Cote: Ugly buildup to World Cup, now comes the beautiful game and magic | Opinion
This week and into July should remind us why we’re sports fans. Soccer’s quadrennial men’s World Cup intersecting with the crescendos of the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final should make it tough to complain. Whether your fandom is avid or casual, driven by money wagered or just by the glory of athleticism at its best, finding something to love right now ought not be hard.
The thing is, sometimes we need reminding why we’re sports fans in the first place, because it can get complicated. It can be a challenge.
So San Antonio wins Game 3 of the NBA championship series in New York and Knicks fans respond afterward by assaulting Spurs fans who traveled for the game, ripping the Spurs jerseys off their backs. Ah, sportsmanship! Sometimes the very notion seems as quaintly bygone as a Norman Rockwell painting.
“It’s unacceptable,” Spurs star Victor Wembanyama said in response. “We can’t forget it’s a game. We’re just playing a game out there. I am all for passion, but [with] respect.”
Wednesday night’s Game 4 is back at Madison Square Garden, and hopefully there will not be an unpopular president up in a suite to boo on the big screen, or on-court retaliation against a villainized Wembanyama, or postgame fisticuffs in the streets. Can we just enjoy what could be an epic seven-game series between one team chasing its first NBA title in 53 years and the other led by a 7-4 unicorn?
The hockey finals knotted at 2-2 also portend a great, full series as Carolina and Vegas (unexpectedly, for me) draw the biggest Stanley Cup TV ratings in at least 10 years.
It has been a while — since 1994 — that hoops and hockey both had seven-game finals the same year. Enjoy that possibility, rather than griping about the lack of historic pedigree between two finalists with only one Cup title apiece.
The games themselves always have the power to override the ancillary negativity.
And oh how we need that in the World Cup, whose first two of 104 matches are Thursday.
The buildup to this mostly U.S. World Cup (75% of all games will be stateside) has been ugly.
We rely now on the beautiful game to help us forget all of that as we — the world — get lost in the magic of the globe’s most popular game, and also in the power of sports to lift us.
It’s just a game, sure. But it’s more.
An expanded 48 nations competing in the largest ever World Cup makes this the biggest event on the planet the next six weeks through the July 19 championship, and not just in sports.
But the buildup to America’s first time hosting the World Cup since 1994 has been nonstop controversy, from exorbitant ticket cost and price-gouging for public transportation to our country’s far-right immigration policies scaring away many would-be visitors.
Now, though, the games and the fan fervor take over. Soccer owns the stage.
Now, we see Inter Miami’s Argentine maestro Lionel Messi and his old rival Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal in likely their final World Cup. Messi’s magnetic draw is such Argentina this week drew almost 90,000 fans to a stadium in Alabama (not exactly a soccer hotbed) for a final tuneup match vs. Iceland.
Now we see if 18-year-old wunderkind Lamine Yamal of Spain can make that nation champion or if co-favorite France will prevail. Or might England reign for the first time since Beatlemania was happening in 1966?
Or is there a Cinderella team poised to shock the world? And what about a deep run by the United States team on home turf? It could happen ... maybe ... right? (Imagine if it did.)
Ugly is always around the corner in sports? Right now it’s Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby granted another year of eligibility to play despite breaking all the NCAA rules against gambling — the same thing that got Pete Rose banished from baseball.
Ah, but did you see that an obscure, 114th-ranked qualifier named Maja Chwalinska of Poland stunned the tennis world by reaching the championship of the French Open? For every bad thing in sports, there is an antidote. Something to lift us.
Now, finally, the World Cup is upon us. Forty-eight teams will play a combined 104 matches across 39 days, and it will have the power to lift and unite a splintered planet like nothing else can.
Expect magic.
