Last night, only minutes after Viet Nam had defeated Indonesia to win the Gold Medal in football after thirty years of trying in the Southeast Asia Games, I was on the streets of Ha Noi on the back of a motorbike headed from the West Lake neighborhood of a friend’s house where I had been invited to watch the match, to my residence on Yet Kieu.
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| Streets explore in euphoria as nation won football gold. |
Already the streets were filled with people, and traffic could barely move at a snail’s pace. Thousands of people of all ages were lined up on the side of the street giving high fives to passing motorists and those of us on motorbikes. Some people beat on metal pots and pans with wooden spoons as if they were drums. Some people danced to music someone played loudly over an intercom.
The air was filled with flags held up by people in passing cars and trucks, a red and yellow wave that rose and fell in the hands of people standing on the open seats of convertibles. Even on the motorbike it was impossible sometimes to move because there were so many people in the streets. So many screaming, happy people blowing loud horns and smiling and pumping their fists in the air.
Yet it never felt dangerous, and I didn’t see one unhappy person, let alone anyone who was angry. It was such a deeply joyful celebration that as we sped up and slowed down and sped up again I began to realize that this was not just about football, and watching the throngs of people surge around me, the thousands of people really, I thought too about Nguyen Cong Hoan’s great short-story Tinh Than the duc (The Spirit of Sports).
In the story, which takes place in 1930’s French Colonized Ha Noi, the French decide to organize a soccer match between themselves and a Vietnamese team. Once the day of the much-advertised match comes, there’s no one at the stadium, no fans. The Vietnamese, under French-Colonial rule, struggled economically. They didn’t have the luxury of taking a day off from work to watch a soccer match held hours away from their homes, and no transportation.
The angry French authorities ordered the police to arrest people on the streets and force them to attend the match, the only reason why anyone showed up to watch that day. Amazing how things have changed in less than ninety years. A wise man once wrote that to understand America, you must understand baseball. The same thing can be said about Viet Nam and football.
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| Fans are ecstatic as Vietnam fullfilled SEA Games dream. |
Viet Nam has a great young team, that’s clear. Now that they are also blessed with a gifted and brilliantly defensive coach, there’s no telling how far this team could go. As a team they are a marvel of balance, with everyone clearly understanding their role as team member but willing also to step up when the need arises outside of their positions; we saw many such plays around goal when the goal keeper had been drawn to one side and the ball was free for example. I believe their true strength throughout the Games however was their concentrated focus on defense, and even though they scored first four, and then in the final, three goals, unusually high for a final’s score, it was their defense that gave them the Championship.
A group of gifted athletes who somehow come together on the same team with a dream coach and make a miracle happen is the sports’ end of things, and however satisfying and exciting that may be, it is not the whole story, and the joyfulness that filled the streets last night was not just about football. It cut much deeper than that, to the heart of Viet Nam’s national pride. Those thousands of people on the streets were not simply celebrating a 3-0 SEA Game’s Gold Medal win, they were celebrating what it meant to be Vietnamese in the way of their commitment to excellence, their loyalty, their steadfastness, and a personal pride that ran so deep people were brought closer together.
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| Bruce Weigl (3rd in the left) with his friends in Hanoi |
Viet Nam’s history is a history of foreign invasion over the course of more than a thousand years. There are many sad stories to remember from those invasions and the long days of troubled skies over Viet Nam, and there are few if any antidotes to overcome those memories, but last night a group of young people, full of love for their country, put their hearts on the line and brought home a great victory against a history of loss and suffering, and peoples’ hearts were raised up. That’s not just football.
