilltop favelas. Whatever the reason, we didn’t see any children playing soccer until the rain stopped and we went to the beach.
What we saw was children running circles around American and Mexican tourists. My wife counted five goals by kids who looked no older than twelve in one fifteen minute game, played on a pint-sized pitch of sand situated between lush, rocky sea grass on one end and two resorts on the other. Winner stays on isn’t just a thing at the Brooklyn basketball playgrounds or Rucker Park. Here, first to five wins and the losers get back in line. What was remarkable was the Brazilian kids took on all comers, and people kept coming back for more. One boy, wearing a Shaquille O’Neal Miami Heat tee shirt, took a break after two games to come ask me about my jersey (a Michael Bradley # 4, circa 2011 Gold Cup). His feet were bleeding from hours of play among the seashells and sand and what had to be a lengthy walk to get to the beach.
“Michael Bradley, good”, he managed, with a toothy grin.
“We have some good players,” I said.
“Almost good enough to beat us five years ago,” he said.
“Almost,” I responded.
“Who’s your favorite player?” he asked. “Bradley?” “Donovan?” “Why no Donovan?”
I had no answer. I think he was impressed that I was impressed with his broken English. He should have been. I felt increasingly embarrassed only my wife could talk to him in Portuguese. He changed the subject to show off other things about America he knew and understood.
“LeBron James,” he said. “Very good. Very good.” We all laughed. “Barack Obama. Black like me,” he said. “I like him. Same skin as your lady.” I didn’t have the heart to correct him. I didn’t have the language either. And even if I had, he was done with us. There was more soccer to be played, and a new group of tourists to punish.
Stuck in the favelas, an image of the “other”, less happy side of this World Cup.
Stuck in the Favela (The Night before Ghana)
Because US Soccer essentially rented out a now defunct car dealership for the party the night before the Ghana match, neither Google Maps nor our taxi driver had any idea where it was. US Soccer had provided an address—but that was on one of the largest roads in Natal, accessible from three directions and our taxi driver (and other folks’ drivers, as we would find out) weren’t completely sure where it would be. We managed to assure our driver that you’d know it when you saw it: the US Soccer crest wouldn’t be illuminated at the site for security purposes but there would be a red, white and blue banner that read “Uma Nação, Uma Equipe.” He assured my wife in Portuguese that he’d figure it out.
Ten minutes into our taxi ride, our driver’s small car stalled out on a hill in a favela. As our taxi driver exited his car, it began to rain. Three men on top of the hill, drinking bottled beers, looked at our taxi and began laughing. There was a large bed sheet hanging on a clothesline on an adjacent hill that read: “FUCK FIFA.” I focused on that more than the driver’s assurances that we would be fine.
We were moving again in less than two minutes and nothing even remotely sinister happened, but the stalled car did get me thinking for the rest of the ride to the dealership (60 reais and nearly half an hour later, we found the place) about the ethical misgivings I’d had about this World Cup to begin with. What was the proper role for me as a visiting tourist in the midst of objections by many Brazilian citizens to the World Cup, the actual protests of several groups, and the various strategies, many of them military, implemented to secure its realization? And should I feel bad that I had to get stuck on a hill in a favela to think of that?
Maybe the most startling realization was how easily the government and local police, and the general layout of Natal itself (two cities, one along the water, one on the hills to the interior), had insulated us from thinking about, let alone exploring ethical quandaries. Sure, the airport smelled of drywall and fresh paint and you could see the duct tape, and there had been that haunting mural next to the shopping mall of the boy in the Neymar shirt asking for food from his Selecao hat, but beyond that, very little about the place screamed protest. Natal has minimal public transport compared to the larger cities, and there hadn’t been bus strikes like in Sao Paulo or Rio or Brasilia. The airport workers had been friendly and helpful, which was more than you heard or read about other cities and places. Was this a ruse we were comfortable accepting to enjoy our time in Brazil as fans and night time soccer writers? Was Natal as opposed to the FIFA World Cup as other places? And because Natal’s new arena wasn’t complete until January, there had been no mass protests that caught the eyes of American televisions the previous summer, when the Confederations Cup as viewed from the hilltop favelas in various cities that produced the likes of Garrincha and Rivaldo briefly met the “other” Brazil, the one the tourists see, in the middle.
There are all manner of images and memories in my mind from our trip to Brazil but the “FUCK FIFA” sign on a sheet outside a disheveled hilltop home is one that won’t escape me. It didn’t the remainder of that evening either, despite my excitement as a fan about being at the World Cup, and being one day away from the beginning of a journey that would culminate four years of US Soccer.
US Soccer throws a great party the night before at an old car dealership.
The US Soccer party itself was at its best in Natal. There had been whispers of thousands of Americans being in Natal for the Ghana match, one Jürgen Klinsmann famously called a “six-pointer” in the aftermath of the Yanks’ brutal draw. But partly because our hotel seemed to be more a haven for El Tri supporters, and partly because with so many hotel options compared to many of the host cities, Natal made it easy for the Americans to appear “spread out” on any given day, the Federation’s “Night Before” party was the first genuine confirmation of an American invasion.
Thousands packed into the old car dealership which was decorated to the nines with US Soccer gear and paraphernalia. There were American Outlaws from nearly every official and unofficial chapter, trading scarves and cigars and tracking down “Twitter friends.” There were reporters who stuck out like ugly ducklings without US gear on; I spoke to one from GQ and another from Esquire, both in Brazil to do stories on what it meant to be an “American Outlaw,” and spending ten minutes asking me about it, as if I were a qualified source. There were Free Beer Movement shirts and “State Jerseys” (US jerseys with things like Georgia, # 4 on the back) and Dead Presidents and red, white and blue dresses and stilettos and sunglasses at night. There was a stirring sense of “togetherness” and “belief” and no shortage of “I Believe” chants amidst the beers that cost 15 reais and the terrible cheese on bread they called “pizza” that cost ten. My wife and I eventually found Jon and Nicole Levy, newlyweds on their honeymoon and great friends, and reflected on the four year journey that our website, The Yanks Are Coming, and US Soccer had been on. We talked about all the people who helped us get where we were and the countless others we wished were here with us. It was as emotional as I’ve ever been before a match.
And in the end, when Sunil Gulati took the stage to tell us that he “believed that we would win” tomorrow against Ghana, we listened. And in the pouring rain, we believed.
TYAC Co-Founders with the US Ambassador to Brazil on Ghana gameday.
Gameday
The rain stopped the morning of the game. The sun sneaked through the clouds, and for the first time, you could see the beautiful skyline of downtown Natal from the beaches along the coastal highway. I hadn’t slept much, but the view from our hotel room porch of the ocean and the city and the abundant sunshine was rejuvenating. I drank a cup of black coffee slowly on the porch and tried to soak the moment in. The US would play Ghana in the World Cup tonight. I would be there with my young wife.
Sports are to some extent contrived events, driven if not compelled by narratives of our own creation and judged, increasingly in the age of social media, by how they fit or don’t into the narratives we create. At base it is of course “just a game,” but we emphasize the results and narratives anticipating and reacting to those results so much that we lose that — sometimes to our detriment. Sports demand that we forfeit our own control over our lives, even if just for a moment, and place our faith and hopes and dreams into something beyond our grasp. The risk innate to that leap of faith, while actually zero, in the grander sense, becomes seemingly greater the longer you invest in a particular sport, and even more so, in a particular team.
For more than a decade of my adult life, the team I’ve faithfully left my emotions open to is the US Men’s National team. For six of those years, I’ve exercised what I’ve at least convinced myself is a modicum of control over that leap of faith by writing about them consistently at The Yanks Are Coming. Along with Jon Levy, one of my best friends in life, I’ve been a consistent part of shaping and re-shaping the narratives that surround that team. How close, or far away, the narratives we’ve created and discussed on our website match the team’s actual results has become part of the process of writing, and, as a corollary, the process of being a fan. I’m thinking of that on a Monday morning in Brazil, clutching my coffee and staring at the beautiful coastline and ocean. I have an idea of what will happen later that night at the Arena das Dunas—but that’s all it is—an idea. No matter how much we write and no matter how much better we get at previewing the match or tactically breaking down the opposition, I can’t control anything. I’m thinking of that and it’s driving me crazy, so I go back to crafting narratives and telling stories.
