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I was away for too long, cocooned in a country where football is
aberrantly called soccer. I got sucked in to one of the local games they refer
to as World Tournaments. How can Boston Celtics or LA Lakers be described as
World Champions when they never stepped out of the United States of America (not
even to Puerto Rico) to play another country? Same with the Indianapolis Colts
or the New Orleans Saint’s who were dubbed, world champions after winning the
Super Bowl in 2007 and 2009 respectively.

With balls freezing under my thermo-pants (trousers please)
every Super Bowl Sunday, I would go to Uncle Sunny Oboh’s house, a fellow
immigrant and lifelong supporter of the Washington Redskins and men who wear
women’s terelin, throw oblong cocoa pod-like leather with fat hands and call it
football. And none of us would have the balls to call a spade a spade, and
declare what Americans call football is known to the rest of the world as
handball. But that is America for you, they are the world and the rest of us
are the children.

Instead of screaming foul play, we’d fake excitement because how
else could we defrost the snow that had formed icicles in our homeland
memories?

When I first came back to Nigeria, I mistakenly called real
football soccer and a co-worker gave me an evil eye full of, “this is not
America, stupid”. I had forgotten that football was sacrosanct in Nigeria, like
religion, like opium; the people get so high on it and many get killed because
of a game of kicking a spherical piece of leather around for ninety minutes.
Before America’s myopia got me killed, I learned to correct my tongue,
repeating to myself many times, it’s not soccer, it’s football, sucker! And now
the World Cup fever has seized me like a New England winter, I wonder how I
could have forgotten football, something that had been woven so tightly into my
cultural upbringing?

To forget football is to forget my late father who would find
time despite his hectic schedule to watch me and friends play football with
oranges under my grandfather’s huge pear tree, and mediate when fights broke
out because football, whether by kids or adults, is a highly competitive game.
Or to forget my mother who was my doctor and physical therapist who nursed me
back to the next bruising game.

To forget football is to forget my senior brother, Osajele, who
bought me my first Felele out of his very first salary in life. I don’t
remember telling him thank you because I bolted out the door as soon as he
handed me the light weight ball and started screaming down the street like a
Holy Ghost possessed Pentecostal. I soon became the Pele and the king of boys
in my quarter and every one of them wanted to be my friend.

To forget football is to forget my PT teacher in primary school,
who gave me a long look on the field one day and said “Oyinbo you are too thin,
go and blacken the board for the next lesson”. Till today I still hate him more
than BODMAS. That Odemwingie guy could have been me, though my senior brother
would probably kill me first before allowing me to plait my hair. He would say,
“best footballer my foot – are you a woman? ” To forget football is to forget
my good friend, Okwy Okeke, who is so passionate about the game that he talks
about it like a first kiss, good wine or that very first love making that
lingers in one’s memory like a lick of honey in a bee-less country.

To forget football is to forget the one unifying universal
language, the hope that holds the world together as one. The single pot from
which we all drink without locking horns, where you do not hear expressions
like “geopolitical zone”, where Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Esan etc, has one heart
beating inside their Nigerian body.

To forget football is to forget our dictator, late Sani Abacha
and the days he had us on his killing noose. For a brief moment, the country
breathed peace during the 1994 World Cup until the Italians sent us packing, a
situation that was more painful than the hell Abacha was meting on Nigerians.
And hell broke loose again; such was the dictator’s negative vibe.

To forget football is to forget the recent history of our dear
beloved late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s ‘cabal-liers’, who found football
important enough to include in their scripted speech from the spirit world:
“I’d also like to use this opportunity to wish our national team the Super
Eagles success in our Nation’s Cup matches in Angola…blah blah”. And the Eagles
did not come home with the cup, because lies bring bad luck.

To forget football is to forget that we now have a president
whose name is Goodluck, a man who ascended the throne despite the evil machinations
of political Maradonas. And this is why I am wishing our national team, the
Super Eagles, good luck (not through BBC). May they bring us the ultimate cup,
the true mark of world champion, no matter the tricks and maneuvering of the
other teams’ cabalists.