how I became a football nut

How is it possible that the world throws an amazing party every four years and I, so far, have been missing out?
And not just a party, either. It's a sports party. A soccer party. (Okay, fine, I'll even be multicultural and call it "football" if you want.)
It's the World Cup!
Football's my game. I played soccer for five years before high school, and was a referee two more years after that. (Which means that, yes, at one point in my life, I understood the offside rule. Bow in the presence of greatness, peasant.)
But I never dug watching it so much as playing it. Playing it was a blast, once I got myself into shape. I even scored a goal once. I was playing right forward on a glorious California afternoon, charging down the field, defenders left in the dust, goalie looking pale and scared and totally not up to our level of awesomeness—and the center passed, and BAM, I booted it right in. I reacted modestly, as I recall; now I'd like to erect a temple to myself.
Football was hard work, to be sure. Playing in Tennessee was humid, and often rainy. Playing in the desert was hot and dry. I worked with some prima donnas that would've put Beckham to shame, both coaches and players. And thanks to the precise orientation of some of the blood vessels in my right nostril, I got nosebleeds all the freakin' time. Every game I played, somebody would give that ball a kick three feet in front of me and it'd come soaring up in slow motion and conk me right on the snout, followed by a copious flood of vermillion.
Watching football was just...bleh. A bunch of tiny little men running around a big green field with white stripes, booting a ball back and forth. Whoop-de-doo.
Then I went to England. I was already aware that the World Cup was up and going. Heck, that was my purported reason for going to England in the first place, to watch the World Cup in the pub with my English friends. That was how I pitched it to my editor, anyway. I said, "Hey, I'm going to be rambling around Scotland, Ireland and northern England for two weeks in June, watching the World Cup in the pubs surrounded by a pack of ravening England fans [or, in Ireland's case, a pack of ravening Brazil supporters]. I'll be your war correspondent behind enemy lines, sir. I shall infiltrate the enemy's ranks and observe their football-related operations in intimate detail, if you please. How'd you like some dispatches from the front?"
At the time, I was speaking facetiously. Little did I realize how prophetic my levity would prove to be.
I rode the bus with Andrea up to Stansted Airport. It was a beautiful ride through picturesque English countryside, all fields, hedgerows, and woods that Robin Hood wouldn't have felt like a complete idiot hiding out in. Andrea, who (bless her heart) had treated me to a beer before we got on, got all caught with me during the ride, and I her. She'd been teaching university students in West London, but it was driving her mad: Western children aren't quite as industrious as our old Korean gang had been. I advised her to get out of the teaching business and go live by the seaside somewhere and write, all the while grinning inside. Somehow I always thought English kids were too smart to ask their professors to bump grades...
We made Stansted, checked in, and went through security. That was the only place where I was searched: dinky little Stansted Airport, about to board a domestic flight to Newcastle. I'd traveled thousands of miles over oceans and mountains and foreign lands, through international airports like McCarran and George W. Bush and Heathrow, and Stansted is where the curly-haired safety official pulled my bag off the scanner and rifled through it, chatting at me all the while with her nigh-incoherent English accent. Weird.
Anyway, we had a lovely 45-minute flight to Newcastle. I say "lovely," not because the flight itself was lovely, but because the views were lovely. I was sitting next to a lovely, slim, doe-eyed brunette, for one thing. Her name was Nicola and she was coming up from London to visit her Geordie boyfriend in Newcastle. So of course I said "Hey, Nicola baby, why settle for that bucolic bumpkin? Tag along with me and I'll show you what an old-fashioned home-grown grade-A American man is. I'll pierce the secret depths of your sorceress soul with my Longbow of Love, darling angel-pie."
Well, I didn't say that, exactly, but some version of it was running through my head as I chatted her up. She was quite friendly and open, and pointed out some of the sights as we came down for a landing—making a dramatic sweep out over the North Sea and then lancing back over the jagged coast. The orange sun was just kissing the horizon, lighting the rolling green lands beneath with a slanting, golden divinity. The waves crashed against the sands and rocks as we thundered over.
It was an auspicious start. This was "the Toon," and man, it looked beautiful. Andrea and I disembarked and met Adam and Elaine, our friends and local guides, in the terminal. We stepped out into the still-setting sun (I was about to learn how long-lasting and late the sunsets are in Newcastle in summer) and hailed a taxi. It was sure something seeing A & E again. It had been almost exactly a year since we parted in South Korea. Being near them, hearing that lovable Geordie accent tumbling around in my ears, observing the two of them again in their natural environment...it was almost unreal. I was overjoyed to be reunited with them and thrilled that I'd now get to play around on their home turf. Within the span of two minutes it was just like old times: we were laughing, talking, joking, jibing, doing all the myriad things we used to do together on those narrow streets and tiny restaurants in K-Land.
But this wasn't K-Land. I could tell that immediately. England flags were everywhere. St. George's Cross flew proudly from every upper-story window, every shopfront, even from the antennas of cars. This was football territory, and it was World Cup time. It came home to me then. I would be spending the next two weeks in a land utterly obsessed with football, during the most well-known international football competition in the world, in which both my country and England were competing. And, abruptly, I was transformed.
Think of the most fanatical, die-hard, sycophantic sports fan you know. He doesn't necessarily have to slather himself in his team's colors and leap up and down in the stands like a trained ape; he may not even own any memorabilia. But his soul, his essence, his life-force seems inextricably linked to the performance of his team. He'll scream and yell and holler when points are scored; rant and roar when an unfair call is (rightfully or wrongfully) perceived; become insufferably exuberant for hours after winning a game (or days, in the case of playoffs or championships); and likewise sulk for a full-length mourning period on the heels of a loss. Take that man, soak him in three pints of beer and dust him with a packet of pork rinds, and you have an English football fan. These guys are nucking futs. I was infected with this excitement, this ardor, this enthusiasm, this pandemic zeal within minutes of getting off the airplane in Newcastle. Suddenly I was pumped. I was raring to go. I was ready for some football. I wanted my team to win, more desperately than I wanted my own seaplane or a bootlegged copy of The Star Wars Holiday Special. Some hitherto inactive and unsuspected gland had been activated, galvanized by the competitive pheromones in the English air, and was feverishly flooding my body with footballmoxytocin and ballsinourcortisol, twenty-four years' worth of backlogged fan-pheromones. The chrysalis of apathy had come off, as had the gloves. I had been transfigured from a lackadaisical observer to a dyed-in-the-wool football nut in less time than it took László Kiss to score a hat-trick against El Salvador in 1982.
This was going to be sweet.
The first night was thankfully uneventful. I was exhausted by my travels, and by my long night of debauchery in Las Vegas some twenty-four hours before. Except for a few cat-naps here and there, I'd been awake for close to forty-eight hours. I was ferried to Adam's mum's house in a taxi, where I was fed, watered, and cleansed. Elaine's friend M came over and the four of us stayed up into the wee hours of the morning, sitting in Adam's mum's tiny conservatory, listening to AC/DC and Curtis Mayfield and just getting caught up.
I was floored. I was in England. I was sitting in the conservatory of an English house, looking out on the prim and proper English garden, surrounded by an English red-brick neighborhood, under a sky that refused to go completely dark in these northern latitudes. My soul boiled with excitement. My head swam with anticipation, happiness, and travel-induced delirium. I was out on the road again, back amongst friends, in for a hell of a time, and loving every second of it.
We'd originally resolved to stay up all night waiting for Jeff, but we figured since we'd be shouting and screaming and hollering and jumping up and down and drinking copious amounts of beer and watching the World Cup match the next day, we should probably get some rest. I was put to bed on a marvelously soft queen-size in an upstairs room. The view from the window looked like this (in the morning):

