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World Cup 2006 started at the beginning of 2005 for me. As a product manager for Nike, the road to World Cup was to be the global theme for our company; and as we had creative kick-off for the Spring ’06 line, it was clear that I would be thinking and talking about Football a lot over the next year of my life. At the time I had zero idea I would actually be living abroad for it; so in my mind World Cup was part of my business life. I mean I live in the states, where the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL are king and “soccer” is the other sport. I personally liked the game, was a regular at Portland Timbers games, yelling and heckling with the best of the Timber army, knew names and faces like Beckham, Thierry Enrie, Ronaldinho, but that’s the extent of it.
Time moved on, SP06, SU06 product creation calendars rolled by, the amount of e-mails from corporate communication increased monthly, and then I moved to Hong Kong. Walking down any street in the expat heavy Central district revealed World Cup posters, signs, deals, events….you couldn’t avoid it.
And then it began, and any late night walk through Soho or LKF revealed crowds pouring out of bars into the streets; bars with names like McSworley’s, Stormy Weather, Whiskey Priest, Dublin Jacks and The Globe. The crowds lingered for the whole of nights, but peaked during the nightly kick-off times; which went from 9:00pm, midnight & 3:00am in the first round, to 10:00pm and 3:00am in the second round, and so on and so forth. As the teams changed so did the crowds, one accent switching to another. The spirit was infectious; I stayed up many a late night. Meetings at work started getting scheduled later than usual; allowing a little morning flex time for the folks who fought through the 3:00am games. The pantry at work got filled with inflatable soccer balls, flags and signs, and for those too smart to stay up all night, a running stream of the previous night’s games.
I fall into the “not smart” category of course, spending plenty of nights at plenty of bars. One Wednesday night we had cleverly arrived by 6:30pm to snag the big booth at McSworleys – the one that had its own private flat screen, then sat through the 9:00pm Costa Rica vs. Ecuador game and then managed to amuse ourselves for another hour before we finally got to watch the midnight kick-off of England vs. Trinidad and Tobago. Unfortunately what we discovered over the course of the night was that our both had zero air circulation – seven hours in a cloud of cigarette smoke was hell. And inhalers of albuterol were passed around the table like a joint. The hangovers were particularly harsh after smoking second hand about three packs of fags.
Another night I met an American friend for the midnight Australia vs. Brazil match. Soda, an Australian bar typically reserved for moderately cool kids listening to house music had turned into a sports bar. In true Aussie style a small Coleman was set up to serve some barbied shrimp. Lighter fluid mingled with the hot humid air and made for a long match – I only lasted for the first half. It WAS Sunday after all!
One Saturday night we felt obligated to stay up for the 3:00am USA vs. Italy game. Bulldogs Bar was our host and got me home after the sun rose again. Of course, no night in LKF would be complete without some annoying drunk American frat boy aggressively yelling and generally being obnoxious. Add a game to the mix and his actions grew and (choke, choke) made me proud to be an American. But in all fairness, every village has their idiot, and I saw similar behavior over the course of World Cup from Brits, Aussies, Koreans, Germans…….. it’s apparently universal that there will always be “that guy” in any given crowd.
My favorite and final game was the tragic England vs. Portugal event. Surrounded by all Brits we crowded into Dublin Jacks and started an intense evening in which my friends, a morally questionable group who I would refer to as my worst influences and drinking buddies, suddenly turned religious. So many prayers and moments of silence were given to Beckham, Rooney, Crouch….okay, not Crouch, that I felt like I was at a Southern revival. After this game, we did not stay out until sunrise. I have a feeling had England actually won, I would not remember much of that evening! My liver thanks the ref for red-carding Rooney.
