JJ Bowman
Two games, two sports, two cultures. One amazing day. Feb. 3, the day the lowly Fiorentina squad made the soccer juggernaut in Roma quiver for a full 90 minutes. The day New England proved to the world what their football fans already knew.
I watched them both — the first three rows back at midfield and the second from a professor’s living room floor until Adam Vinatieri iced the Super Bowl with no time left.
All in all, it was a very educational day.
I saw the soccer game as a way to pass time until the real game started nine hours later. After going with Pepperdine students to a game a few months earlier, when the weather was horrible, the teams stunk, and the seats were somewhat obstructed, I expected very little from the prospect of having a ticket to another soccer game in Florence.
No one expected Florence to contend in this contest as the 17th place team facing No.1 Rome. However, after the home team in purple netted two early goals, the crowd absolutely erupted. A man in front of me acted as an Italian bad word dictionary when attempting to belittle Roma’s apoplectic coach. Another man adorned with a long, blond beard, Star of David chains and an Israeli flag sprinted down the sidelines to excite the already-animated fans.
That character led me to consider the Bible story told so well in a Michelangelo sculpture, that perhaps Florence could slay this Goliath. At that thought, I finally began to learn how entire nations could lose themselves over what from afar looks like a very slow and uneventful sport.
With their team leading 2-0 at the half, fans started getting giddy. Unfortunately, Rome sent everyone back to reality after tying the game. Nevertheless, the riot patrol remained in case Florence could pull off the season’s biggest upset. Then with seconds left, a Florence player found himself about 12 yards away with nothing around him but a wide-open goal. He wound up and nailed the inside of the crossbar, which propelled the ball right back toward him with no time left.
An entire city was about a centimeter away from exploding. Instead, thousands of stunned fans exited the stadium as if they had just had their winning lottery ticket torn to shreds before their eyes. How minuscule the difference between dejection and jubilation, I thought, a notion that would stay with me until about 4:30 in the morning.
At midnight, 35 Florence students along with 20 boxes of pizza packed into the faculty family apartment adjacent to our villa to watch football’s greatest game (or in the case of some people, TV’s greatest halftime show).
The Boston Globe noted earlier that the Patriots came in as the only team in Super Bowl history to wear red, then white, then blue for their big game appearances. After such a tumultuous year, that reeked of destiny. Furthermore, the Pats rode on the talent of a few hard-working former no-names, just like certain policemen and firefighters who rose to the occasion in New York City a few months before.
And rise they did. Yet, after dominating for most of the game and presumably icing it with a fumble recovery for a touchdown (which was later overturned), things got dicey, and the Patriots needed the strong leg of their kicker, just like in Florence hours before. Only this time the ball didn’t hit the crossbar, it barely cleared the goal post, sending the few remaining Pepperdine Pats fans jumping up and down for joy — although we had to muffle our screams as our professor and his wife slept in one room next to us and their three-year-old son slept in the other.
Through the two sports I saw two remarkably similar cultures when it comes to rooting for their guys to succeed. I also developed a new appreciation for all those people who work so hard only to have their victories or defeats decided by a hairsbreadth.
March 21, 2002
