For a country that boasts such an impressive sporting heritage, the United States suffers from -- especially of late -- a dearth of nationally unifying sporting moments. Born in 1980, I was all of 25 days old for Mike Eruzione, Herb Brooks, and the Miracle on Ice over the Soviets in Lake Placid. And indeed, most of my former classmates and contemporaries -- at least those who can remember anything at all from their respective first years of life -- recall the Mount Saint Helens volcanic eruption in Washington state, and not Al Michaels's hysterical " Do you believe in miracles? YES!" as the first truly national occasion to markedly intersect with their lifelines. Even at the not-so- tender (but still not-so-jaded) age of 12, the mere announcement of the 1992 Olympic Dream Team basketball squad's roster felt like a bigger deal than when Magic, Michael, et al. inevitably won the gold over Croatia in the actual championship game.
On June 16, 2002, though, in a former college roommate's South Pasadena, Cal., living room, I watched transfixed as the U.S. national soccer team -- my national team -- dismantled and outclassed a criminally overconfident Mexican side 2-0 in a World Cup second round game at Jeonju, South Korea. A half decade and another World Cup later, the Mexican national team -- El Tri(color) -- has yet to heal fully from the psychic wounds inflicted on them that day by the North. (The physical wounds were inflicted by El Tri that day, whose play became increasingly brutal as the match's outcome ticked closer and closer to finality.)
With games kicking off on a schedule skewed some 17 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time, we were fortunate that the USA-Mexico second round game had garnered an "early" 11:30 pm PDT kick-off, something for which we could drink beers and then stay up for, not a 2:30 or 5:30 am kickoff for which we could drink beers in preparation, fall asleep, and then hopelessly snooze through. Now, upon Brian McBride's go-ahead goal eight minutes into the first half (and again after Landon Donovan's clincher 20 minutes into the second), I had to throw my arms into the air. Even after sheepishly pulling them down, I felt helpless; they flew up, and up again, with each slo-mo replay of the ball whisking past Mexican goalkeeper Óscar Pérez. Of course, a U.S. victory over a developing nation in anything ought not to be reason for the big white colossus to celebrate, but, well, there I was.
These days, in our age of the Bush Doctrine, we Americans no longer have license to cut loose after an achievement in the international arena. We're seen as bullies and jerks, smug with the knowledge that even a thumping at the hands (or feet) of Nike-clad Brazil more favorably affects Phil Knight in Beaverton, Ore., than it does O Presidente, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brasilia. But shock and awe, quagmires, and ridiculous border fences notwithstanding, there's still something primitive -- something uncorrupted (or uncorruptible) by smugness, by dollar domination -- about USA-Mexico, "La Copa NAFTA."
It will be a stretch for this Sunday's Championship Final of the Gold Cup -- North America's micro-version of the World Cup -- to reach the intensity of even a first round match up of FIFA's quadrennial main event, but Sunday's 3:00 pm match-up features, as most soccer pundits predicted it would when the tournament began two weeks ago, the Stars and Stripes versus El Tri. Tom Tancredo be damned, 11 Mexican citizens will show up for work on the grass at Chicago's Soldier Field to renew what's currently American sports' most vicious and most visceral rivalry. And though the United States has dominated since 2000, going 8-2-1 over the Mexicans (including that stunner in Korea), history and tradition--soccer's maddeningly wonderful intangibles -- will, in this rivalry, always side with the green, white, and red.
In a time during which American patriotism can be hopelessly embarrassing, it's still difficult to be ashamed of U.S. Soccer. And come Sunday afternoon, be it Oguchi Onyewu, Clint Dempsey, or Tyler Twellman slipping a goal past Mexican 'keeper Oswaldo Sánchez, I'll be raising my hands. I really don't expect to have any choice in the matter.
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