soccer and railroads

I am meeting with Prof. Allen Guttmann of Amherst College, who is sports scholar of sorts this tomorrow. I am looking forward to it. My goal tonight is to put together some questions, but I also hope this conversation flows organically.

I have been skimming through two of his books: Games and Empires and From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports. He has an interesting chapter in Games and Empires on the origins of soccer. I guess it is strange that I think of soccer as a “latino” thing, when it’s really a British thing. Soccer really took off when the British introduced it to Argentina while they were building the railroads. I remember reading 100 Years of Solitude and tearing up a little at this passage: 

At that moment the town was shaken by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration. During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laying ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they thought it was some new trick of the gypsies, coming back with whistles and tambourines and their age-old and discredited song and dance about the qualities of some concoction put together by journeyman geniuses of Jerusalem. But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureliano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late. The innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo.