A waiter I know is a Copt, so I am disposed to like him; he already has enough problems. But he asked me if I would be following “the mondial.” I didn’t know what he meant, so he explained: the World Cup. I felt my affection draining away.

This year the World Cup took over the city. There was always a nest of soccer-friendly bars on lower West Broadway, where the tunnel people cross it on their return to Jersey. But this year bar owners and restaurateurs citywide caught on to the good thing. Which of course was a bad thing. Door and windows open to the early summer air. Television blaring onto the street, as if it were the street’s business. The foreign flags, like little U.N. Plazas, or some hellacious nautical distress signal. The cheers, for the continuous burst of non-events. The drunks. This was the year the Mondial came to New York. Ola ola!

I actually like the flag of Brazil (except for its mark-of-the-beast slogan, Ordem e Progresso): the cooling palette, the global night sky. I like the flag of Brazil — except, this is not Brazil. We run so fast, we kick the ball!

It is not as if we lacked for sports of our own. It’s not as if we were bushmen or Benedictines or Buddhist monks and we needed a little vicarious exercise and sublimated war-making in our diet. We have Yankees and Mets, football (real football) in the Meadowlands, basketball and hockey at the Garden, tennis at Flushing Meadows, the horses at Aqueduct. We have TV channels and radio stations devoted to sports pedantry, as intricate as negotiating throw-weights during the Cold War. Our governor calls in as Dave from Harlem. Our sports stars are full-fledged celebrities, ingesting drugs, copulating with actresses, brokering multimillion-dollar salaries, endorsements, and alimonies. So is what we need above all, even more than national health care or the incorporation of gun rights via the due-process clause, David Beckham and Posh Spice? Ola! Ola!

It is not as if we were uncosmopolitan. Half our baseball players are from the Dominican Republic; if there is an ambulatory seven-footer in a yurt somewhere, the NBA will find him. Diversity, c’est nous. Nor is it true that soccer is the world’s sport. Look at Asia: east, south, and Soviet. They all field teams, I suppose, but their real sports are, respectively, gambling, cricket, and alcoholism. But for all those Americans who won’t be happy until beer and gas are served in liters, the rest of us cannot demonstrate our humanity until we embrace soccer. We kick the ball so fast, we run, we run.

Maybe it would be better if something ever happened. There is constant activity, but nothing ever happens, does it? An old friend of mine, unfortunately a soccer pod person — though her son plays tennis, so she is not lost utterly — tried explaining once why nothing ever happens. The Italians, it seems, invented a technique of defense in the Fifties that means . . . nothing ever happens. It sounded to me as if she were saying that the sport was really interesting until it stopped being. We toot the vuvuzela!

Faking injuries: That is interesting. I ran across your shoelace, but I have fallen on my omoplate, it hurts so. See how many minutes of time it takes me to get up. I know, I know — hockey brawls and spitballs and steroids and all the rest of it. Where there are sports, there must be sportsmanship, because there will be violence and cheating. Is it that the cheap melodrama of soccer cheating somehow matches the hysteria of the rhythm of play? We toot the vuvuzelas all together! Blow, blow!

Ninety minutes of something almost but never happening. We kick the ball, we kick the ball with our heads, now we are running, ola! We shoot! But the man of them kick the ball thirty yard the other way, we run back. Repeat eighty times, with faked injuries. This is what we are supposed to inflict on ourselves?

One of our very favorite places is not that far from the old soccer bars, though it seems miles away. Like all the best places it draws a nook around itself. It is an Italian restaurant, not a made-man place with heavy cutlery and red sauce, but sleek and chic, with brick-oven pizza crust thin as paper. The owner wears open-necked shirts, slacks, and trim shoes, each the color of a different flavor of sorbet. His tables spill onto the sidewalk and look, across the narrow street, at a row of ginkgo trees and their shivering leaves, behind them a playground with a hoop and a wall where the residents of this mini-country shoot baskets or hit tennis balls. In the midst of the Mondial we went for an evening of ease and found the bar surmounted by a television, a monstrous shouting toad, before which were ranged the owner, his staff, and their customers, listening to the distant morons tooting and yelling while the homunculi ran and kicked. We turned our backs and flexed our necks and traps and stared glumly at the now-meaningless street. Paradise lost. Ola!

This is my country. The pitcher holds off the late-inning rally; the stadium roars; he pays no mind, he tends to the task at hand. Plumes of breath, torn away in the wind; swollen opposed shoulders, almost touching, as if conferring; the last game of the year, the goal-line stand. The red horse makes his move, it’s as if all the others had stopped, his jockey tucks the whip in, unused. Scraping Reeboks, shouted syllables; the pick-up teams play for the chance to play again; along the wire fence another team waits to replace one or the other. My trainer’s son made an interception, it is the first in the history of the league, they didn’t play football in the islands where my trainer grew up, he is thrilled.

No Ola! from me.