What happens if the U.S., as I expect, fail to win? Is it a referendum on Jürgen Klinsmann as Gulati’s man; a judgment on a courtship that took three swings before finally making contact? Is it less that than simply a judgment on his roster selection—the shocking omission of the best field player our country has ever produced in favor of a pair of grizzled MLS veterans with next to no international experience and a pair of kids who are and are not barely old enough to buy a beer at a bar back home? Would a draw, which I do expect, be the end of the world—with what I consider to be the more favorable “matchup” coming six days later in Manaus against a Portugal team I think is wildly vulnerable? Would the team’s spirit break with a defeat?
And what if they win? Is Klinsmann immediately vindicated from roster selection criticism? Is he canonized as the manager who finally vanquished the Black Stars of Ghana, the bogey side who have ruined three international tournaments for various US teams in the last decade? Is the firing of the former manager, who won a World Cup group and beat Spain before Holland made it look shockingly easy, now validated because the new hire, the guy they wanted instead of him all along, got the result he couldn’t? Or should we judge each World Cup on its own merits, defying the great soccer history books and articles and previews and simply stating that the US were due, in this World Cup, with a better team than they’ve ever assembled, even without the best player they’ve ever fielded? I’m thinking of narratives, and recording them into a little voice recorder. It helps me feel like I’m exerting control over my emotions, which helps, because I know I can’t control the game.
With basketball uniforms featuring the names of “Dead Presidents”, these guys brought it in Natal.
The“tailgate” backat the old car dealership US Soccer used, and the pre-party, are all a blur. There’s more red, white and blue than a #BOSTONSTRONG Fourth of July or Patriot’s Day party and more fifteen reais Budweiser and hugs and high fives and photographs. There’s a speech from the US Ambassador to Brazil, who shockingly also “believes that we will win,” but then genuinely shockingly wants to take a photograph with Jon and I—a fan of our website and writing. We’re thrilled to have such high marks and diplomatic relations with Brazil at The Yanks Are Coming.
Pepe’s red card for head-butting Thomas Müller draws some sneers and jeers and Jon Levy quickly points out how that’s reshaped one narrative, call it the “hothead and can’t score Clint Dempsey gets mad at Pepe and picks up a red card for a crotch punch” narrative. Pepe’s ejection, and Portugal’s capitulation, reminds me of another narrative: maddening things happen at World Cups and great players often do stupid things. Except Germany, I think. Germany are always fairly predictable. Whether that makes them riveting or dull or simply excellent remains up for debate. Or at least it did on that Monday afternoon in Natal. But mostly we just looked at our watches and phones to mark the passage of time. And then we paid thirty reais a piece to ride a bus four blocks to the FIFA “Exclusion Zone” by the Arena, where some two and a half hours before kickoff, we went through security and made our way to the stadium fan zone.
As day turned to twilight and twilight to early evening, gray clouds approached from the east. It smelled like rain, but the rain never came.
US Fans in the Arena das Dunas made the match a virtual home game. (Photo: AFP, Javier Soriano)
“Oh My God, There’s so many of us”
Marvin Gaye’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1983 NBA All Star Game will forever be the greatest rendition of our national anthem, barring a switch to “God Bless America,” in which case, Ronan Tynan at the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium wins forever. But for me personally, from June 16, 2014 forward—my wife staring around the Arena das Dunas just before the US national anthem against Ghana and saying “Oh my God, There’s so many of us”—that moment and the anthem that followed will be how I think about every national anthem at any future sporting event. It wasn’t a perfect anthem. And we couldn’t see the players faces, which at a World Cup, is always special. But we could see each other. And there weren’t many dry eyes.
