World Cup puts me in touch with my inner Dutch

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2010 (5793 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s not often, as a professional athlete, that you get a chance to see what it’s like to be on the other side of the fence as a fan, but this weekend, with a football final of a different sort, a couple of us got a first-hand experience in cheering for and rooting on a sports team that is also a reflection of where we are from.

With a last name like Oosterhuis, it’s pretty evident that Jon, the fullback on our football team, has some Dutch ancestry behind him, but my ties to Holland are a little less obvious and a little less well-known. The last name Brown is certainly not a Dutch handle, but my mother was born in the Netherlands before she and her parents migrated to Canada, and that is pretty much all the Dutch and excuse I felt I needed to jump on this World Cup bandwagon and ride it all the way to the championship game.

Of course, like most Canadians, half Dutch or not, European football, or footie as I like to call it, isn’t exactly at the pinnacle of my regular viewing curriculum, but that probably has as much to do with our exposure to it and the lack of local involvement as anything else. But at the same time, while many of us recognize that European football is the most popular sport in the world and the World Cup of soccer, the most-watched sporting event by a landslide, the pageantry in the game does not exactly mimic the code of conduct we are used to seeing in our first two loves of hockey and football. When players dive so much you would think they were trying out for an Olympic swim team or put on elaborate flamboyant displays to draw advantageous penalties at every turn, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling these actions take away from the game and are distasteful and unbecoming of our superstars. But then again, when you don’t live in a culture obsessed with all things footie, who are we to judge what types of athletic mannerisms take away from the integrity and appeal of the sport?

Back to my transformation, once the Netherlands defeated Brazil and then Uruguay to earn a berth in the World Cup final, I figured I should finally get serious about my Holland fandomship. So for the first time in my 30-something years, I went jersey-shopping to support a team of my partial heritage, though apparently far too late in the game. Normally it’s hard enough to find clothing to adorn my height and weight, even more so when it has to come in the fashion of an increasingly popular soccer jersey, so the pursuit was not fruitful.

All I could find in the entire Polo Park mall was an orange Burberry Polo for a whopping $150, or a double XL American Eagle T-shirt, once again in Netherlands orange, but for a much more reasonable $30, considering I was only going to wear this colour once every four years or so to coincide with the World Cup.

Now that I was outfitted in my team colours, the greatest challenge that lay before us was in where to watch the game. In the 10 years I have spent in this city I have never stumbled upon any places where the Dutch seemingly get together on a regular basis. Yet through a public profile request on Facebook, Jon and I were directed to Legends sports bar off of Portage that was the second coming of Amsterdam that Sunday afternoon. There was an orange Chevelle SS parked at the front door of the bar and nothing but flags in the parking lot and at the wood. There were painted faces, horns, orange hair, a gouda cheese wheel raffle draw and plenty of Heineken to go around.

Though the game did not end as the hundreds of us had hoped, it was a unique and telling perspective into what it’s like to support a team from afar and feel some ownership and ties to it through regional or ancestral links. Despite the outcome, the match was an entertaining see-saw battle of attrition, and how else — for the bargain price of $3 a month — would I ever have become a full fledged member of the Dutch Canadian Society of Manitoba?

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press.