Football and William Shakespeare > IDEAS & IDEALS

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Frankly speaking, despite all the nationwide promotional activities and advertisements for the 2002 FIFA World Cup we are co-hosting with Japan from May 31 to June 30, I could not feel the spirit, festivity or excitement of it earnestly until the day before yesterday. It came all of a sudden yesterday with the arrival of England national football team studded with such stars as David Beckham and Michael Owen at Inchon International Airport to have a friendly match with our squad. With the England team leaped the World Cup to me all of a sudden with its heat, fever and frenzy.

      I watched the arrival of England footballers with particular interest on TV. There had been many famous and outstanding football teams before from other countries, but this one from England was special to me. They impressed me strongly with their full dresses, with good looks, smiles, and confidence on their faces, and with free and relaxed attitudes, after so long a journey from homeland.

      I don't know why I felt such a special favour towards the England's team at my first glance and fell in love with it. Is it really different from others? No, I don't think so. It is just one of the many outstanding football teams in the world. Better and stronger teams will arrive one by one from now on. France, for instance, with the legendary star player Zinedine Zidane, is also scheduled to arrive this week for a warming-up game with us. Then, am I preconditioned psychologically to react so favorably towards England for unknown reasons? Probably. Whatever the reasons might be, what is certain and sure is that I would not be so much enthusiastic for France or for Italy, another strong contenders for the Cup, as for England. Why?

      Slowly the reasons of my unusual preference to and my unexpected affection for it dawned on me. It is from England to begin with. As a professor of English, how can I afford to be indifferent, neutral or impartial to the special guests from the motherland of English language and literature, and of football - my job, my lifelong passion, love, struggle, and obsession - my major preoccupations that have dominated, sustained, and even possessed my life from early childhood until now? My life would be quite empty or entirely different from what it is, were it not for a country called England on the face of the earth.
  
      That England is the motherland of football doesn't necessarily mean that it originated in England. It could and it could not. Football is a very primitive and ancient sport, and it could have started anywhere in the world. We human beings instinctively like to kick something, whether it is a pebble on the road or an empty can on the street, for no purpose but for fun. Long before the FA (Football Association of England) was formally created in England in 1863 with football clubs, with its modern rules of game and tournaments, a sport in which people kick something round for fun and contest must had existed all over the world. Football is a sport deeply related with human nature.

      Truly, football has all the elements to be popular and to spread far and wide. The rules are simple, and very commonsensical. We can play it on any strip of land, even on the narrow alleys and on the streets. It does not demand much or any special technique to play it. Anyone who can run can do it. It is very cheap sport too. It does not require any expensive equipments nor particular gears. What you need is just healthy legs and lung, and the passion to enjoy it.

      Long, long ago, when I was a little elementary school boy in a small rural village, and when we were all very poor and hungry, when we did not have a single lawn-ground throughout the country, when not a professional football team did exist, when the World Cup was known to only a few special people, and when football players were not heroes of the young, we all liked it so much and played it so well. On the hard and rugged sandy ground we kicked anything round like a ball. The leather-bound ball was a luxury. Often we played with bare feet, and our feet bled, but we didn't care. Football was the only sport and pastime for us. In fact, we were all football players once.

      I recall with fond reminiscence the days when I played football myself. I was just a mediocre player all the time, but they needed me on the team wherever I went, and whenever there were football matches, and I had kept on playing it until quite recently, when I found my heart and legs could no longer sustain the fast running. I decided to quit playing it once for all some years ago, weeping. Once I had thought that I would rather die, if I could not keep on playing football. But, as you see, I am still alive and contented to sit before TV to watch the World Cup games. Age comes along with its own blessings - resignation. to name a one.

      I, who, as a boy, had once aspired fervently to become a star player of football, failed to realize his dream, but became a professor of English literature instead. I do not lament my lot. The field in which such literary geniuses as Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth star and play is a bountiful compensation. Were it not for them, I would. To read and appreciate the world these literary players display and express superbly well in English language on the paper is as much engrossing as, nay far more engrossing than to watch those legendary football stars, such as Pele, Beckenbauer, Maradona, playing and scoring goals on the ground. Geniuses, whatever forms they take, are the gifts of God for the common people like you and me to watch, enjoy and admire.

      William Shakespeare for one included and treated in his works almost everything we have, we know of, and we can possibly think of as human beings. I got curious, on this special occasion of football festival, if I could possibly find out any hints or clues that he did like football himself like me, play it, or knew about it in his time, and I decided to check it out. I got thrilled and overjoyed, as if I scored a goal myself in the World Cup, to discover that only once and briefly, throughout his vast and entire works, he mentioned football. In The Comedy of Errors, Dromio, the servant, complains to his master of his ceaseless as well as unrewarding errands between the two twin masters as follows:  

"Am I so round with you as you with me
That like a football you do spurn me thus?
You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither.
If I last in this service, you must case me in leather."
   (Act II, Scene I)

What we can gather from above is that football was already there in England before 1594, and they had balls covered with leather, which were not as common as we have today. Whether Shakespeare himself did like it and play it like me or not, is not certain. But I am strongly inclined to believe that most probably he did, when he was a schoolboy at least, simply because playing football is fun for any healthy boy in the world at any time. And there is not a scintilla of hint or evidence that William Shakespeare was a weakling, physically or mentally.
                                                                                                     (May 21, 2002)