Freed: The 'beautiful game' of soccer is a mystery to me

Five billion people — more than half the planet — are now riveted to the globe’s most passionate, all-important event: World Cup soccer.

Meanwhile, the other 3 billion, including me, try to figure out: Why?

I sometimes drop into soccer-watching cafés for big games because I love the mixed national crowds, passion and flag-waving victory celebrations — no matter which country wins.

You can see grandmothers dance on tables and four-year-olds weep, while South American governments may topple.

But I admit the “beautiful game” itself is a puzzle to me, especially this year with the World Cup in Qatar, where migrant workers, women and LGBTQ2+ members have barely more rights than a soccer ball.

I grew up playing high-scoring, high-action sports like basketball and football, goal-oriented games perfectly suited to our hopelessly short North American attention spans.

So I’ve never really understood low-scoring, low-action soccer, where lists of the greatest-ever World Cup finals often have regulation scores of 1-0, 2-0 or 0-0.

I suspect there are hushed-up games with final scores of minus 1 to minus 3.

A British soccer-crazy friend has accompanied me to so-called futbol games to tutor me in the many subtle skills he appreciates, as he screams in delight or despair. I can see the players have astonishing footwork, artistry and endurance and some are magnificent stars.

But most players spend their time in centrefield far from either goal, kicking the ball back and forth, as if no one wants it, while the announcer screams excitedly:

“It’s Fernandez, passing to Hernandez, back to Fernandez, back to Hernandez, back to Fernandez, back to Hernandez, OVER TO PEREZ!! but Ohhh … he’d left the field for a quick espresso and missed the pass.”

Compare this with crazily high-scoring basketball, which sounds more like:

“It’s James with the ball … OHH! HE SCORES!! … Now Durant takes the ball out and OHH! HE SCORES! … and OHHH!! HE SCORES AGAIN … AND AGAIN! … AND AGAIN!!! This game’s a nail-biter, at 592 to 591!”

I know many younger Canadians now play and love fast-growing soccer and adore Canada’s wunderkind team in Qatar, which narrowly lost to second-ranked Belgium (1-0, of course).

So before legions of fans surround my house to boot me around like a soccer ball, please know that my British soccer-loving friend feels the same way about our beloved national game as I do about his.

He has never played hockey or skated and can’t fathom the sport. When he watches, all he sees are heavily padded, large men dashing around a sheet of ice and deliberately smashing into each other.

Usually, he can’t even spot the high-speed, extremely tiny puck that he says “you Canadians have been trained to imagine you see.”

“Every now and then a light flashes and the announcer screams: ‘He scored!’,” adds my pal. “Then they show the slow-motion replay — and I can finally see there actually is a puck.”

One person’s sporting ecstasy is another person’s mystery.

I’ve always found baseball slow-moving and monotonous, even when I played as a kid. That’s why I often didn’t catch fly balls coming straight at me in the outfield where I’d fallen asleep, standing up.

Many famous authors have written worshipfully about baseball as a “thinking person’s” sport: how a game can theoretically last forever, until someone eventually wins; how you can legally hit the ball as far as you can, even to the next city, so the game defies both time and space.

They say it’s poetry in (slow) motion, where the pauses and rituals between plays are the real action. Sounds fascinating, Yawn! But I find it as thrilling as watching sheep graze.

Football? It’s a military sport, where two armies take turns attacking and battering each other so brutally half the best players are usually out with concussions.

Yet the Super Bowl is the biggest event on American TV, while Canadians massively celebrate our less grandiosely named “Grey Cup.”

Personally, I like watching tennis because I play regularly and see it as live-action chess. But my non-tennis pals find it numbingly boring. They just see “two guys hitting a ball back and forth over a net a kazillion times, while grunting like hogs” — along with a scoring system that’s baffling.

So why do we love watching sports, apart from having grown up with them? Partly because in a world beset by political, economic and personal problems, sports are a way to forget them momentarily and concentrate on more immediate issues, like:

Why didn’t our star player score on the empty net? How could the ref miss that blatant tripping penalty by the enemy team? Also, how many times do I have to watch the exact same car ad?

But we also love connecting with a larger community — whether it’s our team, city, nation, fellow fans or just our personal heroes — whose glory we share, from our TV armchair.

Also, as intense national rivalries go, sports definitely beat war.

So enjoy the World Cup despite its many Qatar failings. I’ll be out there somewhere, watching you watch.

Joshfreed49@gmail.com

1. Freed: I've become a Josh of all trades for companies I pay

2. Freed: Superstitions are slippery things, but I keep my fingers crossed, anyway