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A different game

A black South African and an Afrikaner, both around 40 years of age, began talking at a bar prior to boarding a flight to Johannesburg. It was thanks to the Afrikaners, the people of chiefly Dutch extraction who ran the apartheid state, that black men like this one had no right even to a vote until 1994. But the two men chatted about the World Cup, business and politics with amiable ease, revealing not a hint of historical resentment or racial stress. The thought struck that the black South African would have been unable to connect as easily with a Nigerian, a Rwandan or a Mozambican; the Afrikaner would not have found as much in common with a Dutchman, an Englishman or an American.

That could change, though, as Mr. Pienaar conceded when he said that South African politics found itself at a "crossroads"; that after the World Cup fun was over a battle would resume within the ANC between the Malema camp, whose mix of half-baked Marxist rhetoric and race-tinged populism appeals to disaffected youth (60% of under-35s in South Africa are unemployed); and those "real leaders," as Mr. Pienaar calls them, who carry the Mandela flag of principled "nonracialism."

Contrary to much received opinion, it's more of a challenge to divide the races in South Africa than it is to unite them. Anyone who doubts it should ask the black player on the 1995 rugby team, Chester Williams, and the white player on the 2010 soccer team, Matthew Booth. Mr. Williams is married to a white woman; Mr. Booth, to a black one. Each couple has two small children.

—John Carlin is the author of "Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation," the book that served as the basis for the film "Invictus."

Ven, gringuito

With Jonathan Bornstein's goal in October, the United States tied Costa Rica and set off celebrations in Honduras.

January 23, 2010
U.S. Soccer Player Is National Hero (in Honduras)
By BILLY WITZ

CARSON, Calif. — With the United States trailing by a goal in the waning seconds, Jonathan Bornstein looked at his fellow defender Steve Cherundolo as the team prepared to take a corner kick.

“I was like, hey, dude, one of us should go inside the box,” Bornstein said. “We both don’t need to stay back here.”

And so off Bornstein went, sprinting toward Costa Rica’s goal, where he was about to find out just how far a little initiative could resonate.

When Bornstein headed Robbie Rogers’s corner kick into the net in October, it set off an emotional celebration at R.F.K. Stadium in Washington. Although the result of the final World Cup qualifying match meant little to the United States, which had already advanced to South Africa, the Americans took inspiration from their teammate Charlie Davies, who lay in a nearby hospital after he was involved in a fatal car accident a day earlier.


The interim president, Roberto Micheletti, declared a holiday after Honduras secured its first World Cup berth since 1982.

But the real roar emanated from Honduras, which, with Bornstein’s goal moments after it had beaten El Salvador, 1-0, clinched a berth in the World Cup for the first time since 1982. A country that had been torn by a political coup found a reason, at least for the moment, to coalesce. Hundreds of thousands of people emptied into the streets of the capital, Tegucigalpa. The interim president, Roberto Micheletti, declared the next day a national holiday.

Micheletti, who had been installed as the country’s leader after an army-backed coup ousted President Manuel Zelaya last July, ordered a parade rerouted in front of the presidential palace so that he could pose for photographs with the team.

But he did not forget Bornstein. He offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the resort area Islas de la Bahia.

“We’ll bring this gringuito who scored on the header,” Micheletti said. “He doesn’t need a visa to come here to Honduras.”

On Saturday night, Hondurans will have an opportunity to express their gratitude personally, when Honduras plays the United States in an exhibition here. Bornstein is expected to be at his familiar left back position.

“Growing up, you score goals in club soccer or in college and they maybe help your team win,” said Bornstein, whose goal knocked Costa Rica into a playoff, which it lost to Uruguay. “This goal against Costa Rica had a real impact on a whole nation. It doesn’t just affect me or the team, it affected three countries. That a simple soccer goal could do that is very surreal.”

[highest bid for shoes currently  $1,125; 10am, 23 January 2010]

Bornstein has autographed the shoes he wore against Costa Rica, and on Friday he began auctioning them on eBay, the proceeds going to disaster relief in Haiti. The bidding runs until Wednesday, by which time his teammates may stop ribbing him. Some wondered if he would play a half for each team Saturday.

