Word: soccers
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...hitchhikers—in my experience, the only type. The people who stop for hitchhikers aren’t psychos or child-molesters, burglars, or schizophrenics. They’re the middle-class, middle-aged women who envision it as such. They’re the churchgoers and soccer moms, the good women who volunteer at school fundraisers. As long as the young hitchhikers aren’t what they’d expect, aren’t punks with dreads or convicts on the run, these women will stop. They have to. Otherwise they’ll be wracked...
...grandchildren of Africa, from both sides of the Sahara. Italy's lineup, by contrast, had no players of immigrant origin (although Mauro Camoranesi's grandparents had left Italy for Argentina) - the Azzuri were, to put it bluntly, the whitest of the Western European teams at the World Cup. Italian soccer has long been a magnet for fascist nostalgia of the far right, and festivities following its triumph were marred by Swastikas spray-painted on the walls of Rome's historic Jewish quarter, as well as a comment by a former minister in the previous government of Silvio Berlusconi that Italy...
...That complaint has long been shared by the anti-immigrant far right in France, whose leader Le Pen complained that France "cannot recognize itself in the national side." Still, it was precisely the makeup of its national team that allowed French soccer to play a major role in helping France imagine for itself a more cosmopolitan identity...
...reason the furor over French soccer star Zinedine Zidane's head-butt in the World Cup final has reached such a fever pitch - especially since his televised interview Wednesday did little to clear things up - is that it's about much more than trash talking. Even if Zidane avoided confirming or denying the initial speculation that there had been a racial dimension to the insult that provoked him, the incident is a reflection of the social divisions that persist in an increasingly multi-cultural Europe...
...France, but more specifically to the disenfranchised youths on the mean streets of Le Castellane, the immigrant ghetto in northern Marseilles where he grew up. Zidane learned to fight on the streets of Le Castellane, where respect was earned by not walking away from a challenge. And his early soccer coaches were quickly alerted to the violent rage that could be provoked by taunts from players and fans about his origins and family. They taught him to channel that rage into superlative soccer skills, but it periodically erupted in violent outbursts...