Adam warned me that I would likely be awakened in the middle of the night by Jeff, our Canadian friend, who was was also coming to the Korean reunion (from Korea, actually) and who was taking the night bus up from London. He and I would be splitting a bunk. If he did wake me up, I don't remember it. I was out like a light.
Well enough for me that I got my rest, for the next day was a momentous one: England's first game of the World Cup...versus none other than the USA. Time to explore the Toon first. We commenced with the Quayside, where the bridges which Newcastle is famous for spanned the mighty River Tyne.

We took a nice little stroll down by the waterfront, crossing the Millennium Bridge over to Gateshead, taking the elevator up and admiring the view.

We also stopped in at Greggs for a snack. Greggs is something like the Geordie McDonald's: only instead of burgers and stuff, it's pasties and pies. The steak bake was delicious. Check this mother out:

Then we stopped in at our first pub (yippee!). Bob Trollops, just off the Quay.

Lovely little place. I'd been dying to try some English cider. I'd had some Old Rosie at Adam's the night before, and liked it a lot. Had something of a sulfuric overtone to it, but was very equable otherwise. I saw no reason to quit there, however, so I procured some Strongbow. Named after the Norman who made the first official British expedition to Ireland back in medieval times, Strongbow is your basic English cider: apple-tasting, fizzy, and roughly as alcoholic as beer. It makes a nice change from beer, though, and gets the same job done.
And there I was, sitting in a tiny, dark, woody, brass-laden English pub with a couple of mates and some cider.
You know that feeling you get when you realize one of your lifelong dreams? Yeah, I was getting that feeling about then.
We exited Trollops and headed up the rather steep Dean Street....


...which became Grey Street, if I remember correctly...

