If there is one thing I have learned after meeting people from all over the world, it's that you cannot understand or share someone's passion without first experiencing the object of that passion. I came to this realization, strangely enough, as I tried to explain my passion for nineties hip-hop to one of my Norwegian roommates. Classic hip-hop, I explained, is all about self-reference and intertextuality. Each track consists of samples of other music and a litany of references, so with each track you experience a whole web of interconnected music. My passion consists of broadening that web and discovering all the obscure connections and history surrounding every song and every sample. Unfortunately, I found that my ode to hip-hop was falling on deaf ears-- without having a prior familiarity with any of the artists, tracks, or samples involved, there was no web of connections for my roommate to draw upon. He stared at me blankly and eventually asked me as politely as he could if he could take over the aux cord for a while and play something Norwegian.
In a similar example, my British classmate Mike tried to explain to me the emotional significance of a particular goal scored by Manchester United when he was younger. When he was finished explaining he said, "Can you imagine that?" I couldn't, at all. I immediately tried to explain one of my own stories of sports fanaticism and, of course, he was equally incapable of imagining my joy at seeing Steve Gleason run through the line and block that punt in the New Orleans Saints' first game back in the Superdome. Without understanding the Saints long history of failure, our deep-rooted hatred for the Atlanta Falcons, or the general post-Katrina despair-- not to mention the rules and dynamics of a North-American football game-- how could he possibly be expected to understand my joy at that surreal moment?
Ever since I arrived in Buenos Aires, I've been hearing about "Boca" without even the slightest frame of reference. I gathered, of course, that Boca was a football team (or a "soccer" team as we Americans so blasphemously call it) and that the people of my barrio are extremely passionate fans, but I had no idea who was on the team, who their rivals were, what point of the season they were in, or even what league they played in. I'm completely ignorant of any and all sports aside from basketball and North-American Football, and even with those two I can only manage to keep informed about my hometown teams-- The Pelicans and The Saints. So when three friends from my hostel suggested that I come to the "big game" with them I had absolutely no idea what to expect, but I knew that I needed to see a football match for myself. Maybe then I would finally be able to understand that passion that Mike has, that the people of Buenos Aires have, and the passion shared by so many football fans all over the world.
Getting to the game turned into quite the ordeal, however. We had to pick up our tickets from two separate private sellers, and we were supposed to meet the sellers at the same time in two completely different neighborhoods! We weren't able to find the first seller, a woman we were going to meet in a Starbucks downtown, and then we had to race toward the stadium to meet an Argentine guy named Walter who had the other three tickets. It turned out Walter didn't have the tickets on him, they were with a friend of his, so we waited with him on a dark, fairly sketchy street corner for almost half an hour, pretty much expecting to be robbed at any moment... Fortunately, Walter's friend finally arrived and even had an extra ticket to replace the one we had lost from missing the Starbucks lady. We finally got to the stadium, but the security staff tried to send us to different sections. By a stroke of luck, an Australian with good Spanish overheard our plight and swooped in to convince the security guards to let us all go in the same direction. Then, in a truly absurd catastrophe, our British companion Zin accidentally inserted his magnetic ticket into the wrong slot at the gate, so that the ticket wasn't processed and fell into the inner workings of the machine. The staff all screamed "Noooooooo!!" and we were utterly dismayed until one of them managed to open up the machine and fish out the ticket from the bottom of it.
(Zin, looking longingly into the abyss of the ticket-swallowing machine)
(Shirin, relieved to be through security!)
We finally made it into the stadium, with plenty of time before the match began, and ultimately we were treated to an incredible experience. The crowd was electric, chanting and throwing confetti the whole way through the match, and every time they swayed you could feel the concrete beneath you swaying with them. Boca won in a landslide. It was 4-0 by halftime, they secured their advance into the next round of the cup, and we each left the stadium feeling nearly as elated as the fans all around us. I cannot say that I have suddenly become a football super-fan, but I am glad to say that I've increased my mind's football web, so to speak, and that I am at least one step closer to being able to empathize with the passion shared by football fans everywhere.