“You might hear some Johnny Bornstein chants,” said Benny Feilhaber, a midfielder for the United States who grew up playing with Bornstein. “They’re in love with Johnny right now.”

Over the last three months, Bornstein’s Facebook page has been peppered with messages thanking him, and a page named Gracias Jonathan Bornstein has been set up. During the United States team’s three-week January training camp, he has been stopped several times leaving the field by Honduran fans who wanted to pose for a photograph with him.

“People are going to remember that name for a long time,” said Alfonso Rosado, a Honduran who has lived in the United States for 14 years.

Rosado was watching the United States-Costa Rica game with friends at his apartment in Long Beach, Calif., fearing the worst. Honduras was on the verge of World Cup berths in 1986 and 2002, only to lose its final qualifiers at home, to Canada and to Trinidad and Tobago.

“When the U.S. scored, we couldn’t believe it,” said Rosado, who watched Honduras work out Thursday night in a cold rain. “We were all jumping up and down. I got a call at 7 the next morning from friends in Honduras, who had been out drinking all night, yelling, ‘Can you believe it?’ ”

For a country that is still plagued by political problems, corruption and crime, the World Cup berth has given Hondurans a rare common cause.

“At that moment, in that day, everyone forgets about all the problems — the crime, the politics — and everyone is together,” Rosado said. “You wonder why we can’t do that on a daily basis, but we know there is at least one thing that can bring us together.”

Bornstein’s goal has opened windows for himself as well. He had understood what it was like to walk onto a soccer field in Central America as an unwelcome visitor, dodging coins, cups of beer and worse. Now he knows of at least one place where he can return to a warmer reception. He has looked into the Islas de la Bahia; a cabana amid the palm trees, sandy beaches and warm tropical waters does have its appeal.

So, about that next vacation?

“Maybe forever Honduras will be a good spot to go,” Bornstein said. “I’m going to keep those options open.”

Gun-totin' soccer mom

What can anyone possibly add to this?


Woman who carried gun to daughter's football match found shot and killed

A US woman who caused a stir last year by packing a pistol on her hip at her five-year-old daughter's football match was found shot to death in her home late yesterday with her husband. Police in Lebanon, Pennsylvania said they were not looking for a suspect in the killings.

Meleanie Hain, 31, and her husband Scott Hain, 33, had been having marital trouble lately, a neighbour told local news media. Neighbours reported hearing a boom and children screaming about 6pm; the couple's three children were home at the time but were unharmed.

Hain, a Lebanon, Pennsylvania gun enthusiast, last September wore a high-powered Glock pistol on her hip to a youth football match at a public park, alarming parents and children. After the game the opposing coach confronted Hain, who replied by giving him a pamphlet explaining her gun rights under the US constitution. Organisers of the football league told her to keep her gun away from future games and warned if she brought it again they would call police.

Meleanie Hain wears a loaded Glock 26 to her 5-year-old daughter's football match in Pennsylvania in September 2008. Photo: Jim Zengerle/AP

Parents complain to local authorities, and six days after the game Sheriff Michael DeLeo revoked Hain's license to carry a firearm. He cited a provision in Pennsylvania gun law forbidding individuals whose character and reputation portend a likelihood to threaten public safety from having a license.

Hain sued and a judge restored the license, though he questioned her judgement and asked her to keep the gun concealed if she brought it again to the football pitch.

Hain believed DeLeo violated her constitutional rights and targeted her unfairly. She said publicity surrounding the case had caused clients to pull their children from her baby sitting business, and said she had been ostracised by her neighbours. In November, she sued him, seeking $1m in damages.

The Brady Centre to Prevent Gun Violence, a national advocacy group, offered to defend DeLeo for free.

"It is a case that calls out for common sense," Brady Center attorney Daniel Vice said at the time. "It's ridiculous to bring a gun to a child's soccer game."
The case was delayed when an attorney was injured in an auto accident.

