This is what you hear about soccer in the United States: You hear that
soccer can never be as big here as it is in the big soccer countries around the
world because our best athletes, at least not enough of them, will never come
to soccer first. In the other countries, their LeBrons start kicking a ball and
here, first chance they get, they try to dunk it. Or throw it down the field to
a speeding wide receiver. Or hit it out of sight with a bat in their hands.
And there is something to that. Just maybe not on Tuesday afternoon in
the World Cup, when it is the United States against Belgium, a chance at the quarterfinals
on the line, a chance for Jurgen Klinsmann’s players to keep this run of theirs
going; a chance to keep the stage.
You see how the whole thing continues to build. There was the 2-1 win over
Ghana, then that spectacular 2-2 draw against Portgual. And even when they
lost, 1-0, to Germany last Thursday afternoon, we saw something with great
clarity: Our guys really can play with the big boys now.
Did Germany outplay the U.S. in that game? If you saw the game you know
they did. But our guys outplayed the Portuguese before that, before the great
Ronaldo made a play at the end and got them a draw. Clint Dempsey nearly did
the same for the U.S. with a header against Germany. If the sides weren’t even
that day, they were close enough.
Now comes this game against Belgium, a team that has not yet lost in
the tournament. Now comes another shot at showing the country and the world
that if we still aren’t getting the best athletes to soccer, we are getting
enough of them to go toe-to-toe with anybody.
You know when soccer will be bigger than ever in this country? Six
o’clock today when the U.S. has more goals than Belgium.
You know when Olympic hockey became as big as it has ever been in this
country? When we beat the Russians and then won the gold medal in Lake Placid
34 years ago. The late, great Herb Brooks pushed and yelled and motivated his
players to that moment. Now Klinsmann, a World Cup hero from another country,
tries to do the same.
“What (Klinsmann) is doing is why we’re cheering his team the way we
are,” Jim Craig, the goalie on Herb Brooks’ team, says to me.
I was there for every game Brooks’ team played in Lake Placid, and
remember, the way everybody who was there remembers, what it was like dealing
with him. And how much people complained about him. He never cared. He would
have said anything to win the game. Klinsmann is the same, trying to write his
own story, the biggest and best story ever written about his sport in his
adopted country.
Jurgen Klinsmann doesn’t care what you think or what I think. He
frankly didn’t care what Landon Donovan, the star of the U.S. World Cup team
four years ago, the hero of the game against Algeria, thought when he decided
Donovan wasn’t a good enough player anymore to make his team. Klinsmann cares
about Dempsey and Michael Bradley and Tim Howard. He cares about Omar Gonzalez,
coming off playing the game of his life in front of Howard against Germany.
Klinsmann, as much the star of this team as any of them, really only cares
about his team doing enough against Belgium to make it to the weekend.
He doesn’t care what anybody thought when he said his team wasn’t good
enough to go all the way. That was then. This is now. Now means Belgium,
another game that feels like the biggest we’ve ever had. Now Klinsmann is
telling his players not to plan on returning from Brazil until July 13, hours
after the final in Rio. Again: He says a lot of things. To get the best out of
the injured Rob McClanahn in the Olympics, Herb Brooks did everything except
call the kid a coward. And then the kid screamed that he’d play on one leg if
he had to.
“That’s just how you have to approach a World Cup,” Klinsmann says now.
“No matter what happens now you can always change your flights. So it’s better
to start with the end in mind. The end is July 13.”
It is why nobody wants the run to end against Belgium in Salvador on
Tuesday afternoon. I was talking about this with a young friend, Kofi Agyapong,
who only made it to this country from Ghana because of the skill and magic and
speed he brought to soccer. He played with my youngest son in high school, and
went first to Wake Forest and then Columbia, and later won two national titles
with the junior team for the Columbus Crew of the MLS.
This is what he said about the team we have sent to Brazil:
“Every country is there to win the crown as world champions. I think
the United States is there for that and something else. Something bigger than
just the trophy. And that is to play for the people of America. It’s not a team
anymore. It’s started to feel like 11 of the other team is taking on all of us.
It’s never been like this. And it’s an unbelievable feeling.”
It has been all of that, and will be again for the Belgium game. It
will be an unbelievable feeling for all the crowds who will watch another game
in malls and parks and bars and offices and living rooms; the ones who will
watch on their phones or listen on the radio and cheer Jurgen Klinsmann’s team.
At least now we know, fully, what it feels like everywhere else during
the World Cup. Maybe we’re not ready to be the best team in the world.
Klinsmann just wants to be the best today.
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