06/22/2002
Adrian Winnubst greeted me at the door when I went to the Black Forest
Restaurant to watch the soccer game Friday, but he warned me not to pester
the Germans.
"It's not a good time right now," he whispered. "Wait until halftime."
Feeling a little like a child permitted to sit at the adults' table on
the condition of being seen and not heard, I humbly took a seat, trying
not to scrape the chair legs on the wooden floor.
On the way to the restaurant, I had been hearing festive live radio
reports from a Greenville Avenue bar, where U.S. soccer fans were packed
wall to wall, hooting and swilling beer despite the ungodly 6:30 a.m.
kickoff. Anybody expecting to find a like-minded crowd of German fans
hoisting tankards and singing "Lili Marlene," however, was in for a
letdown.
Sportswise, the heavily ballyhooed USA-Germany quarterfinal World Cup match was an event of major significance for Dallas' small community of German expatriates. The gravity of the occasion was marked not by the audience's exuberance, but by its intensity.
For my part, I had the perverse advantage of having only a vague notion of what was going on in the game. I'm a near-perfect specimen of the European stereotype of a clueless American fan: I still regard "football" as the grand pageant of marching bands and cheerleaders and huge linebackers, and "soccer" as a game played by suburban children.
Thus, I was able to gauge the progress of the game based entirely on the reaction of the observers.
The contrast, from a cultural perspective, was startling. A knot of U.S. fans clustered at one end of the restaurant, gazing at an auxiliary TV set propped on wine cases. At hopeful moments they leapt to their feet and shouted encouragement; in despair they slapped their foreheads, groaned, and excoriated the referees.
At the other end were the German fans, their eyes fixed like lasers on another TV propped in a niche next to a cuckoo clock. Compared with the American fans, they looked as if they were sitting through a Kiwanis meeting.
When the going got tense, they leaned forward almost imperceptibly and gripped the arms of their chairs. When Germany scored in the first half, there was a scattering of polite applause. One guy woofed exactly twice and fell silent.
"Well, it's kind of difficult that you have to be jolly so early in the morning," a lawyer named Hans Heppe told me during halftime. "It's kind of strange that the World Cup comes at this hour."
He had a point. I suspect the liveliest fans in town were the ones whose Friday morning was an unbroken continuation from Thursday night.
Carsten Kruse, an executive for the Whole Foods grocery chain, became a U.S. citizen just last week. Soccerwise, however, he left his heart in Hamburg.
"I think that generally, in something like this, Northern Europeans are different from Americans. Not so – ah – cheerful," he said tactfully.
Goofy, you mean? I asked.
"Yes, that is a good word for it," he said, relieved that I said it first.
It was dawning on me that, for German fans, this game was extremely serious business. Hooting and hollering and drinking beer would have served only as distractions.
Their sober mien brought to mind a German athlete I saw several years ago while covering the Olympic luge competition.
He had just won the gold medal, the world's most prestigious award in the sport to which he had devoted his life. Reporters crowded around, demanding to know how he would celebrate: Go to Euro Disney? Bathe in champagne? Party like a rock star?
He mused silently for a moment, then answered matter of fact: "I will eat Bavarian sausages."
Well, to the victors go the sausages, if that's their preference. The German fussball team won its fans the right to celebrate as they see fit.
In this case, the fans offered up another round of applause, then politely lined up to pay their breakfast checks.
"Maybe we're just not naturally exuberant," said Carola Devallette, a German native who works for a Dallas oil firm. "But we enjoyed the game. I will have to try not to gloat at the office."
Just outside the front door, a woman I had seen watching the game was apparently comparing notes over a cellphone with a fellow fan. She spoke excitedly in German, the words tumbling out in a stream punctuated by laughter. Too overjoyed to stand still, she paced up and down the sidewalk, waving her free hand extravagantly as she talked.
There was celebration there, after all. There were exuberance and pride.
I just missed them in the translation.