Watching the World Cup from America: 1966 and all that

Russia 2018 will be my 14th World Cup. It’s been a lifelong obsession. Football365 has been gracious enough to allow me to share some of my memories, not only of the football, but of following the tournament in a country that calls football ‘soccer’ and up until very recently didn’t care much about it at all…

I discovered football in 1966. Actually, it was futbol. If you grow up in Los Angeles, sooner or later you study Spanish, and at the age of 10, I attended Colegio Español, a summer Spanish-language program on Spanish and Latin American culture.

Naturally that included sport, which meant futbol. I can’t remember if I’d heard of the game before – this was the USA, where soccer was mostly invisible – but in any case I knew zero specifics. I remember the teachers drawing diagrams on the board to give us the basics. We were divided into teams named after famous football clubs (I played for Real Madrid!), and were sent out on the playground to do battle.

It was incredible. I mean completely totally glorious. Where had this game been all my life? The dribble, the dash into the penalty area, the through ball, the tackle – this was absolute joy. My skills were limited even by 10-year-old standards, but who cared? I was Pelé, because that’s who they said the best player was. Forget Spanish and Latin American culture, forget everything else for that matter. What a summer! When we received our diplomas, the head teacher called me “our football player”. It’s still the greatest accolade of my life.

As you might have heard, 1966 was a World Cup year. I don’t remember when I first found out about the tournament, but when I heard the final was going to be telecast (the very first international football match on US television), there was only one place I was going to be.

England vs. West Germany. I decided to support England, because…well, England, I suppose. They spoke English. There was also the small matter of my father. He had seen combat in the Air Force during WWII, and was Jewish to boot, and had fairly strong views about Germans. Like Basil Fawlty, he would have very much mentioned the war. So England it was.

It’d be nice to say I remembered every detail of the match, but I didn’t. England won in extra time, and some sort of controversy was involved, but that was about it. What I remember most is that I knew who had won before the game ended. Because of the time difference, the match was shown several hours after it had taken place. In those days you could ring a phone number to hear a recording with all the sports results, and my brother decided to call and find out who had won. At one point he smiled, and that’s when I knew England were world champions.

In fact, all my memories of the match come from after the match itself. Some months later I found a little red English paperback, World Football Handbook 1967, by Brian Glanville – how it migrated to Los Angeles I have no idea – and it became my bible. It gave all the details of the tournament, the qualifiers too, and much more besides. I learned about Pelé, Eusebio and Bobby Charlton. I can still quote whole sentences: ‘There can have been no more dramatic World Cup Final.’

Even better, at some point the official World Cup film, entitled Goal!, appeared in the local movie theatres. Of course I demanded to go (several times), and got to see all the action in living colour. I was officially World Cup crazy.

But that meant I had to wait four years for the next tournament. How to survive? Well, I invented a solitaire football game that could be played with a deck of cards. With the little red book as my guide, I proceeded to conduct entire World Cup tournaments, including qualifiers. Especially qualifiers. Although my first run-through borrowed the actual qualifying groups for 1966, eventually I expanded them to include every country in the world. I kept playing and playing and playing, and never let my imagination rest.

The Glanville book disappeared long ago, but I kept the records of my solitaire tournaments. They’ve travelled with me everywhere. Last night I extracted the folder from the bottom drawer of my old filing cabinet and reminisced. They’re in blue ink on quarter-inch graph paper, with all the numbers fitting nicely into the squares. For each tournament there’s a title sheet with ‘THE WORLD CUP’ in big block letters. Then follow page after page of qualifying matches, then a few pages for the final tournament, and one page for the knock=outs, finishing again with block letters ‘CHAMPIONS’ followed by the name of the winner. My roll of champions, in order: Uruguay, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Saudi Arabia, Luxembourg, Romania, Bolivia, Tunisia, Japan. A better world, perhaps.

Anyway, that’s where it all started. For more than 50 years I’ve loved the game and obsessed over the World Cup. Over the next few weeks I’ll tell you more about it, and hopefully in the comments you’ll share your World Cup memories too.

Peter Goldstein