Soccer Part II (From 4/9/06)
(Note -- This will make more sense if you read the original "Soccer" post first -- see below.)
So Saturday afternoon I went to the bar around the corner to watch the soccer match. It was a crazy scene. Except for the bar owner’s wife, I was the only other woman in there for a while. Then a couple of old ladies wandered in but they were there to drink coffee and had no interest in the television. Otherwise it was a group of older men who smoked like chimnies and drank like fish, the bar owner (who I guessed to be in his mid- to late-forties, either Turkish or Italian but had lived here a long time), and me, sitting at the bar, watching the TV.
I felt a little strange at first. They didn’t talk to me much except to ask me who I thought would win (and I said I didn’t know as I was American and had just arrived from California). They all thought that was pretty funny/interesting. Then one guy asked me if I knew the offsides rule. I don’t know why soccer-watchers use THAT as the test as to whether or not one knows about soccer, because it’s one of the easiest rules to understand in all of sports. So I told him that since I had watched and played soccer for many years, I did indeed know how offsides worked. He said, “Oh, you play? The American women are quite good.”
Now it was funny about this particular man (as if the others weren’t also somehow funny). He was sitting closest to me, and when he came in the bar owner greeted him with an informal “you.”
(German language lesson sidetrack … German has two forms of “you”: formal (“Sie”) and informal (“du”). If you are both grownups, you don’t call either other “du” unless you are very close friends, married, or related, basically. A bar owner “dutzing” a customer (yes, there is actually a verb for calling someone “du” rather than “Sie” ) is pretty unusual in any event.)
Anyway, this customer had on a really weird-looking gray suit (everyone else there was in jeans and sweaters), and he said that he had been living in Spain for the last two years. I am almost wondering, based on my understanding of the things he was talking about, if he had gone and worked in Spain in a soccer capacity, like for a team down there or something. I don’t know, it’s just a feeling. The television was quite loud, and this man tended to mumble AND had a little bit of a Bavarian accent, so I didn’t catch everything he said. He was also the only one who wasn’t drinking beer (he had a glass of red wine and a mineral water). I don’t think he was really a dirty old man (he didn’t leer at me or anything), just more politically incorrect, especially with his jokes about black people. But I chalked it up to his being old-school German.
As for the game itself, the poor snubbed goalie Oliver Kahn did not have a good outing. Of course it didn’t help that the only goal its team could manage to score was an own-goal. Bayern Muenchen lost 3-0 to the second place team in the league, thereby jeopardizing their chances of winning the league championship.
I suppose all of this was even sadder for me yesterday after I’d put away a liter of strong German beer (my God, that sounds like a lot … it was actually only two beers but they’re served in big tall glasses). I was feeling quite emotional about the whole thing as I was leaving all my new friends in the bar at the end of the game. But the thing is that it was just a soccer match, and today is another day. They’ll have another game next weekend and maybe “Olli” will have the outing of his life and redeem himself. In any event I’ll have to watch it then, and find something else to occupy myself with during the rest of the week.
One last thing about soccer and then I promise to stop. They have an interesting way of broadcasting games over here. There appears to be one main soccer show. That show is meant to cover all 8 or so games that are going on throughout Saturday afternoon (they all start around 3:30). What they do is show a few minutes of one game, and then they switch to another, and often the signal for when to switch is when you hear a DIFFERENT announcer in the background shouting “TOR IM FRANKFURT!!!” (This means “Goal in Frankfurt!!!”). Then they switch over to Frankfurt (or wherever the goal was scored) and show the replay, then they show that game for a little while, until another announcer shouts “TOR IM STUTTGART!!!” Then, well, you know the drill… The most interesting thing about that whole switch is in the few seconds while the broadcast is switching, everyone in the bar is speculating who scored in that other game and what the score is now (and what’s really funny is most of the time they’re wrong).
This broadcast style would never fly in America. Could you imagine? You’re in a sports bar, watching football with about a million drunk Raiders fans (or Jets fans or Redskins fans or ________ fans). If they were to switch AWAY from the Raiders (Jets, Redskins) to show another game, and not show the pathetic effort by the Raiders in its entirety (I’m a Chargers fan, so I couldn’t resist that one), people would be throwing things at the TV and beating the crap out of each other. All hell would break loose, and it would be hilarious. Unless, of course, you got hit in the head with a flying beer bottle, then the game would probably be spoiled for you.
