I PLAYED DIVISION 1 football. I know what it’s like to be an athlete surrounded by a raucous crowd on a big game day, how you feed off it, how the fans feed off your play.
I have also been lucky enough to be in the stands for four World Series games, three NBA Finals, two Super Bowls, a Stanley Cup contest, and the men’s hundred-meter track final at the London Olympics.
But I will tell you flat-out that I have never felt anything close to the extraordinary energy inside Maracan? Stadium after ninety minutes of nail-biting regulation play and fifteen minutes of dramatic overtime left Germany and Argentina locked zero to zero in the winner-take-all game for the soccer championship of the world.
Going to their respective benches for water and coaching before the second overtime period began, the players looked like they’d been through a war. The fans in the stadium looked like they’d witnessed a war and were holding on to one another for strength.
I got it. Like them, I’d seen twenty-two men playing beyond their hearts for one hundred and five minutes, striving for supremacy under incomprehensible pressure, while all around the globe, literally billions of fans were living and dying on their every fevered move.
This is different, I thought as I climbed up the stands and scanned the crowd. This is a whole other dimension of sport.
Don’t get me wrong. I love baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, but you can’t tell me those games yield true world champions the way soccer does. More people play soccer than the four of those sports put together, and the World Cup pits all nations against all nations, with almost every country on earth competing during the four years of qualifying that lead to the final tournament.
As the players returned to the field, the emotion in the crowd of seventy-five thousand rabid fans was off-the-charts electric. I had trouble staying on task when the referee blew his whistle and Maracan? Stadium morphed again into a madhouse crackling with hope and pulsing with fear.
When the ball went out-of-bounds and the din died down a little, I triggered my lapel mike, said, “Tavia?”
“Right here,” she said from the opposite side of the stadium.
“Tell everyone that this is not over yet, and we stay sharp until the very last person leaves this place.”
I heard her speaking Portuguese and then the crowd roared, drowning her out and sucking me right back into the game at the hundred and twelfth minute.
In a full sprint, Germany’s André Schürrle drove the ball down the left side of the pitch with Argentine defenders in hot pursuit. Schürrle dribbled toward the corner and just as he was about to be double-teamed, he struck the ball with his left foot.
The rising ball flew beautifully between both Argentine defenders and past a third before dropping to the chest of Germany’s Mario G?tze, a substitute player sprinting toward goal. The ball bounced off G?tze’s chest. Before it could hit the ground, he let loose with a nifty feat of kung fu, booting the ball out of the air and into the net.
The place went insane with a roar that hurt my ears. The Germans were deliriously singing “Deutschland über Alles” while the Argentines screamed in disbelief, ripped at their hair, and cried as if a wedding had just turned into a funeral.
I’d never seen anything like it.
More than seven minutes remained in the overtime, but I began to move laterally through the stadium toward a blue stage erected in the stands high above midfield. This was where the trophies would be awarded. I figured that if there was going to be a security issue, it would happen when the politicians and lords of FIFA emerged from their bulletproof hospitality suites and exposed themselves to the players, the fans, and the world.
Only four minutes remained on the clock by the time I got to the area. Already a large company of burly Brazilian policemen in matching blue suits, ties, and white gloves were moving to positions on either side of the aisle of steps the players would climb to reach the stage. Colonel da Silva was coming down the stairs on the opposite side, inspecting the security line.
On the stage itself, on a long table draped in white, the trophies were being assembled and positioned. Behind the table, overseeing the arrangements, was a man I knew slightly, an acquaintance, really. Henri Dijon was French and the primary spokesman for FIFA.
In every encounter I’d had with Dijon, he’d been unflappable, well spoken, and impeccably dressed. He was also a health nut and ordinarily appeared tanned and fit. But in those last minutes of the World Cup final, Dijon looked pale and weak as he patted his sweaty brow. And his clothes seemed, for him, anyway, disheveled.