World Cup From the stadium to the bar stool, watch for our ongoing reports A L S O _T O D A Y Who's going to win the World Cup? Andrew O'Hehir runs down the teams to watch T A B L E_T A L K Discuss the World Cup in Table Talk's Sports area R E C E N T L Y The Internet comes to the Outback By Simon Winchester A 7-year-old boy's life changes forever (06/09/98) Mondo Weirdo Slow boat to Thailand Temptations and tribulations on the Mekong River (06/08/98) Ramadan By Mona Simpson Taking a lover: An erotic journey from Cairo to Alexandria (06/05/98) Hot tix! By Don George Cathay offers super-low fares to Hong Kong, Bali, Bangkok (06/05/98) Losing their shirts By Tanya Shaffer Seeing a fetish priest requires unbuttoned giving in Ghana (06/04/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		___________________________ ARE WE THE world ? Despite our uneasy place on Planet Soccer, the United States will be one of 32 nations vying for glory as the globe's most passionately watched sporting event begins. BY ANDREW O'HEHIR Almost four years ago, on a hot summer afternoon in Pasadena, Calif., an Italian Buddhist watched a white leather sphere sail into the sky and covered his face in despair. Thousands of miles to the south, an entire nation began its riotous celebration, and the 1994 World Cup -- international soccer's blind date with the United States -- had reached its ambiguous conclusion. You might say it was the kind of date that ends with a lingering kiss on the doorstep rather than a passionate, long-term coupling: Although the '94 tournament was a great success on its own terms, drawing more fans than any previous World Cup, it did not catapult soccer to the forefront of American pop culture, or suddenly turn the U.S. into an international soccer superpower. Even for the beleaguered minority of American soccer snobs -- in whose number I count myself -- that was too much to hope. To labor the metaphor just a little further, it was also the kind of date that subtly changes the two parties' perceptions of who they are, and leaves them increasingly curious about each other. Staging its crowning spectacle in an essentially neutral country made soccer stronger in its time of crisis, and gave Americans the chance to experience the obsessive, carnivalesque and even deranged passions that attend this often bewildering game. Americans always appreciate scale even if they don't understand it, and the sheer color and bigness of the World Cup surely accelerated a process that was happening anyway: The planet's favorite sport, smuggled past the Border Patrol by immigrants and adopted en masse by 11-year-old suburbanites, was insinuating itself into a permanent niche in our sports landscape. It isn't realistic to suggest that soccer will soon, if ever, be as big in the American spectator-sports pantheon as baseball, basketball or football. (Supplanting hockey, another imported niche sport that may be wearing out its welcome, is another matter.) But "America's soccer nation," to borrow a phrase from George Vecsey of the New York Times, has grown extraordinarily broad and diverse, stretching from immigrant-rich urban hotbeds like East Los Angeles and Newark, N.J., to middle-class strongholds around Portland, Ore., and Dallas-Fort Worth. As the planet's attention turns to France this week for the opening of the 1998 World Cup -- where the hot topics are striking airline workers, Algerian terrorists, English hooligans and a gap-toothed kid named Ronaldo from the slums outside Rio -- it's worth recognizing how far American soccer has come. Major League Soccer, the 12-team U.S. pro league that arose in the wake of World Cup '94, is a weird, low-rent affair in many ways. It has made several lamentable rule changes in an effort to make the game more comprehensible to non-fans, and its team names (the Dallas Burn? the San Jose Clash?) seem lifted from some marketing student's MBA thesis. But MLS continues to draw respectable crowds in near-total media obscurity (the league-wide attendance average is about 14,000 per game). More importantly, its level of play has improved dramatically. If you're one of the soccer snobs who spurned the league for its Madison Avenue cheese factor, or who gave up during its often-laughable first season, I strongly advise you not to miss this year's edition of the Los Angeles Galaxy -- a slashing, high-scoring team of speed burners who combine South American flair with North American grit. Professional competition at this improved level has in turn toughened and sharpened the U.S. national team, previously an unstable mix of foreign-based players and near-amateurs. The American team that will play Germany in Paris on Monday is by far the best ever to represent this country, a tirelessly athletic side that plays sound positional and tactical soccer and doesn't surrender goals easily. Its accomplishments over the last year have been impressive: The Americans held Mexico to a goalless draw in a crucial qualifying match before an enormous, enraged crowd at the high altitude of Mexico City; rode red-hot goalkeeper Kasey Keller to an astonishing 1-0 win over world champion Brazil; and thoroughly dominated Austria in a 3-0 victory in Vienna. Unfortunately for them, expectations were unfairly raised by the far less talented and interesting '94 squad, which snuck into the round of 16 on a fluke, after a Colombian defender put the ball into his own net. (He was later murdered, perhaps by drug lords, in apparent retribution for his mistake.) In addition, this year's team must play two of the most talented sides in Europe, Germany and Yugoslavia (the name still officially used by Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian government), and two of its games may be drowned in political hype: When the U.S. plays Iran on June 21, it will mark the first significant athletic competition between the two since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Yugoslavia game on June 25 will undoubtedly be tinged by tensions over the Serbs' latest round of atrocities in the Kosovo region. In short, for all the team's improvement, it will take a bigger miracle than '94's to get them out of the first round. Soccer, like life, is full of injustice. N E X T+P A G E | More famous than Michael Jordan ILLUSTRATION BY HUNGRY DOG STUDIO