World Cup soccer in Miami: Immigrants’ delight

I take a deep breath, look up to the ceiling and dig into my supply of patience to explain to an American, for the third time, what the offside rule is all about.

The attacker, I repeat, cannot receive a forward pass if he’s closer to the opponents’ goal line than the next-to-last adversary. In a face-to-face with the goalkeeper, the attacker always has the advantage, even if the goalie can catch the ball with his hands.

Before the rule was created, there was always a wiseguy loitering near the opponent’s goal cage, waiting for a loose ball to come his way. That’s why games used to end up with 10 and 12 goals scored.

“Yes, that’s fine,” he counters, “but what if there is a player so swift, so skillful that he manages to break away, enter the opponents’ area and wait there for a pass. Why should he be punished? On the contrary, he should be allowed to score, as is done in basketball and American football.”

I shrug and throw in the towel. Nothing more I can do.

In front of him, a TV set is showing one of the craziest and best World Cup tournaments in history. Most of the old European champions have been edged out, one after the other. His own national team has classified into the eighth-finals almost by miracle, after beating Ghana, eking a tie with a Portugal as rickety as Cristiano Ronaldo’s left knee, and losing a timid game to Germany, 1-0, without much pride or embarrassment.

He, however, can only focus on trifles, technicalities, unimportant details. There’s no cure for that.

Apparently, European football is like science fiction literature: if you didn’t get hooked in childhood or adolescence, you probably won’t get hooked. Maybe you’ll understand the rules and perhaps you might enjoy a couple of games, but you’ll do so antiseptically, at a distance, without sweating or getting excited. In the best of cases, you’ll celebrate a goal politely, with sportsmanlike applause, and will call the game “soccer.”

At least, that’s what I have seen since I arrived in Miami. Except for some proud bars with national-team jerseys pinned to the walls, beers and drunks, a couple of national flags flown from cars and balconies, and a national jersey lost in the crowd, there is no World Cup mood here. Nothing remotely similar to what happens when the Heat reaches the playoffs.

Much is said about David Beckham and his project to build a stadium in Miami; many talented players have recently arrived in the MLS; the U.S.-Portugal game had a very high rating (a record audience nationwide for a soccer game); much is seen of Landon Donovan — who after Klinsmann’s unforgivable omission ended up on television — explaining the games with the flair of a political analyst or a meteorologist.

But one feels that years will pass before the “gringos” can understand the game, much less feel it, which is the only way to understand soccer.

I was used to the scandalous celebrations that spread through my neighborhood at the end of every game. A nabe that wasn’t Villa Fiorito or Rosario and didn’t even have the mysticism of the marginal barrios. A Havana neighborhood with the effeminate name of Flores [Flowers].

Well, there, in Flores, among the box-like Soviet-style apartment buildings, the World Cup tournaments were enjoyed with the same intensity as in Río or Maracaná.

We also played street soccer, of course, emulating the players we had just watched, using two discarded school desks as goal cages. But the best occurred outside the playing field, where any fan of the losing team was literally beaten to a pulp.

Sometimes I didn’t want to go out on the street, because I’ve always had a peculiar instinct, a special ability to cheer the losing team and the moment comes when one tires of defending the indefensible, or making a dignified ass of oneself.

But it was no use hiding. The kids went up to get me, calling me by the name of the team I had supported, and there was nothing for me to do but to show my face.

I don’t know if they even remember me. Nobody misses a mediocre player who kicks with his left foot, and badly. But in the past several days I’ve thought a lot about them, because the excitement of those days I have found only among immigrants.

It is us, the immigrants, who have imported to Miami the ambience of the World Cup.

Like that bar full of Brazilians, most of them drunk before the game even started, who placed their hands on their hearts and sang their national anthem in front of the TV set, along with Felipao and Neymar, minutes before the latter showed the best of a Brazilian team that no longer awes anyone or plays a beautiful game.

Or a couple of Argentines telling jokes about Argentines, in between Messi’s goals, to still the nervousness: “Ché, do you know how you drown an Argentine in a swimming pool? You put a mirror at the bottom.”

Or the same couple of Argentines, leaping with joy — more joyful even than the day when Argentina moved up, unconvincingly, in the easiest of the groups, when Mexico tied Brazil. “God, I’m never as happy as I am when the Brazilians suffer,” they said.

Meanwhile, in a corner of the restaurant, a Mexican watched in silence, counting the minutes remaining to Memo Ochoa, while he bit the collar of his sweater, which bore an image of Emiliano Zapata.

Or a Peruvian who supported Chile (“Let’s go, Chile, dammit”), overlooking a century of tension, hostility and maritime disputes, on the historic day in which Alexis Sánchez’s and Arturo Vidal’s Red Team sent home the other Red Team — Spain — with its EuroCup, its world title and its tiki-taka.

Now, my friend the “gringo” opens another beer and says he’s sad. He’s sad because, he says, the U.S. team should have beaten Portugal and at least should have tied Germany. One hundred and eighty minutes wasted in front of the TV set, he grumbles.

Don’t complain, brother, I tell him. Does the year 1938 mean anything to you? No? Well, that’s the last time that my national team played in the World Cup.