Sardinia, 1990. The Fool on the hill.
Hey, who’s got World Cup Fever? Neither do I. I’m more concerned about how the first-place Braves could drop two out of three to the Arizona Diamondbacks and their putrid bullpen. But that’s just me.
Apparently, all the world loves the World Cup and there’s no escaping the fusillade of stories coming out of South Africa for the next solid month. A sampling of honest-to-goodness, actual headlines so far:
“English Hooligans Arrested in Early Morning Raid” (This is before the event has even begun.)
“Greece Players Have Money Stolen From Hotel” (As if their country doesn’t have enough money problems back home.)
“Referees Learning English Swear Words” (They should hire Joe Biden as a consultant.)
My only brush with the World Cup came in 1990 when it was played in Italy. I was working for Turner Sports at the time and my assignment was to go to Italy a couple months prior to the games and bring back stories about the country. Not the games, just the people, the culture, and so on. You know, quirky stuff.
I was dispatched with my cameraman, Steve Shepard, on an itinerary of my choosing. My marching orders were along the lines of: “Go wherever you want to go, do whatever you want to do, stay as long as you want. Oh, and since Michelin is sponsoring this travelogue, you’ll have use of a Porsche convertible for part of the time.”
Once I got over the draconian restrictions, I went to work. The response was positive, for the most part. Jack Craig of the Boston Globe wrote, “Ryden’s light touch also was a consistent brightener during the World Cup telecasts on TNT. Why can’t the networks get someone like that?”
But as they say, you can’t please everyone. My favorite letter came from a viewer who, commenting on our World Cup coverage, spat, “The only possible drawback was the short travelogue done by a man who typified the very worst in an Ugly American, an image we have all been trying to overcome. He was in such bad taste, spitting out cheese, pretending it was hard to learn the word for cheese, making fun of an Italian family who took him in for dinner, etc. The coverage was more of him in a car making sappy jokes than any coverage of a wonderful country. And to think he was paid to travel all over the country. Very sad indeed, and an image we need to overcome.”
Usually, you let those kinds of letters roll off your back. But I just felt, in this case, that I had to respond. So I started, “Dear Mom…”
Actually, the letter was—wait for it—unsigned. The source of his seething rage? I can only assume it was the piece I used to wrap up my two and a half weeks in Italy. Watch the video and you be the judge:
For more insults to Italy and everything World Cup, I’ll show you a few more samples of what we did over there in upcoming posts. Please try not to hate me.