Filed under: European Soccer, US Soccer
It wasn’t just the stadiums in South Africa where you were subjected to the hideous drone of the vuvuzela. While Bafana Bafana was still in the tournament, the racket would begin at sunrise.
There was never a need to set the alarm — someone walking outside the hotel would take care of your wake-up call for you. Fans brought them to shopping malls. You’d hear them while sitting in a restaurant eating a meal.
Tens of thousands of vuvuzelas, when united in the rhythmic blowing that would occur about once each half at the World Cup, ravaged the ear drums. Talking to the person sitting next to you could be impossible. Escaping onto the stadium concourse, or even to the bathroom, didn’t always solve the problem.
For example, the toilets set up behind the media seating at Green Point Stadium in Cape Town were housed in trailers in areas accessible to fans, and several poked the plastic horns in through the little windows and sounded off, right in someone’s ear, while they were using the urinal.
The buzzing was the soundtrack of the World Cup, and for most it was tolerable because it was temporary and, we were told, part of South Africa’s unique soccer culture. But there were several signs of trouble — most notably that many foreign fans seemed to delight in taking up the custom and that many were buying boxes of the things to bring home from South Africa. Would the plague spread?
A few days after I returned from the World Cup, a D.C. United fan unleashed his vuvuzela a few feet from my right ear as we were walking toward RFK Stadium. I jumped like one of the recently-returned soldiers in a movie who hears a car backfire.
Enough is enough, it seems. On Wednesday, UEFA put its collective foot down and outlawed the vuvuzela at its matches, and American soccer may be close behind.
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Today on the Internet: If want to learn about making a living online, you owe it to yourself to learn how to make money on Amazon.
Thu, Sep 2, 2010
World Cup Headlines