The Matters of Life, Death, and More - eBook

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ecstatic revelation. His essays on the game are the very definition of pleasure. Franklin Foer, author of How Soccer Explains the WorldSome people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that. Bill Shankly, legendary Liverpool F.C. managerAs the worlds eyes turn to the World Cup, Aleksandar Hemon reminds us of a sad fact: an average life seldom contains more than twenty World Cupsour games are tragically numbered. We need to pay attention, to absorb the joy, the skill, the agony, the triumph, the beautyeverything that soccer is. And soccer is, of course, everything.In these pages, Hemon revisits memories of his first World Cup (1974), for which his then homeland, Yugoslavia, qualified in dramatic fashiononly to quickly lose their way out of the tournament. He takes us through the World Cups of the eighties, nineties, up to South Africa in 2010 and Brazil in 2014, which was a special one for Hemon, the first time in the countrys history that Bosnia and Herzegovina qualified.Played out on the world stageboth in the World Cup and in soccers international professional leaguessoccer is a high-stakes enterprise full of extreme passion, extreme talent, extreme money, and often extreme politics. But Hemon is also quick to point out that a game of soccer requires only a reasonably flat surface, a sufficiently round object, and someone to show up, and he regales us with stories of the heated games of his youth in Sarajevos gravel courtyards, of the frozen pick-up games of his adulthood in Chicago, and now, of his daughters slightly less intense soccer practices, replete with cones and shin guards.Hemon has been celebrated far and wide for his fiction and essays, but here he takes on what is truly his lifelong, animating passion: soccer. Its more than a sport, its certainly not exercise, and its not even enough to say soccer is life (as Shankly pointed out). Soccer is, in fact, the beautiful gameand never more so than in these pages. Even if, despite all of America's best efforts, Hemon still occasionally insists on calling it football.