No Exit, No Excuses: Germany 2006: My Unconditional Surrender to Total Football

It’s like losing your virginity: you don’t forget when it happened, though it usually happens much sooner. I know I watched the 1970 World Cup but I have no conscious recollections, only the vague sense that I was there in the television room in Beirut—the room whose windows gave on the Green Line and that would be shot to hell by snipers during the early days of the civil war, when we huddled in back of the fourth-floor apartment—when my father shouted his exuberance along with the rest of the world at the sight of the Brazilians putting on the greatest show in the history of the game, and at Pelé scoring one of the greatest goals ever in a game leading up to the final—greatest for the fact that the ball never even went into the goal. If you’ve seen the tape you’ll immediately know what I’m talking about: Pelé’s out-of-nowhere sprint up the middle toward the Uruguayan goal, taking a diagonal pass from midfield but letting it sail past himself and the rushing, utterly and flatly faked out keeper as Pelé kept running in the opposite direction only to zip back around the stunned keeper and reclaim the ball that had kept ambling on its merry way. Probably stunned himself by the DaVinci moment he’d just pulled off, Pelé, the back of the net gaping open to him, shot just wide of the near post: a goal all the same, in poetry if not in fact. After that, how could the Brazilians lose anything? They crushed Italy 4-1 in the final and made a man out of me. I was five and a half years old: Eros unbound at a very tender age indeed. Read the rest, steamy but for the grace of O Rei...