In The World Cup, Race-Based Rooting Patterns Go Out The Window.

I know, I know …if I had a shred of dignity and sophistication, I would have written last week about the McChrystal "resignation," or the shocking realization across America that there really may be significantly more black voters in South Carolina than the Census Bureau has ever disclosed.

How else could a black man named Alvin Greene have done so well in that state's recent primary election for the U.S. Senate?

The presumption by most mainstream pundits is that Greene, somehow, must have “rigged” South Carolina’s entire electoral apparatus. It couldn’t simply be that he got the most votes from the state's surprisingly large, and recently more active, black voting base, could it?

Hey, I could have even talked about the Iranian ship that had been headed with breakneck speed toward Gaza, brazenly inviting direct confrontation with, and testing the resolve of, the entire Israeli military machine.

I could have speculated about who might be the 2012 mayoral hopefuls, here in Philly, now that one, little-known Republican committeeman, named John Featherman, has already announced his candidacy.

Yeah, those could have been my topics but it turned out that they all took a clear, second priority to my new-found interest in World Cup Soccer.

I found myself attracted to the World Cup for two reasons: One, I really do believe that national, athletic competition is routinely seen as a proxy for war, and, in my opinion, war, among the members of humankind, is inevitable. As Chairman Mao was fond of saying, “war is the continuation of politics, by other means.” Done right, then, victory in national team sports has been about as close as you could come to gaining “bragging rights” over another country or demonstrating your national superiority -- without having to fire a single shot, drop a single bomb or draw a single sword.

The Greeks understood that very well when they introduced the first Olympic Games, back in 776 B.C. As strange as it may seem now, the original concept of the Olympics had very little to do with TV ratings points, advertising revenues, or athletes positioning themselves for multi-million dollar product endorsements.

No, the idea was: Each invited country brought their strongest soldiers to compete in a series of military-related events, including running, boxing, wrestling, jumping and weapons accuracy. The objective was to determine which country would probably win if the various nations actually had to resort to war.

Fast forward to 2010 and we see a great deal of that same approach evident in the World Cup athletes, in their sponsoring nations and, certainly on the eerie, nationalistically painted faces of their fans. This is all about as serious as it gets in athletic competition, during peace-time. From the very heads of the participating governments, down to the last player on each team, winning in these matches is of paramount importance and losing is absolutely unacceptable

This is not the artificial competition engaged in by professional sports teams in the U.S. This isn't the “Chargers” against the “Ravens,” the “Eagles” against the “Cardinals” or the “”Phillies” against the “Dodgers.” No, in the World Cup, it was Portugal and Brazil, in succession, against North Korea. The scary part was that the teams that actually won against the soccer-challenged North Koreans, and observers from other countries, began to read all kinds of things into their victories, wondering, for example, whether North Korea really is a serious, global, military power, after all. How tough can the North Koreans actually be, they led themselves to think, if the members of their soccer team are so defenseless, so inept and so uncoordinated?

Notwithstanding the fact that North Korea reportedly has a one-million-man standing army, that’s what they were thinking. Some of the broadcast sports analysts even said as much, out loud, between the matches.

The World Cup, unlike your average Major League Baseball game, pits the former colonial powers – England, France, Germany, Portugal and Italy – against their former colonies, Nigeria, Ghana, Brazil, Cameroon and the Ivory Coast, among others.

Do you really think it was “just a game” when the South African team competed against the French team, recently?

If you thought so, you would, of course, be dead wrong.

Even though South Africa's host team was eliminated in the first-level “group stage,” a French media outlet accurately reported that “the manner of their victory over former champion France meant they could exit the tournament standing proud.”

On the other hand, once the French team was also ignominiously bounced from the competition in that same, first stage and returned to Paris, Thierry Henry, one of the team leaders, was immediately summoned to a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who demanded a “wholesale” review of French soccer, so as to prevent a re-occurence of the nation's embarrassment on the world stage, in the future.

No, in countries around the world, this is way more than a game.

Why have we in the U.S. been so late to figure that out?

When he was very young, I taught my son to watch and listen intently to sports coverage so that he might gain a gut-level understanding of America’s cultural and racial dynamic. In that regard, the World Cup is filled with a number of interesting and contradictory subtexts.

Like many African-Americans, I'm constantly on the lookout for situations, in all walks of life, in which I can see “our people” excel and further prove their worth. Accordingly, over the years, I frequently found myself, as a sports fan, rooting, first, for the pro football team with the most black players, then, for the team with the rare black quarterback, then, for the team with the even-more-rare black head coach.

That approach hasn't been based on a desire, necessarily, to see white-dominated teams do poorly, but rather, on a sincere interest in having yet another, far-too-infrequent, public demonstration that we, as black Americans, are a lot more capable, a lot smarter, than we are generally given credit for being.

Despite the curious denials by this year's NBA Finals broadcasters – including by some former African-American players who absolutely do know better – black basketball fans, back during the Larry Bird era, did root, overwhelmingly, against the Boston Celtics. That was in direct reaction to NBA announcers, who found it necessary to repeat incessantly, during games, that, among all players in the entire league, Larry Bird, one of the Celtics' several Caucasian stars, was an especially “smart” player, an especially “intelligent” player, a remarkably “unselfish” player and one who “made all of his team members better” by his mere presence on the court. The implication, of course, was that Mr. Bird was, somehow, a superior athlete, even though he had obvious physical and skill-set disadvantages, as compared to the league's black players.

Wanting desperately to add a differing perspective to those observations, but not having access to our own airwaves, we responded by rooting for any team other than the Celtics, throughout Larry Bird’s entire career. If the Celtics played the Pistons, we went right out and bought a Pistons hat. If the Celtics played the Lakers, we became instant L.A. fans, and when the Celtics played the Sixers, the Philly team received our unquestioned and absolute support.

I’m finding, however, that such a simplistic approach is harder to apply in the World Cup.

Just when all of us new, U.S.-based, black soccer fans wanted to root automatically for an African nation, we found that the U.S.’s opponent in one game, Algeria, had only one Negroid member, its goal keeper; while the U.S. team, itself, had eight black players. Consequently, many of us found ourselves rooting energetically against the African Algerians as the U.S. sent them to defeat, in overtime.

And just when we wanted to root aggressively against the old “colonizers” in these televised, streaming videoed "virtual wars," we discovered that more than half of the 23 players on the French World Cup team and the same percentage of players on the English national team were also of Negroid African descent.

Finally, thoroughly confused about these numbers and about which team we really "ought" to have rooted for, we decided to do the patriotic thing and support the surging, "never-say-die” U.S. team, the one with Tim Howard, the half-Hungarian/half African-American goal keeper, and seven other “brothers.”

Then, along came the schedule makers at FIFA, World Soccer’s coordinating organization, who announced that the next U.S. opponent in the World Cup was going to be Ghana, the last African nation still competing in the tournament, at the time.

That was when confusion really set in.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time for us, and the rest of the world, to move away from the lingering, race-based, and ethnic/nationalistic, proxy-for-war-based approaches to sports competition, if we can.

Maybe it’s finally safe to go back to rooting for the team that plays the hardest, or the team whose uniform colors we prefer.

Can we learn that from the World Cup?

Are we there, yet?

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