Dear Will:

When we moved to Orange in 1998, we owned a single, 13-inch color TV with rabbit ears. For the first 12 years of our marriage it served us well, both as an entertainment medium and as a symbol of the importance of television in our lives. Unfortunately, tucked in among the hills of Orange we found it virtually impossible to get television reception through old-fashioned , over-the-air technology. And so it was with reluctance that we phoned TimeWarner and, for the first time ever, we signed up for cable, or I should say, the cheapest cable possible: local channels and not much else. It’s the less-than-basic package they refuse to advertise and will sell to you—reluctantly—only if you ask.

Which is to say, the only TV programs we get at our house are mostly unwatchable. (That may also be true if we got the Gazillion Channel Package, but we would never know.) We don’t get HBO or FSN or even Animal Planet for that matter. Its just UPN, ABC, and several others which are incomprehensible even with the subtitles.

So how is it, you might wonder, that my seven-year-old sports nut, Seth, is in the grips of World Cup Fever? Since we don’t get ESPN, most of the games are available to us only in Spanish on Univision. And Seth doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish. In spite of it all, there he is at 6 a.m.—watching Lithuania versus Bora Bora or whatever—and trying to explain to me why the officiating is so bad. At the same time, he has developed a curious vocabulary: falta, tiro de esquina, fuera de lugar, and the one word we all understand, ¡gooooooooooooooool!

What I find so interesting is how this event has begun to introduce Seth to other lands and other cultures. (Do you know where Trinidad & Tobago is? I didn’t. Seth does.) It’s not just that the announcers are speaking in a foreign tongue, but he gets a chance to see the passion of the spectacle which isn’t present at all in the United States. When I was on my mission in Uruguay, I witnessed firsthand the way in which the sport both divided the country (Nacional and Peñarol were the Yankees and Red Sox of their pro soccer league) and united it (in international competition anyway). I even found myself out working one night when Uruguay won the Gold Cup soccer tournament, and all 1.5 million citizens of Montevideo (or so it seemed) streamed into my neighborhood to celebrate. It was as if I had stepped into a completely different universe where I watched, agog, as the citizenry joined in song, deliriously happy, united by a silly game.

Or perhaps not so silly. After all, the World Cup brings people from all over the world into close proximity and forces them, for a couple of hours anyway, to give some thought to another place and people. I witnessed, for example, a moment at the conclusion of one of these matches in which players from opposing teams exchanged jerseys in a traditional display of post-game sportsmanship. One of the players noticed blood on his shirt—the result, no doubt, of rough play—and then good-naturedly insisted on giving his opponent a clean, unstained one instead. It was a marvelous moment of international goodwill, and I was pleased to have Seth see it.

I’m even pleased to have him watching in Spanish inasmuch as we now find ourselves living in an increasingly multi-cultural, bilingual city. Watching a game is helping him to resist the ethnocentric tendencies to which we all fall prey, and if we can begin that process at seven instead of seventeen, I’m all for it. One of the things that the gospel of Jesus Christ is supposed to do is make us “no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens” (Ephesians 2:19). I just never imagined that less-than-basic cable could contribute to that end.

PW