Email from New Hampshire Pedro Pereira

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.

Sportinguistashave 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

pastures where black-and-white Holsteins added splashes of indolent beauty.

For a boy of three or four, these outings were a huge thrill, providing a veritable assembly line of life-long memories.

Don’t ask me about specific victories or losses (or draws; this is soccer after all). It’s been too long. But I remember sitting with dad at the front of the bus, the players paired up in rows of seats behind us, trading barbs, telling jokes, singing, psyching themselves –and congratulating or consoling each other after a match.

In my childhood, I saw the Lisbon-based Sporting play only once, in 1979. The team flew in for an exhibition game against Ideal. We braced – and hoped – for a blowout. Maybe 8-0 or 12-0! We all had bets going.

When Sporting scored only twice and left to catch a flight to Madeira for another exhibition, we despaired. It never occurred to us we were being disloyal to our local team, whose joy and disappointments we shared much more intimately. We followed Sporting on TV, the jersey loops coming across as fuzzy light gray and fuzzy dark gray. But with Ideal, we could smell the grass in the pitch and hear the ragged breaths of the players up close.

I again saw Sporting in person decades later, in 2010, when the team played an exhibition against London’s Tottenham Hotspur at Red Bull Stadium in New Jersey. It was a 2-2 draw. Two days earlier, Sporting had defeated Manchester City 2-0 on the same pitch.

Eight years later I saw Sporting play at its home stadium of Alvalade against rival Benfica. Talk about anti-climactic. Benfica attacked more, but never managed to score. Neither did Sporting. It was a dull 0-0 draw. Did I mention that most soccer games are low-scoring? No matter. I was there for a derby between two of the oldest soccer rivals in the world. Success by another name

Sporting’s accomplishment this year is a kind of sporting miracle. The team was considered seriously hobbled as the season kicked off. It had lost seasoned players and its newly hired coach was young and short on experience. Still, Ruben Amorin (who rose to prominence as a player at Benfica) assembled a scrappy young squad, reaching deep into the club’s academy to find hungry new talent.

Now, for those who don’t know, Sporting’s academy usually appears somewhere on the list of the top five or 10 soccer academies in the world. It produced the prodigy that is Cristiano Ronaldo, arguably the best to ever play the game.

In a way, Sporting is a victim of its own success. The academy’s excellence often interferes with the team’s prospects of winning championships. Deep-pocket clubs from England, Spain, Italy and France keep a close eye on graduates, poaching them at the first opportunity. Such was the case with Ronaldo, who was scooped up by Manchester United after only one season with Sporting’s main squad.

Ronaldo, through his stunning systematic accumulation of soccer records over the years, has been a huge source of pride for sportinguistas. Though our team may win a championship only occasionally, no one can take Ronaldo’s phenomenal success from us.

Then again, it hasn’t been all bad for the team. Sporting has picked up several trophies in cup competitions since 2002, but of course fans value the league championship most of all. It will be a while before the sheen of victory wears off – well, at least until the first match Sporting loses after the new season starts in August. We may have to wait another 19 years for glory. But it will be worth it. Just as it was this time. Just ask my dad.