How to Cheer for America

Updated at 12:36 p.m. ET on November 18, 2022

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When I was 6, my mother missed the deadline to register me for the Pop Warner football league. She needed something that would get me to do a lot of running outside the house, so that I didn’t do as much running inside of the house. A colleague suggested soccer. It wasn’t a sport my mom had considered: Not many Black kids in Louisiana played soccer in 1994.

I started playing in a recreational league at our local park, practicing twice a week with a team coached by two of my teammates’ dads, men who were learning the contours of the game alongside us, but who insisted that the most important thing was enjoying ourselves.

By the time I was 9, I was completely enamored. That summer, the World Cup was held in France, and games were played each day for weeks. My parents wanted to get more acquainted with the world’s most popular sport. As I remember it, though, they didn’t actually sit down and watch many of the games. It was more like they thought we might all learn about the sport through osmosis, as it played in the background and they moved about the house making lunches and washing dishes. At first, if I’m honest, I didn’t watch much either. I didn’t have the attention span to sit through an entire soccer match on television, a sport whose pacing was so different from the American football that usually played on the television in our house.

[Franklin Foer: A spectacle of scoundrels]

But on occasion, seeking a reprieve from the summer heat and humidity outside, and drawn to the screen by the fervor with which the commentators were discussing the games, I did sit down and watch. And one day, holding a grilled-cheese sandwich wrapped in a paper towel, I saw a moment unfold on-screen that would stay with me forever.

1998

This was South Africa’s first time qualifying for the World Cup. The team, majority-Black and a hopeful symbol of the country’s post-apartheid future, was by no means a pushover. On June 12 they played France at the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille. France had some of the best players on the planet. One was a 20-year-old named Thierry Henry.

What you should understand about Henry is that when he ran with the ball, he was not running so much as gliding. Watching him move past opposing defenders