Soccer Saves The World

For me, when it comes to sports, size matters.

Aside from rugby, I don’t follow much, but when a World Cup comes along I stock up on flags and facepaint and embarrass myself.

I don’t even think the games matter much to me; I just like being in a large group that’s laughing and shouting and emoting. It’s so easy to find common ground with strangers.

After the Fifa World Cup last year a newspaper columnist commented that events like this in SA don’t show us how we are, they show us what we could be like.

There was none of the clichéd violent rivalry associated with soccer. What the World Cup did was make it easier to talk to those from different backgrounds and contrasting cultures. Not just internationally, but local ‘Others’ we South Africans know so little about, and associate so seldom with.

And even now, when the cricket is being played so far away, it still seems natural to talk to the guy at the table next to yours. But if you took away the sport on TV it wouldn’t happen.

Other events lack this dynamic. At the recent Cape Town Festival I felt none of the camaraderie and Oneness a major sporting event infects us with.

Why is this? What is it about two teams smacking, kicking or passing a ball around that brings us together? How does a game dissolve the fear we seem to have about interacting with strangers?

Is it because we now feel we have something in common with the ‘Other’? Of all the people I met over that amazing month in 2010, I found I had a lot in common with most, if not all, of them.

I wonder if we had more things like this – things that somehow made us forget our fear and randomly befriend strangers – I wonder if our ideas would shift to such an extent that the attitude would become natural.

It would be natural to just talk to anyone. And it would be natural to not look at someone randomly talking to us as weird or over-friendly. We could learn so much when it became natural to not just stick to our ‘group’.

Imagine a South Africa where the goal isn’t to find a common identity – something that makes us all the same – but to enjoy and find fascination in the amalgam of identities and differences within our nation.