bambina writes

It's the World Cup, Baby!

It’s been almost three weeks since the World Cup started, and I cannot believe how riveted I am by this tournament.  My daughters and I went to the opening at Soccer City, cheered ourselves hoarse for Mexico and cursed every single vuvuzela-blowing moron. 

 Last Friday we were at Loftus Stadium in Pretoria to watch our team, Spain, trounce the Chileans.  In between those two matches, I was in Europe, marooned indoors, thanks to the rainy midsummer weather, all the more conducive to watching the World Cup on TV.  In Italian at that, which made football much sexier – calcio d’angulo, for instance, sounds infinitely more alluring than the mundane “corner kick”.

Cape Now

 
Cape Town, I like to think, is a country on its own, and among my favorite writing assignments are those that involve me going to Cape Town, or, at the very least, writing about it.

B on B: When Bambina Met Beckenbauer

Becks and me, August 2008.  Photo by Thomas von Ubrizsy

With the 2010 World Cup frenzy in full swing, everyone seems to have football on their minds.

In the summer of 2008, I met one of football’s greatest players, Franz Beckenbauer.  I wasn’t a football moron; my mother had some connection to FIFA once upon a time, and I grew up knowing, at the very least, who Pele was.  The national team I support is España, of course, and if pressed to choose a club, it would have to be Barça.  So anything to do with the Bundesliga, was, well, a bit too Deutschland uber alles for me.

But Franz Beckenbauer was a charmer, even if I had never heard of him before that sunny day in August in Ulrichen, Switzerland.  However, my cousin Rick – a sports journalist, football fanatic and Liverpool supporter – had, and when I texted him about the meeting, he texted me back immediately from Manila with a list of questions – he could barely contain his envy.  As I sat beside the original Becks before there even was a David Beckham, I pretended to be knowledgeable about the sport, asking what I hoped were intelligent questions, as per Rick’s instructions, like how he felt about Klinsman coming back to coach Bayern…