Thirty seconds later, it rained Budweiser and Brahma. My wife says she was too busy taking pictures to even realize what happened. You know what happened. A defender closes on Jermaine Jones, who delivers the ball to Clint Dempsey, who does a quick step over into the area past Ghanaian center back John Boye. With Sulley Muntari chasing at full speed and Adam Kwarasey, the goalkeeper Kwesi Appiah started because of pressure back home, closing, Dempsey drills the ball off the far inside right post. Commence a slew of expletives and nonsensical language better suited for a Pentecostal church revival. The hugs of people I’ll never see again tally at eight, my Graham Zusi jersey—the one that caused a Mexican couple to hug me at the Sao Paulo airport four days prior—is drenched in sea salt, sweat and beer. I smell like a brewery, but my beer is knocked over and empty. The Americans have a lead. This isn’t a dream.
Starting fast has been a problem for the United States worthy of a polemic, at least since Jan Koller’s bald noggin put the Americans behind the eight ball five minutes into the World Cup in 2006. You can count on a less than two hands the memorable games where the US didn’t chase from the get go: Spain in 2009, Egypt in 2009, Brazil in 2009, Mexico in Columbus in 2009, Mexico at the Azteca in 2009, the Gold Cup Final in 2011, Mexico again in 2013. So it was forgivable that so many US publications suggested the US didn’t want to fall behind Ghana in Natal, even if suggesting that a team needs to start fast at a World Cup is like an auto racing analyst suggesting that tires will be important at the Daytona 500.
Nonetheless, the US had their lead. And twenty or so less than testy minutes later, when Jozy Altidore took down a brilliant searching ball from Michael Bradley on the left flank but immediately pulled up lame before crumbling to the ground in pain, it became evident they’d simply take punch after punch to keep it.
For the next hour, the Americans swatted away attack after relentless Ghana attack, with a resounding chorus of “USA, USA, USA” to their backs and all-too-frequent singing about Tim Howard ringing in their ears. Tactically, the game wasn’t a marvel: Ghana had most the space they wanted until very deep and the US was admirable in its defensive execution far more than its tactical nous. I marveled at times at how far in the attacking third Ghana’s brilliant left back, Kwadwoh Asamoah was playing, even when the US briefly held the ball, and I remember praising Kyle Beckerman’s poise and positioning throughout, but this was far more soccer in the collective sense of desperation defending than anything tactically memorable.
When Clint Dempsey broke his nose on a high boot to the face and Matt Besler came off at halftime, I wondered if the US could hang on, with no true target forward, its best attacking talent playing with a bloodied face and a potential breathing issue and its best positional defender no longer on the field, replaced by a kid who had never inspired anyone, save perhaps his manager, in a US shirt. And still, it took a small positioning error by Fabian Johnson and a lethal finish from Andre Ayew for the dam to finally break. “Above all, we have to get a damn point,” I told my wife, her head buried in my shoulder.
After Brooks’ stunning goal, Americans didn’t want to leave. Who could blame them?
Less than five minutes later, there was John Brooks, half-blurry in another US fans beer shower behind the Ghanaian net, running around looking at heaven and trying to find someone, anyone, to hug, before settling for the grass. It was Jim Valvano after NC State won the national title meets Tebowing meets snow angels in Central Park. It was perfect, from Graham Zusi’s right-footed ball to Brooks’ run to his teammates’ reaction to Ghana’s sit-on-the-field dismay. I didn’t want John Brooks on the World Cup team. Jürgen Klinsmann did. History won’t judge what I thought at all, but it will validate Klinsmann for that, I thought. It was astonishing. A handful of minutes later, it was three points.
When it ended, we didn’t see an American fan leave, even after the players were done applauding the fans and everyone, even the last to go, Tim Howard and Kyle Beckerman, had walked off the field. There was something to the idea that the World Cup could end immediately, without the heat of Manaus and the Germans in Recife, and most of us would feel satisfied. It had been grueling and ugly and exhausting and nerve-wracking and most of all, the United States beat Ghana and it was beautiful. There were more hugs and high fives and flags to be waved and photos to take. “They’ll have to throw us out,” the IT guy from San Francisco sitting next to me said, as he cut a cigar.
Finally, as we turned to walk away, exit the stadium and dance and sing and chant and cheer deep into the Natal night, it began to rain.
Neil W. Blackmon is Co-Founder of The Yanks Are Coming. He can be reached at nwblackmon@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter at @nwb_usmnt.