Hain became a heroine to gun rights advocates who favour loosening restrictions on carrying firearms, but her practice of carrying the gun when she went about town provoked a dim response from her neighbours.

"The way people look at me sometimes when I am out running errands, I feel as if I am wearing a scarlet letter, and really, it's a Glock 26," she told the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Patriot News last year.

New Soccer Team Stokes Seattle’s Passion

Fans Jordan McDonald, with the horn, and Phil Andrus, with the spiked hair, go all out for the Sounders soccer team at Qwest Field in Seattle.
Now, that's liking the game. I wonder if peoples in other lands paint themselves?


Freddie Ljungberg, a European soccer star and world-class player, is a member of the Sounders.
When the new Swede arrived in the new Seattle, he needed no ax or fishing net, the tools of so many other Scandinavian immigrants who had come before. Instead he wore shorts, and when his name was called on his first day at work — “Freddie Ljungberg!” — 28,000 people erupted.

“They sold it to me that the fans are special here,” Mr. Ljungberg said Saturday night in the locker room at Qwest Field here, just after playing his first minutes at midfield for an American professional soccer team, the new Seattle Sounders FC. “And I must say, they are.”

Even in a city that has supported professional football, baseball and basketball teams for decades, many people say that something else is at work in the instant passion for the Sounders. They say it reflects the region’s well-established affection for soccer but also its conviction that it is not quite like the rest of America. When Seattle cheers the Sounders, it cheers its civic image.

“Soccer is kind of the alternative sport for the United States,” said J. B. Wogan, 24, a reporter for a suburban weekly newspaper. “And Seattle is kind of an alternative city.”

Maybe, finally, futbol is catching on in the US. Kids play it all over, but the game has no real presence on a professional level.

Sounders soccer games at Qwest Field have been selling out.



The early version of the Sounders sometimes drew more than 20,000 fans, but by the mid-1980s, the Sounders and the league were gone. When Major League Soccer began play in 1996, Seattle was left out. The area only had a minor league team until now.

It all comes at a time when Seattle has plenty to be glum about. It lost its professional basketball team, the Sonics, to Oklahoma City last year. Across from Qwest Field, the cranes at the Port of Seattle are not as busy as they once were. Unemployment is rising quickly.

“We seem to have struck a chord and been a pretty good story in a relatively dim landscape,” said Adrian Hanauer, the team’s general manager and one of its owners. “That’s fine for now, but we know that this is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately kind of business. We have to deliver on the pitch and connect to our fans.”

A slave at £ 125,000 a week

This one strains credulity. A blog post in the WSJ.com site has this headline: Why Cristiano Ronaldo Isn’t a Slave. The entry goes on to describe this spoiled prima donna wanting to break his contract.

Cristiano Ronaldo is no Curt Flood. Mr. Ronaldo is a 23-year-old soccer player for Manchester United who is one year into a five-year contract that pays him 125,000 pounds a week, but would like to move to Real Madrid. Mr. Flood was 31 years old when he was making $90,000 and was subject to Major League Baseball’s reserve clause, which gave him no chance at free agency and no control of his future.

Some slave wage.

Mr. Flood’s evocation of slavery was controversial; Mr. Ronaldo’s is laughable.

Perspective is so important.

Another bicycle ride

After watching the final game of Euro 2008 (Spain defeated Germany 1-0), after buying a few groceries in Han Yang Market, and after waiting for a thunderstorm to end, I went out for a bike ride. It was muggy.

Starting off at Northern and 149th Street, I went north on 149, turned east on Willets Point Boulevard, weaved around a bit, and wound up by Utopia and the Cross Island, about 2.5 miles.

Getting on the Greenway that runs along Little Neck Bay, beginning by the Throgs Neck Bridge, I pedaled past Fort Totten, and continued south, parallel to the CIP. The wind was against my face, and made riding difficult. That stage was about 2 miles long.

Crossing over the CIP on the 28th Avenue foot bridge, I rode the last 2.5 miles back home.