Tuesday
Traveling has pushed back today’s post, but Julia and I are staying current with the World Cup results as we drive across the country, including Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé’s extraordinary feats. Here’s a soccer poem by Diane Ackermann, written after watching the New York Cosmos play in the 1970s. Former soccer greats Giorgo Chinaglia of Italy and Marinho Chagas of Brazil had come to America in the first concerted attempt to jumpstart soccer in this country.
We can see the long-term impact of such players on the U.S. today (along with Brazil’s Pele) as we watch America’s exciting team. At the time, few schools had soccer programs, and there weren’t the youth leagues we see today. As a result, most Americans found soccer fandom inexplicable and goal celebrations such as that witnessed by Diane Ackerman to be exotic.
Soccer at the Meadowlands
By Diane Ackerman
Near the goal, head sunk into his shoulders
as he sprints, Chinaglia takes the ball
spat at his feet,
dribbles it around a thatch of yellow shirts
and, sliding between the legs
of two defenders, belts it hard
into that caged, invisible something
beyond the green reason of the field
into the netted calm no one enters.
The home crowd’s ear-splitting rant
grows seismic. Screams blur
to wind howl and cymbals.
A jig-step. Chinaglia raises his fists
as laurels. In a walking faint,
he gallops round the pitch,
leaping, as if lovesick,
into Marinho’s arms, leaping
to the hypnotic boom of the crowd.
