On an unusually warm September evening in London 12 years ago, Didier Drogba walked into the Saatchi Gallery from the adjoining Chelsea ground to pose for pictures with a group of Kathakali performers from Kerala. Soon, the then Chelsea and Ivory Coast footballer was striding the contemporary art gallery for more clicks with actors Mohanlal and Dev Patel, who had arrived to launch a new tourism ad film of Kerala.
Another football legend, Gary Lineker, former England striker and winner of the Gold Boot at the 1986 Mexico World Cup, too was present at the event happening only a month after South Africa successfully hosted the African continent's first-ever FIFA World Cup in 2010. It was one of the worst world cup performances for England, crashing out after a humiliating 4-1 loss to Germany in the second round. Asked how the England team was doing, Lineker raised his eyebrows mockingly, "Which England team?"
Lineker's displeasure with his national squad apart, football greats, movie stars and Kathakali artistes coming together at a contemporary art venue underlined the world's cultural diversity. With billions of people across the world following football, making it the world's most popular game, and footballers creating moves on the field like dancers and artists (and the same repeated in several sports disciplines like cricket, tennis and athletics), sports has transcended into the realm of culture in modern society.
Mahatma and Mandela
Nothing has done more to install sports as a cultural emblem than two successive football world cups in this century, the first in South Africa in 2010, and the second in Brazil four years later. The first FIFA World Cup in Africa became a celebration of humanity in the same continent where the first human beings walked the earth. When they were not watching matches, football fans were queueing up in front of the Origins Centre Museum in Johannesburg to learn about the first people on earth, surveying the Apartheid Museum or strolling in the street in the black township of Soweto that housed two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Some fans from India even wore masks bearing faces of Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi to mark the coming together of cultures.
The South Africa World Cup produced the best world cup song ever, Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) sung by Shakira. Cheerleaders lined stadium grounds during match intervals singing Waka Waka and making viewers forget that rival coaches were feverishly running across the same space only moments before. The edition's unofficial anthem, Wavin' Flag by Somali-born musician K'naan, went further, with its fiery lyrics, They'll call me freedom just like a wavin' flag, resting on the lips of a generation of people around the world for years to come. South Africa 2010 also produced the most popular, and annoying, musical instrument invented for a football match — vuvuzela.
The African World Cup sank its sporting spirit deep into the continent's ethnic diversity with a ball that derived its name from a sleepy village near the main world cup stadium in Soweto. Jabulani, where the apartheid regime built hostels to house unwed black males in the '70s, was also the name of the 2010 World Cup ball that incorporated 11 colours to represent a football team and as many official languages of South Africa. Many football fans still believe the world cup would have stayed in Africa if Luis Suárez hadn't denied Ghana a victory against Uruguay in the quarterfinals with a soul-crushing handball.
Play and passion
Sports historians say football first arrived in Brazil literally inside a suitcase belonging to a rich settler from Europe. But the African-origin natives soon outsmarted the Europeans by playing with a passion that characterised the culture of Brazilians who step onto the ground to be happy. Brazilian football stars like Pelé, who gave a mood and method to football by playing like the samba dancer, transformed it into the Beautiful Game in which social ethos mixes with sports skills.
When the world cup action moved from South Africa to Brazil in 2014, the Brazilians first staged protests against big spending for stadiums when the country needed money to feed the poor. But as the event began, the country welcomed fans from around the world, wrapping them with their tropical warmth. Only once before had Brazil staged the world cup, two years after the end of World War II. Brazilians who have memories of the 1950 World Cup recall 200,000 people attending a match inside the famous Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro.
With protests at the centre of the country' world cup preparations, Brazillians used football to highlight the vast gap between the rich and poor, sometimes with art exhibitions having anti-football focus. In one such exhibition near the Ipanema beach in Rio, Brazilian artist Renato Velasco led a group show, titled Anti-football, to bring attention to the travails of the poor through the popular sport. Painting an unenviable narrative of sports and society, the exhibition showed a No.10 jersey (worn by Ronaldinho) with a soiled one side and a shining another. There was a football with mud and gold on each half and an empty bottle of the country-made Brazilian liquor of cachaca resting beside a bottle of Coca-Cola.
Petropolis, the architecture-rich former imperial capital of Brazil, was earlier known as a football-shy city. It changed colours in the last decade when its new wax museum added a figure of Pelé to its collection of kings, heads of state and inventors. Brazilians tried to make their own vuvuzela, a world cup replica with a built-in noisemaker, but it was soon forgotten. But another cultural invention, the leather-and-feather peteca in Brazilian flag colours of yellow and green, tossed back and forth between two players like a shuttle caught on, even hosting a mini peteca world cup under the giant Christ the Redeemer statue. As the peteca feathers flew past in the air, the participating "national" teams showed how different cultures can come together through sports. For Drogba, the first African to score a goal against Brazil in a world cup, the peteca players would have made another perfect picture postcard.
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