So Saturday afternoon I went to the bar around the corner to watch the soccer match. It was a crazy scene. Except for the bar owner’s wife, I was the only other woman in there for a while. Then a couple of old ladies wandered in but they were there to drink coffee and had no interest in the television. Otherwise it was a group of older men who smoked like chimnies and drank like fish, the bar owner (who I guessed to be in his mid- to late-forties, either Turkish or Italian but had lived here a long time), and me, sitting at the bar, watching the TV.
I felt a little strange at first. They didn’t talk to me much except to ask me who I thought would win (and I said I didn’t know as I was American and had just arrived from California). They all thought that was pretty funny/interesting. Then one guy asked me if I knew the offsides rule. I don’t know why soccer-watchers use THAT as the test as to whether or not one knows about soccer, because it’s one of the easiest rules to understand in all of sports. So I told him that since I had watched and played soccer for many years, I did indeed know how offsides worked. He said, “Oh, you play? The American women are quite good.”
Now it was funny about this particular man (as if the others weren’t also somehow funny). He was sitting closest to me, and when he came in the bar owner greeted him with an informal “you.”
(German language lesson sidetrack … German has two forms of “you”: formal (“Sie”) and informal (“du”). If you are both grownups, you don’t call either other “du” unless you are very close friends, married, or related, basically. A bar owner “dutzing” a customer (yes, there is actually a verb for calling someone “du” rather than “Sie” ) is pretty unusual in any event.)
Anyway, this customer had on a really weird-looking gray suit (everyone else there was in jeans and sweaters), and he said that he had been living in Spain for the last two years. I am almost wondering, based on my understanding of the things he was talking about, if he had gone and worked in Spain in a soccer capacity, like for a team down there or something. I don’t know, it’s just a feeling. The television was quite loud, and this man tended to mumble AND had a little bit of a Bavarian accent, so I didn’t catch everything he said. He was also the only one who wasn’t drinking beer (he had a glass of red wine and a mineral water). I don’t think he was really a dirty old man (he didn’t leer at me or anything), just more politically incorrect, especially with his jokes about black people. But I chalked it up to his being old-school German.
As for the game itself, the poor snubbed goalie Oliver Kahn did not have a good outing. Of course it didn’t help that the only goal its team could manage to score was an own-goal. Bayern Muenchen lost 3-0 to the second place team in the league, thereby jeopardizing their chances of winning the league championship.
I suppose all of this was even sadder for me yesterday after I’d put away a liter of strong German beer (my God, that sounds like a lot … it was actually only two beers but they’re served in big tall glasses). I was feeling quite emotional about the whole thing as I was leaving all my new friends in the bar at the end of the game. But the thing is that it was just a soccer match, and today is another day. They’ll have another game next weekend and maybe “Olli” will have the outing of his life and redeem himself. In any event I’ll have to watch it then, and find something else to occupy myself with during the rest of the week.
One last thing about soccer and then I promise to stop. They have an interesting way of broadcasting games over here. There appears to be one main soccer show. That show is meant to cover all 8 or so games that are going on throughout Saturday afternoon (they all start around 3:30). What they do is show a few minutes of one game, and then they switch to another, and often the signal for when to switch is when you hear a DIFFERENT announcer in the background shouting “TOR IM FRANKFURT!!!” (This means “Goal in Frankfurt!!!”). Then they switch over to Frankfurt (or wherever the goal was scored) and show the replay, then they show that game for a little while, until another announcer shouts “TOR IM STUTTGART!!!” Then, well, you know the drill… The most interesting thing about that whole switch is in the few seconds while the broadcast is switching, everyone in the bar is speculating who scored in that other game and what the score is now (and what’s really funny is most of the time they’re wrong).
This broadcast style would never fly in America. Could you imagine? You’re in a sports bar, watching football with about a million drunk Raiders fans (or Jets fans or Redskins fans or ________ fans). If they were to switch AWAY from the Raiders (Jets, Redskins) to show another game, and not show the pathetic effort by the Raiders in its entirety (I’m a Chargers fan, so I couldn’t resist that one), people would be throwing things at the TV and beating the crap out of each other. All hell would break loose, and it would be hilarious. Unless, of course, you got hit in the head with a flying beer bottle, then the game would probably be spoiled for you.
posted by Jennifer at 05:14
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