National pride fuels Koreans
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Staff Columnist
When the United States and South Korea meet in the World Cup tonight, it will be about soccer — and a whole lot more.
To the winner goes the guarantee of advancing from Group D into the second round and the likelihood of being able to avoid playing Italy, one of the tournament favorites, right away.
For the United States, accustomed as we are to being a global power and center of attention in so many areas, this can be just about soccer, exulting in no longer being 32nd among 32 World Cup teams, and reaching for the stars.
For South Korea, a country that sees international validation in every goal and a swelling of national pride in each victory, this has to do with history in a way that perhaps only a people who have experienced as long and often unhappy existence as the Koreans can fully appreciate.
It is why you don't have to know a corner kick from a give-and-go to find compelling theater in the World Cup.
Every four years 32 countries bring not only their hopes and their flags to the pitch, they tote their histories and all the sorrows or guilt they entail. They give this event a poignancy beyond what we look for in the Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs.
In this there are few examples better than South Korea. For centuries the peninsula known as the Land of the Morning Calm has been anything but. It has been a pathway for the Mongols, a vassal state for China, a colony for Japan and a dividing point for Russia and the United States.
The Cold War is over but the Koreas — North and South — not only remain divided across the 38th parallel, the most militarized strip of land on Earth, but still technically at war a half-century after the conflict that claimed 3 million lives.
During 35 years of brutal Japanese colonial subjugation, Korea's few international sports triumphs were bittersweet. When one of its greatest athletes, Sohn Kee Chung, won the marathon in the 1936 Olympics, it came with the hinomaru, the rising sun of Japan, on his chest and under the name of Son Ketei because Koreans, prohibited from using their own lan- guage, were forced to use Japanese renderings of their names.
After independence, the Koreans put everything into nation building, raising a war-torn country into an economic force by the dedication of their toil. In the process, sports has come to take on a meaning beyond mere games for South Koreans who find heady self-confirmation in their triumphs and deep disappointment in their setbacks.
It is why, after Se Ri Pak's remarkable rookie year on the LPGA Tour that the celebrations were so exhausting she was hospitalized. And why the final round of the Compaq Classic last month, where KJ Choi became the first Korean to win a PGA Tour event, was shown live at 4 a.m. in Korea.
On the flip side, the controversy over the disqualification of speedskater Kim Dong Sung in the Salt Lake City Olympics still boils, the pot given a further stir by Jay Leno's wisecrack that Kim "went home and kicked his dog and then ate it."
But nowhere has the pain been more crushing or enduring than in soccer where South Korea was 0-10-4 through five previous World Cups. The anguish was reflected in the frequent use of the word "han," which denoted a bitter longing.
When South Korea was named, along with Japan, as co-host of this Cup, the first one to be played in Asia, the event offered a global stage for Korea and redemption. It was a sign of the event's importance that Korea, which would borrow $19.5 billion from the International Monetary Fund to see it through an economy gone sour, repaid the loan three years ahead of time and invested $2.7 billion in 10 new nationally themed soccer stadiums.
"Suppose Korea goes to the World Cup final against Japan and wins," a South Korean academic told the New York Times. "All the past could be forgiven."
Almost since a giant clock in downtown Seoul began counting down the days to the start of this World Cup, the slogan "Second Round" began being plastered throughout a country that doesn't want to be the first host team to fail to get past the first round.
For this Cup, even hermetically sealed North Korea — whose heavily-armed sentries stare icily across no man's land — is watching.
When you are Korea, the coming of this World Cup is about more than just soccer.
