The great agony of the World Cup, for its most ardent fans, stems from its scarcity, like if Christmas came only every four years.
That gap between tournaments — mulling missed chances, craving the high of competition, awaiting the opportunity to do it all again — can feel interminable.
So imagine the angst of those forced to wait even longer than that.
In New York, they are everywhere: soccer fans from around the globe enduring decades without the pleasure of seeing their teams on the biggest stage of the world’s most beloved sport.
But there is only so much one can take. This month, a mass exhalation will ripple through the five boroughs, as the expansion of the tournament from 32 teams to 48 has blown open the doors of the World Cup to a crop of debutantes and otherwise long-absent nations.
Consider Uzbekistan, a soccer-crazed country with an equally fanatical diaspora, much of it concentrated in South Brooklyn, where news of the team’s first-ever qualification was met with elation.
“We’ve been waiting for years,” said Abdumalik Ahmedov, the president of Mahalla USA, a community organization supporting Uzbek immigrants. “Everyone has excitement in their hearts.”
Jordanians and Cape Verdeans and Curaçaoans, the three other first-timers, will be relishing the newness of this moment, too. And then there are the Haitians, Congolese, Norwegians and others for whom the World Cup spotlight, until this year, had faded into a decades-old memory.
A spot in the tournament has awakened a dormant sense of soccer pride for each community. Now, across the city, lifetimes of waiting have given way to flurries of action, as long-suffering fans aim to extract the maximum from this moment, to make memories that will only need to sustain them, hopefully, for no more than four years.
‘So Many Norwegians’
Brooklynites may act as if they’ve seen everything, but a Viking ship cruising through the streets of Bay Ridge one sunny afternoon last month naturally turned some heads.
The ship — actually a wooden parade float atop a 14-foot trailer — was the handiwork of Sporting Club Gjøa, a fraternal organization in the area, and one of the centerpieces of the 73rd annual Norwegian Day parade, which registered only a modest footprint while winding its way through the sleepy neighborhood.
“Back in the day, it was so much bigger — so many Norwegians,” said Tanja Bjornson, 50, a club member, who helped lead the pack in an ornate, traditional dress known as a bunad.
The area, once home to tens of thousands of first- and second-generation Norwegian Americans in the middle of the 20th century, has evolved. Connections to the home country faded. Families moved away.
“When Nordic Delicacies closed, that’s when you knew it was over,” said Kristoffer Roggemann, 44, of Fort Greene, referring to a local food shop that closed a decade ago.
But Gjøa, like the parade, has held on by a slender thread, and there is hope for some revival this summer.
Mr. Roggemann, a third-generation Norwegian American whose children play for one of Gjøa’s youth soccer teams, agreed with other paradegoers that the country’s first World Cup appearance in 28 years had given the community a jolt.
After the parade, hundreds of people made their way to Gjøa’s clubhouse in Sunset Park. The charmingly tattered building — flanked now by a Chinese karaoke joint on one side and a Chinese auto body shop on the other — filled up with accordion music and loud conversation. The newly crowned Miss Norway New York waved from a little stage.
On the walls hung plaques from the club’s earliest sporting triumphs, including a tug-of-war championship from 1917. A trophy case was filled with soccer memorabilia dating back a century.
Jimmy Svendsen, who started playing for Gjøa when he was 5, said the soccer program now proudly reflected the present-day diversity of Brooklyn more than any singular heritage.
“But I jokingly say blond children get a discount,” he said.
Mr. Svendsen, 60, said the crowd was the largest he had seen in the clubhouse in 10 years. He hoped it augured well for the days ahead. The club had recently purchased additional televisions and planned to host viewing parties during the tournament.
Among the younger people with a blossoming curiosity about the community was John Ostensen, 22, of Staten Island, whose paternal grandparents were from Norway. He had wandered into the clubhouse with his family after the parade, almost on a whim, while wearing the national team jersey of Erling Haaland, the country’s biggest soccer star.
In other areas of his life as a New Yorker, he said, wearing the soccer uniform of a small Nordic country had felt “almost random.” But on the parade route and inside the clubhouse, where countless others wore the same shirt, it felt like a membership card for a select group.
“The team is bringing Norwegian people together in this country,” he said, “and it’s cool to see.”
The party bubbled on as he spoke, though there was a brief pause in the music as someone grabbed the microphone to make an announcement.
“Ladies and gentleman,” the person said, “the Gjøa float won best float at the parade!”
That it was basically the only float that day seemed to matter little. The room filled up with cheers and applause, and the merriment began anew.
‘A Great Summer to be Haitian’
On a balmy afternoon last month in Jamaica, Queens, a pair of semiprofessional local soccer teams — each owned by, and mostly composed of, Haitian immigrants — squared off in a hotly anticipated match.
But for all the supposed enmity between Osner’s FC and NYC Haiti United FC — bragging rights in their Brooklyn community were on the line — they were in agreement on one thing: delight over Haiti’s first World Cup appearance in 52 years.
