Senegal relishes its World Cup run
By David Polhelmus
SARE FOODE, Senegal — It's humbling to remember that the United States is the only nation that considers a football to be something other than a spherical object.
Associated Press
We think the World Series and the Super Bowl are big deals. They are small potatoes indeed compared to the World Cup, which reached a climax at stadiums in Japan and South Korea as a field of 32 national teams was reduced to one.
Soccer fans in Senegal gathered in an electronics shop to watch their national team play Turkey in a World Cup match. Senegal, which earlier scored a stunning upset over France, lost to Turkey in the quarterfinal game, 1-0, and Senagalese life returned to normal.
Many Americans are aware that the United States team was fortunate enough to reach the World Cup quarterfinals, and in a pretty good showing against the powerful German team, it only barely fell short of the semifinals.
But only barely aware. How many in Hawai'i were up at 1:30 in the morning to watch it?
Consider the way time literally stands still in other countries of the world whose teams are in this momentous competition. I happened to be visiting Senegal, a former French colony in West Africa, to see my daughter, who serves in the Peace Corps. She met me at the international airport in Dakar, the capital, and we stayed a couple of nights in Ngor, a beach resort outside the city.
Our small hotel room had a small television, on which we were able to see Senegal squeak past a strong Swedish team to move to the quarterfinals.
They already had won their first game, in a stunning upset over defending champion France. I had heard about how the country went nuts for the rest of that day, with crowds commandeering cars and waving flags all over the major towns.
On the morning that Senegal beat Sweden, we suddenly realized that our next order of business was to take a taxi into Dakar, to the garage where we would catch a ride to the south of the country. And we suddenly wondered whether the ride would be safe.
Sure enough, our taxi was stopped a half-dozen times by clots of deliriously happy Senegal supporters. I hesitate to call them mobs, because (fortunately) their mood was mellow, and the only cost was an extra half-hour on the road.
Still, at times when we were surrounded by these crowds, it was pretty scary. These merry-makers worked their way into Dakar and celebrated for many hours.
Senegal's next challenge was the Turkish team, and to give you an idea of how important this game was in Senegal, consider that I watched the game in this village of some 200 souls, about 14 hours by seven-seat taxi away from Dakar, a village with a couple of dozen round thatch-roofed huts, no running water, no electricity, no phones and at least four miles from the nearest paved road.
Picture this scene: a 15-by-15-foot room, its air shimmering with midday heat, with a 10-inch black-and-white television powered by a storage battery and pulling down a satellite transmission from Japan with an ancient rabbit-ears antenna. The picture was sharp enough, although the sound had a bad power hum. The commentary was in French, and the ball was pretty hard to see from the back of the room.
And watching this crucial game in this small room were no less than 70 human beings, packed together no less uncomfortably than the veritable sardines. That number was possible only because most of the viewers were children.
But believe me, not one of us attempted to move until halftime, and then not again until the regulation time period ended with the score, as they say in Britain, nil-nil.
When Turkey put the ball in Senegal's net early in the first overtime period, most of the crowd in the room simply rose and left silently. They didn't wait to see the delirium explode for the Turkish players. They didn't even wait to see the "golden goal" replayed.
They understood that it was just a game, that the Senegal team had done well, but that someone had to lose and it was time to get back to the fields.
But for a couple of hours here in the baking African countryside, time literally stood still.
And that, folks, is World Cup fever.
David Polhemus is an editorial writer for The Advertiser.
