Quite by accident, in a footballing sense; Quite purposefully, in terms of the cheapest airline fare, We booked our flight to South Africa through Iberica airlines. We planned from the go to leave South Africa prior to the final, purely with financial motivations. Our flights were 50% less leaving a couple days before the final than if we left after the final. Our itinerary required a 4 day layover in Madrid. We extended it to 6 days.
I must confess that I had tried to convince our group to fly to Berlin for the final. I even spent a few hours looking for cheap flights on the interweb. At the time Germany looked liked world-beaters. Running over through and around the world's best. As fortune would have it, flights were not cheap and we ended up staying in Madrid. As you know by now, Spain, with superior coaching and the greatest team passing I've ever witnessed. This worked out. But not in the same way it would have if I was in my twenties and single.
We watched the first half of the final on the street with about 14 million other people (only a slight exaggeration). I enjoyed the game on the big screen, but my shorter companions missed the game action and we watched the second half in the bar closest to the street which still had standing room. The game, if you didn't watch, was a bit boring. The Dutch played better than most commentators I've read give them credit for. The ref tried his best but lost control of the game. He looked like Jim Belushi before Lou Gossett Jr. helped him out with a baseball bat. The game was chippy and tense. I am biased. The thrill of it all was much improved with a room full of Spaniards living and dying with each touch.
The celebration after the victory was something. I've been in one of these before, in Paris in 2000. This didn't match up. It could be that the first is always the most memorable. The thrill of the new and incomparable. It could be the aforementioned age change. In Paris, I was 21. The world as a whole, and the exoctic Paris, was fresh and aweing. For whatever reason, I was into that one more. A part of it emotionally. This one I watched from a detached place. But there were the aforementioned millions, lots of singing and dancing. I will always remember "Yo soy Espanyol, Espanyol, Espanyol." Joy and exhileration were everywhere.
As I said, the party after the game wasn't for me. The next day we ran into, literally, another happy accident and the reason I will always be glad we spent that week in Madrid. The Spanish team, running, I would wager, on adrenaline alone, flew back to Madrid the very next morning. The parade was to be that very night. We knew of it, but didn't think too much of attending. We had planned to go to the Reina Sofia (the big modern art museum in Madrid, if you weren't aware) that night and actually made a point of leaving a bit early to avoid the crowds. Well, we didn't leave early enough. We had to cross the parade route to get to the museum. We attempted to do so about 2 hours before the scheduled start of the parade. We proptly ran into a wall of Spaniards and we made it no further for the next 5 hours. We sat with our new Spanish neighbors through excitement, false alarms, boredom, fatigue and at long last, the payoff.
The whole thing was a wonderful way to experience a group of people. The range of emotions. The interactions between people waxing and waning with those emotions. And through it all the underlying excitment, the thrill of this commen and exceptional experience, still in the process of occuring. The payoff finally came and the crowd - which had completely filled this enormous and very long avenue and was a beautiful yellow and red sight to behold - errupted. It suddenly went vertical. Outside of northern Europe I can typically see over most crowds, at least fairly well. For 5 hours I could see from end to end the rows of people. When the team bus finally pulled into the street, I could see only straight up. Suddenly, there was another person on top of every other person in the street.
And then the payoff came for us and our little World Cup. The winning team. With the excitement on their faces mirroring that of the little children in the crowd. But then the real surprise, that I hadn't expected (perhaps I should have, living for three years in Buffalo, a hockey-mad town): the World Cup itself. Not 10 feet from me. And there it was in a way. This quest, brought full circle. Gone in search of something in South Africa and winding up face to face with the same thing all of these players and teams and fans pin their hopes on every 4 years. I'm not sure what it means. I haven't finished thinking about that one. But it felt special. It felt like we had completed this quest for a taste of the world at its best.
I'll add, as a final thought, that I loved the familial aspect of this experience. Whereas the streets the night before had been filled mostly with teens and twenty somethings. Whereas alcohol and other sustances had been ever present at the game. The parade was filled with fathers and mothers and sons and daughters. There was an element of the innocence and purity that I hope is what makes the World Cup so special. We can all recapture for a moment the time and place before we became jaded before we were wounded and we can feel, like the Spanish players showed that day, as kids, playing for the title in the back yard.
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