...which led us to Grey's Monument, smack dab in the middle of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne city center. It was built to honor Charles Grey, one of the architects who designed most of modern Newcastle.

That's Charles, Earl Grey to you. Yes, the guy the tea is named after. Cool, huh? You didn't think Newcastle was all meat pies and bridges and Brian Johnson, did you?

The place was hopping at mid-Saturday. There are about three different shopping centers clustered around Monument Square; Newcastle University ain't far away, either, and there are enough pizza joints, pubs, and book stores to choke a horse.

We wandered up Northumberland Street, checking out Fenwick's Food Halls. They sell boatloads of candy, booze and deli-style pies, pasties, sandwiches, and Indian food. I was full up on Greggs and drooling anyway. Angelic Elaine let me try some of her chicken tikka masala sandwich.

We kept on, and hung a right at St. Mary's Place (at Newcastle University, where Princess Eugenie Victoria Helena Mountbatten-Windsor of York—insert loving sigh here—is doing the equivalent of her master's degree).

A few hundred yards brought us to Luckies Corner Bar. Like every other pub I was to visit in the U.K. and Ireland, they had a big projector set up inside, already spreading some World Cup pregame love over the spacious interior.

We met up with some more of A & E's friends at Luckies: Nathan, Aaron, and Michael, all solid lads. Bets were going around, being hotly debated and finally placed with the aid of Michael's iPhone. I hadn't realized what a roaring betting culture England has going, especially where football matches are concerned. There were betting houses on every street corner. The Brits'll put 50 pence down on anything: who'll win, how much they'll win by, the final score, the fastest goal, the highest-scoring player...even how many corner kicks there'll be.

Me being the only Yank surrounded by a cadre of English people, the badinage began to fly. They were "taking the piss" out of me, as they say up there. Several rather disparaging remarks were made about the United States' chances against England, which got my red-blooded American dander up. So I hauled out a "chunk" (one British pound coin; thick little buggers, they are) and put it down on the US to beat England 2-1.

There remained but to sit, drink, and wait.
The game came on. The action began. I sat there, watching my friends both old and new unanimously yell at the projector screen, feeling a curious sort of nervousness. It wasn't concern for my chunk, oh no. It was the football-mania again. I folded my arms so no one would see my hands shaking. I kept up a bold front, giving as much lip as I got. Inside, I was pulled tighter than a guitar string. My homeland's manly pride—not to mention $1.40—was on the line.
England scored in three minutes. My forehead hit the table as the pub erupted. A cacophony of hoarse screams and yells resounded through the enclosed space, bedlam on the ears, needles in the pincushion of prestige. Suddenly all the world was gray and lightless, void of cheer, or even the promise of it. This, I thought, was what it must be like to be a football fan.
I recovered with difficulty. I sat up, withstood the laughing jibes of my so-called friends, took a commiserating sip of beer, and took my life in my hands by chalking the English goal up to luck. The next thirty-six minutes inched by, spurred on by my gritted teeth and clenched fists. My eyes were locked onto the projector screen in a death-grip. I didn't even know that my eyes could grip anything before then. If an earthquake had struck the pub at that moment, the projector screen would've held rock steady, so intently were my eyeballs gripping it. The fingers of my very soul were crossed.
And it happened. Just as I was up at the bar ordering another pitcher of Fosters, the ball slid between Robert Green's fingers and rolled into the net.



My brain immediately clamped down on the rest of my body to prevent it from leaping into the air. My eyebrows seesawed. My arms jumped and wavered about, threatening to shoot skyward, like rockets on tethers. Half-strangled cheers and yells of approbation clawed their way up my neck and died, suffocating behind mumbling lips. I settled for giving the barman a friendly wink as I handed him £7.50.
We'd equalized. The US was tied, 1-1. My prediction might still come true. We might win.
The rest of the game was no less tense. All of us leaned forward in our chairs (or back, depending on which way we were sitting). Hearts pounded. Eyes dared to blink. Tongues danced over dry lips. Fingers drummed on tables and knees. Disgusted shouts rang out now and then. The noise in the pub fell to a whisper, rising to crescendo when England got a run on the American goal. But no further goals were scored. And suddenly it was over. A 1-1 draw. My pound was lost, but my national dignity and my life were intact. We celebrated that night with beer, dancing, and a trip to the Pink Triangle, the gay area of Newcastle, whence the gay bars and Goths traditionally were located. Adam danced with an enormous, smiling fat guy as we all got drunk and laughed. We went out for Greek food after and ate in the shadow of the solemn stone keep wall that surrounded the city in medieval times. We somehow made our way back home in the wee hours of the morning, beer-soaked, exhausted, sweaty, stuffed to the gills, and happy as we'd been in a long, long time.

And that was just the first day.