Our Fair City

It seems the Honduras football team from Manchester narrowly lost the league championship to Brazil, a team centered in Nashua. They proudly carry the name of Manchester thoughout the region, proud of themselves, full of energy and commitment. The only thing is, they don't have a place to practice, and the community in general doesn't know who they are.


Ours is a city who has known who she is for a long time. She has baseball and American football, she has hockey, amateur theatre, art schools, and now things are changing. She was able to find a place in her self-understanding for slam poetry, which is a good thing, because her children are making a name for her in the slam world. But now, she's been totally blindsided by this Honduras thing.


Football? She thought she knew what football was about. She thought she had it covered. But here are these lean young fast-running men with their round ball running up and down the field, and she says, "me?" She says, "Are these mine?" They laugh and say "yes," but until now they never even knew how to talk to the Parks and Rec about how to reserve a field. So now they are asking, and now she is wondering. But not for long. Of course they are hers.


All those soccer moms and dads in the suburbs, that's not the kind of game they are playing here. It's football, and serious. The Hondurans play, and I've seen the Africans playing, too, and I don't know who all else. Some people say there isn't a well developed audience for soccer here in the United States. They say David Beckham had to come and help bring his kind of football into the mainstream. But nobody noticed: There's a big group of fans in the United States, but most of them are cheering for Mexico, most of them are speaking Spanish, and others of them are speaking French, Swahili, Portuguese, German, Italian, you-name-it.


Who needs to learn that world football is already a big sport in the United States? The people who already thought they knew who we were; the people in all the cities who thought they knew what was happening with their people.


Hello, Manchester (New Hampshire!) -- welcome to the world.