How I Spent My Summer

 By Program Manager Cyrus Philbrick

A big soccer tournament happened a few months ago in South Africa, although it already seems like a long time ago. I was lucky enough to be there. My kind boss gave me most of the summer off so that I could take the chance of a lifetime to travel South Africa and see the world’s biggest sporting event. It was an amazing experience, for a lot of reasons that I can’t cram into a blog post. I’ll just give a few.

I got a chance to attend seven games, and watched as many as I could around the country’s various Fan Parks, bars, hostels, and homes. For all the moaning about the referees and the quality of play, beneath the refined standards of European club soccer, I thought it was a great World Cup. From South Africa’s earth-shattering opening goal to the heart-wrenching ending of the Uruguay-Ghana game, to Germany’s stunning style, to the testy final (a better played game than most critics give it credit for), South Africa gave us more drama and color than we could have asked.

The final two USA games were the emotional pinnacle of my travels. In Pretoria, I watched from the front row (South African security in stadiums was surprisingly easy to charm) as Landon Donovan scored the last-minute goal to put the USA through to the second round. I hugged teary-eyed neighbors harder than I ever hug family members.
When the USA lost to Ghana in extra time, I left my red, white, and blue heart (along with my makarapa) in the cold Rustenburg night. I actually wanted to cry but didn’t have any energy left.

Going to the World Cup is a good test of our love for our country. It reminded me how much I care about America, and by extension American soccer. I’ve put a lot of time and energy into helping both, no matter how much the two disappoint and how much I need to reserve hope for the future. Although caring so much about what is ultimately a silly game can feel a little childish, as if I’m misplacing a lot of energy when there are so many more important issues than soccer going on in America and all over the world, I don’t get to scream and shout for my country very often. So it felt good to do that for a little while. Cheering for our soccer team is one of the best opportunities we have to pour national pride into something that we can see, in the form of a hardworking and coherent team, uncomplicated by all those fuzzy political and social issues. And even while watching the USA on the field, thinking that I’d rather be there than anywhere else on earth, I also thought about how everyone back home was doing the same thing: watching and hoping and shouting.

But my trip wasn’t all emotional instability, American chest-bumps and tears. Political and social issues never lurk too far beneath the escapism of sports, especially the World Cup. More than the soccer, these issues made traveling to South Africa worth the cost.

South Africa is a beautiful and politically freakin’ complicated country.

I barely cracked the surface of the reality of most people’s daily lives there. Without getting into it too much, the economic and racial divisions in South Africa make those in America look comical. Given that Apartheid crumbled only about 15 years ago, South Africa still lags a generation behind America in the struggle for equal rights and opportunity. But South Africa has a much more daunting and unformed road ahead. As opposed to the ballooned middle class that America preserves, in South Africa a majority of the population, which is almost entirely black, lives in devastating poverty. 

The most valuable part of my trip, in skimming over so many cities and towns, was the chance to engage with so many different native people in such a diverse country. I stayed with blacks, whites, and coloureds, all of which had unique perspectives about the country’s history and how it needed to progress. Although my tourist status sheltered me from some of the ugliest facts of the country, all of the South Africans I met blew me away with their kindness, sensitivity and optimism. Even the people I met who had the least, or those I expected to be the most hopeless and disenchanted with their country, expressed an unwavering national pride and hope for the future. Many people in the townships, or sprawling districts outside of city centers, told me how happy they were that their kids now had the chance to go to school, to learn English and Math, to provide a chance to succeed that didn’t exist a generation before. But nobody that I met was satisfied with the current status quo. There is still an overwhelming amount of work to do.

Such a turbid atmosphere provided a strange backdrop for a soccer tournament driven by floods of rich foreigners. The divide between tourists and natives was often painfully obvious. Foreigners attended games while your average South African couldn’t afford a ticket. At the start of my trip, I had a lot of reservations about how the tournament might function in such a divided country. But South Africa's government and people put on a good show. I got a chance to see some great soccer and get a taste of a country who’s beauty, passion, and complexity kept unfolding as I spent more time there. I’d recommend traveling there to anybody. And it’ll be a little cheaper now that the tournament has blown out of town. 

 

- Cyrus Philbrick

SCORES Program Manager