Twice Left for Dead, Japan Claws Back

 

Sports Saturday

Sometimes it’s okay for your team to lose.  While I am a devoted Peyton Manning fan, when his Indianapolis Colts lost to the New Orleans Saints in the 2010 Super Bowl, I had the consolation of watching a city celebrate five years after suffering devastation from which it is still trying to recover. That’s how I felt when I watched the United States women lose to Japan in the World Cup Soccer Finals.

There was no way that the Japanese should have even been in the game.  The U.S., which had underperformed to that point in the tournament, played its best game and bombarded the Japanese goal.  But as though protected by an invisible force field, the Japanese saw U.S. shots glance off posts and crossbars or just barely go high or wide.  While America played ball control soccer and prevented the Japanese from ever finding a rhythm, the tiny Asian team made the most of the few opportunities that they had to twice come back from deficits to force a tie and settle the affair through penalty kicks.

Somehow towards the end I had a strong sense that Japan would work their way back and, once the game moved into a penalty shootout, I had no doubt at all that Japan would prevail.  By that point their victory seemed destined.

Two images came to mind as I watched the Japanese rebound.  One was from Alain’s Renais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour where we see grass clawing its way back in the city streets on the day following the atom bomb.  The sense that life can reassert itself even following cataclysmic destruction seemed to fit this situation.

My other image was of the tortoise crossing the road in The Grapes of Wrath.  A metaphor for the Oklahomans migrating into California, it keeps on coming and coming, despite the car that misses it and the car that wings it.  The odds are stacked against it, as they were stacked against Japan when they took their corner kick a goal down with only two minutes left in the game.  Yet somehow, the ball got through.

I hope it doesn’t sound as though I am overemphasizing the importance of a sports event.  After all, winning the World Cup cannot make up for the earthquakes, tsunami strikes, and nuclear power plant meltdowns that have devasted Japan this past year.  But we latch on to symbols to provide hope, and the sight of a national team surmounting overwhelming odds to pull out a victory gives those struggling to rebound an extra thing to hold on to.  Of course, after the game, life returns to all the hardness of the recovery, but human resilience, always remarkable, has received an extra lift.

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