Email from New Hampshire The Pain of Winning By Pedro Pereira
Supporting a sports team is a form of suffering. Especially when the team has a tendency to get so close to glory but not quite reach it. Yet, sometimes the gods of sport take pity on long-suffering fans and hand us a reason to rejoice. Such is the case this year with my favorite soccer team in the world, Lisbon’s Sporting Clube de Portugal. Typically Sporting ends the season in second, third or fourth place, but this year won the national championship, its first in 19 years. With three more matches to dispute, Sporting, on May 11, defeated Boavista Futebol Clube, a team from the northern Portuguese city of Porto. The win gave Sporting enough points to make it mathematically impossible for a rival to win the title. The May 11 victory wasn’t without panicky moments. Sporting players had over a dozen shots on goal, but managed to hit the back of the net only once. And as any soccer enthusiast will tell you, a 1-0 score is hell. Sportinguistas have waited for glory since their last championship in 2001/2002 season. Nineteen years may not seem like much if you’re a Mariners or Chargers fan but, understand, Sporting is part of the triumvirate of clubs that have won all but two of Portugal’s soccer leagues. The other two habitual winners are Sport Lisboa e Benfica, cheered globally by a madly enthusiastic diaspora of fans, and the almost-as-famous Futebol Clube do Porto. All three have global followings, but as much as it pains me, Benfica has the biggest. Like Father, Like Son You see, Sporting and Benfica are classic rivals, with stadiums less than two miles apart in the Portuguese capital. As fate would have it, four days after wining the title,
Sporting fell to Benfica in an exuberant 4-3 match. It was Sporting’s first defeat all season, thwarting fans’ invictus dreams. You know rivals, they’re always spoiling the fun. No one was happier about Sporting’s title win than my dad. It was an early present for his 89th birthday. My love of the greenand-whites was passed on from the old man. As a wee boy, I trailed him to soccer matches all over the island of São Miguel, Azores. Dad served as president of the local soccer club, the Sporting-affiliated Sporting Clube Ideal, from 1968 to 1971. Kitted in the same green-and-white jerseys and black shorts of the mother club, Ideal crawled around tortuous island roads in a diesel bus to face off rivals. Back then, highways were nonexistent so a 20-minute trip today would take two hours or more. The saving grace was that the roads, which mostly hugged the ragged coast, gave us spectacular views of an indigo ocean separated from lush-green mountains by ash-colored sand and stern basalt cliffs. Lined with hydrangeas and hyacinths, these roads cut through cliffs and 11
