It's a World Cup World

"I can't believe it's over," my husband said morosely as we sat entangled on the couch late last night watching the last of the news feeds. After a futile search for a place to watch the World Cup that (a) had seating, and (b) didn't smell funny, we ended up back at the apartment where I made coffee and whipped up some almost-virgin blended Mai-Tais for breakfast.

We watched the game on ESPN because the morning feed on Telemundo is fuzzy. My husband tells me watching on ESPN is a radically different experience than Telemundo, where the commentators know background on every player (or, at least, their speedy assistants do) and offer play-by-play commentaries, whereas on ESPN he sometimes wonders if they're just talking to fill in the space, and even during games where there is no American in sight they will talk about the US players and the US games rather than the play on the field. My Spanish is to the point where I can follow about half what is said -- however, when that means only understanding half of the words in a given sentance, it really doesn't get me very far.

Dramatic events will get their attention, though, so Zidane's head-butt was good for at least 10 minutes of speculation (meanwhile, the game played on). Yet not once did they mention the white elephant in the room throughout the Cup this year: that racism has finally become a major issue for FIFA, and that it was most likely a racist comment that set him off (Read more about the head-butt heard around the world at http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/41790.)

After the game, we did the requisite couple things: ate, went to the mall, etc. All this in time to come back to watch the game on Telemundo, where the feed really was much clearer and sounded much more exciting (again, through my half-comprehending filter), and where you couldn't help but notice every time there was a "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!"

Again, the head-butt. I asked my husband if he remembered back when we first got our cat, back when he still didn't like him, and how the cat would try to get my husband's attention by head-butting him in the back of the shin (usually when he was trying to do something, like washing dishes or cutting something on the cutting board for dinner). And then the head-butt started to look kind of cool. Maybe that's a terribly un-cool thing to say, especially with everyone saying his career is going out like a whimper rather than a bang, but really, who ever ends their careers with a savage-looking head-butt?

And yes, at midnight it was still easy to surf the channels and find someone somewhere showing footage of the head-butt, or the final goal, or the Italian player getting his hair cut off, or the fireworks from the stadium, or Shakira doing the opening act, or this or that or the other thing. And yes, it's over again. Over for another four years.