Paris '98: Excrement and the World Cup

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Summer Wildcat Bradford Senning

During the first round of World Cup matches I flashed my Wildcat press pass to the guards at the Park of Princes on the outskirts of Paris. Moments later, I discovered if you smile enough and quote a few lines of Baudelaire or Rimbaud the police won't apprehend you for trying to gain admittance to the world's most popular sports event with a press ID that looks like a Cracker Jack prize.

Needless to say, I covered the World Cup from the fringes-in Parisian bars and cafes, outside the city hall and on the Champs-Elysees where French defensiveman Marcel Desailly said, "You can really get a sense of the impact." So I knew I was in the right place to cover this here sports event and watch the French team cruise stunningly to its first World Cup victory.

That's the power of the idea of nation during the World Cup. Outside the Metro stop at the Champs-Elysees, I found clusters of supporters in colored jerseys, some sporting musical instruments native to their homAelands and others singing songs at the top of their collective voices.

At the center of Paris is the city hall where the government set up a TV for those on the fringe who knew they wanted to be among crowds of people and knew they couldn't afford tickets to the games. It was the perfect place for a reporter to cover the match, among the true French supporters who paint their faces and wear the jerseys of their favorite players just to watch the match on a big screen TV.

I should mention that I also watched the American team with the American fans-fans as deficient as the team. During the match against Germany, the American supporters arose from the Metro station at the City Hall like corpses, bowing their heads solemnly toward the screen as their team suffered a stringent lashing, and singing outdated and absurdly inappropriate songs such as "When the Saints Go Marching In." The only thing that can be said for the American fans and the team is that they left as quietly as they came.

The real story was Team France. Its fans converged at the square of the city hall in force, taunting the police with flags of the revolution clutched in their hands or painted on their faces. During the first game, I met a guy named Pascal. His predilection was to urinate in mass quantities. But he was in the middle of a city where public toilets are difficult to find and they cost money, about the price of an arcade game in the States. Instead of expending the francs and energy to find one, he pulled out his penis in the middle of the crowd and let all the digested wine flow into the public square.

When I mingled my urine with his we became "piss brothers" he said, which I guess was a gesture similar to our two nations' collaboration in the American Revolution - except that I was an American joining in the French effort. Not only was I relaxing the relations between countries but I found that I was obliging a superstition that the French practice with regard to bodily excretions.

It's an institutionalized good thing-fecal matter and the organisms that produce it.

Whether it was the influence of merde or mine and Pascal's version of this theme, pooling our nations' effluences into a single cause, France won its first match and each subsequent match. I watched the semifinal match on a television hung from the ceiling in a bar on the Champs-Elysees. A tension overtook us when, for an entire minute, France was down by one goal against Croatia. Bodies leaned unidirectionally as a pass was made to defender Lilian Thuram and he took the ball upfield and scored to tie the game at 1-1, one minute after the Croatian goal.

Thuram would score a second goal, sending the French team to the finals and the fans to the streets.

Four days later, France would win. I would be in the same place. We were chanting something else now, though to the same tune: "We are the champion." The Arc de Triomphe, lit up with words from a laser beam-splitter, told us what the condition was, "We are the champion," and every newspaper the following morning had pictures and words like "France is the champion."

I believe all the citizens of Paris were on the Champs-Elysees that night celebrating a victory caused as much by the support of their voices echoing through alleys as the two goals scored by a previously unsung French defender. And this is what makes all this excrement talk relevant. France is founded upon a monarchical system of government which, after 1,300 years of power, was subverted by a rabble of citizens who believed in their own momentum, the validity of their lower class values in a ruling system. For one to say that the match was decided on the field, and not by proletariat forces, mugging their beers, painting their faces and stepping in merde, is to deny a whole country's methodical approach to national issues. This World Cup was impacted, as teammates Marcel Desailly and Didier Deschamps agreed, by forces "outside the stadium." And that is where I could be found, a Wildcat for France, drinking beers not to get drunk, but to have a little bit of lucky excrescence with which to lead the common cause toward victory.

Bradford Senning,a senior majoring in American literature and creative writing, is studying in France for the summer.