“I just turned 40, and now I’m going to watch my country playing in a World Cup?” said Walkin Joseph, the sporting director of Osner’s. “I don’t have any words.”
Heat radiated from the artificial turf field. The rattle of trains from the Long Island Rail Road punctured the outer-borough calm. A small crowd had formed in the stands, and though many of the players were arriving directly from their day jobs, the action was lively from the start.
Among the spectators was Jean Baptiste Joseph, 44, who was born in Jacmel, Haiti, and moved as a teenager to Brooklyn, where he eventually starred on the soccer team at St. Francis College. He works now as an analyst for the Department of Parks & Recreation but remains close to the game, describing it as a beacon for homesick Haitians in the city.
“With soccer, it’s like they can take Haiti and bring it to Brooklyn,” he said.
The action paused on the field as officials monitored reports of lighting in the area, and as if to prove Mr. Joseph’s point, the opposing goalkeepers, old friends from Haiti, wandered to midfield to embrace and chat. They had grown up and played soccer together in Port-au-Prince and had not seen each other for years since leaving home.
Haitians everywhere are immensely proud of their World Cup team. The ongoing turmoil in the country had left the national team without access to any sort of home stadium during their qualification campaign. And still they made it.
“The country is going through a lot of things right now,” Mr. Joseph said, “and they count on soccer to be a major relief.”
The mood in Queens was still anxious, though, and the referees eventually called off the game, sending the players scurrying away as the first droplets of rain began to fall.
Ambling toward the parking lot in disappointment was Duhamel Mimy, 33, the captain of Osner’s FC. The game was being broadcast online, he said, and many of his friends had planned to watch.
But talk turned to the World Cup, and Mr. Mimy’s mood lifted. Aside from his commitments to the team, he helps run a party promotion company with a group of friends. Their Haitian night club events, he said, were “always, always, always crazy.” The ones they had planned for the World Cup would be crazier still.
The sky in Queens was growing dark. A massive downpour was only moments away. But Mr. Mimy was now smiling.
“It’s a great summer to be Haitian,” he said.
‘This Is a Battle Dance’
Six musicians hammered out a hypnotic groove inside a subterranean Manhattan rehearsal space one night last month. Five dancers gyrated nearby.
The hour was late. The music was joyous. But the pressure in the room was palpable.
The Democratic Republic of Congo’s first World Cup match in five decades was fast approaching, and Nkumu Katalay, a Congolese band leader from the Bronx, had been tapped by the government on short notice to stage performances outside each of the team’s group stage games in Houston, in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Atlanta.
“If we’re not killing every transition, we sound like a bunch of kids playing!” Mr. Katalay, 45, yelled to his bandmates early in the session.
Moments earlier, he had been verbally sparring in the lobby with Tima Karaga, a dancer and choreographer, as only close collaborators can. Mr. Katalay, who moved from Kinshasa to Harlem when he was 15, tried to articulate his vision for a dance, scatting and beat boxing and emitting a jumble of conceptual buzzwords. Ms. Karaga, 24, stared at him blankly, telling him she had no idea what he was talking about.
And still, once in the room, things began to coalesce.
“This is a battle dance, so you’ve got to be aggressive with it,” Ms. Karaga said to her dancers. “You haven’t been to a World Cup in 52 years, and you’re coming for a war.”
The rumba beat charged ceaselessly ahead. The dancers’ foreheads were soon dappled with sweat. They laughed as they moved, stomping through their routine again and again.
“When you’re moving your waist like that, you have to be happy,” said Ms. Karaga, a second-generation Gambian American, who fell in love with Congolese music and dance under Mr. Katalay’s tutelage. “You can’t wiggle your waist and be upset.”
If the World Cup for some communities was occasioning a period of self-reflection and fellowship, these Congolese performers saw a chance to orient themselves outward, to introduce their culture to others, to strut a bit under a spotlight, for once.
Congo has felt largely anonymous to mainstream Americans, Mr. Katalay said, and was often overshadowed by other African nations. The narratives foisted upon the continent have been suffocatingly negative, and the recent ebola outbreak is only the latest depressing development.
“We have an opportunity to show the positive side of Congo, the beautiful side of it,” said Joné Mwape, 23, one of the dancers. “In our fan base, the football comes with dancing and music, so it’s a chance to showcase it all.”
Back in the rehearsal room, the group’s reservation time was running out. Mr. Katalay, gripping his guitar, feeling something approaching satisfaction, asked to run things again from the top.
“You ready?” he called out to the dancers.
“Are we ready?” Ms. Karaga replied, with playful pugnacity. “We’re waiting on you guys! We’re tight. We’re locked in.”
Andrew Keh covers New York City and the surrounding region for The Times.
The post New York City’s Most Patient Soccer Fans Are Ready for the Party appeared first on New York Times.
