Eyes Wide Shut: The Bombings in Nigeria and the World Cup

The World Cup for the Western World is a month-long fete. An opportunity to check out of work at "kooky" hours and watch a "kooky" sport while sipping a domestic macrobew at the sports bar around the corner from your office. Cynically, it can be even conceived as a dodge wherein us mighty Americans deign to "go global" and watch the world's game while not having the foggiest sense of what is going on, or who is doing it. For the vast majority of the American audience it's enough to root for the national team, or national team du jour if the Stars and Stripes aren't playing that day, sip a beer and absorb some vague, thin waves of international camaraderie via a glowing 50" LCD screen.

Terrorism, another arena wherein the vast majority of US spectators haven't the damndest notion of what is going on, or who is doing it, is never associated with the World Cup. Sure, a writer on a deadline in 2006 or 2010 probably cobbled together a line about "Ghana's midfielders terrorizing the US defense all game long," but that's about as close to the concept of terrorism as soccer gets for the US. For the Western World terrorism is, fortunately, at most a generational horror. An event so crystallizing and rare that even as individual lives are shattered and the collective psyche is scarred the only option is to rebuild. Of course, however, there are corners of the world where terrorism is a tad more commonplace. Places where, while not an everyday likelihood, terrorism still lurks in the minds of those who live there, where a warranted leeriness is the norm.

Damaturu, Nigeria is one of these places and it is here where the crossroads of fanaticism, in two very different senses, converged during the Mexico-Brazil match. The tally for casualties isn't even clear—17 hours after the blast, sources are reporting anywhere between 13 and 21 are dead with upwards of 50 or more injured from the bike-riding suicide bomber's blast. Yobe, the Nigerian state which Damaturu is the capital of, has had government-mandated bans on public watching parties for matches for a few years at this point due to threats (and attacks) by Boko Haram. Jos, a different city in northeastern Nigeria, was rocked last month by a Boko Haram suicide bombing at a watching party for the Real Madrid-Atlético Madrid Champions League Final.

The motives behind Boko Haram's attacks are as brutish as they are base. Large gathering + bomb = mangled limbs, death, and attention. There is a perverted elegance to a logic this cruel and simplistic; but, like so much of the world, the fervor for watching soccer eclipses the risk of being blown to smithereens. As Lynda, a student and soccer fan, explained to the BBC following the attack in Jos, "I was in a viewing centre when I heard that another one was bombed in Jos. I was scared but I had to finishing watching the [Champions League] match before going home." While this utterly fucked-up "game within a game" continues, while Boko Haram and others prey off their kin and countrymen's love for the beautiful game, the games in Brazil keep on going with the pomp and sense of celebration. Sure, there will be moments of silence for the dead and wounded, but FIFA's World Cup is too big to fail, too big to slow its wheels, let alone come to even a second's stop, for a corner of Nigeria.

The television audience is too bloated off cheap beer to pay heed to the 20-seconds worth of attention given to the attack on CNN before flipping back to Pardon The Interruption. At some point, though, the discussion needs to be brought up about spectators being not only a target for terrorism, but as part of the macabre spectacle that the terrorists want driven home to their audience. For the fans not watching on a bar stool or a recliner; for the fans that scream in joy, cry in agony, that meet in public places to behold their heroes and legends projected on larger-than-life screens? There is no easy way to divorce fans from the game that they treasure.

That's the rub. The terrorists can keep betting on taking advantage of human hope and a citizens desire for "fun," even when the fun comes with a known and heavy risk.

In that sense, the attacks are very similar to the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. It's been 18 years and largely forgotten behind the larger memories of Michael Johnson's golden Nike spikes and Keri Strug, but 111 people were injured and two people killed while scrambling out of the packed Centennial Olympic Park moments after giddiness morphed into fear. Those memories were sooner swept away by the likes and wants of corporate sponsors who needed the show to go on and who very much wanted to have those smiling medal-winners back in NBC's studio showing off their flashy medals and pearly whites for a sterile TV audience. 18 years later and corporate sponsors have quietly and quickly swept away the blood stains and dust of Damaturu and want the sterile TV audience to reach for another cold one, to get ready for the knockout round.

Far too often we all take the path of least resistance, even in our fandom. We order the same buffalo wings from the same sports bar, we click on the link for "The 15 Hottest #USMNT's Fans" instead of the link covering a bombing in an obscure corner of Africa. It's just damn depressing to know that the rest of the world feels and thinks the same way. That the machinations of sport have in some very direct ways encouraged us to be one kind of a fan and to not fret about those other fans. Even in the bright lights of the World Cup we are all the same way in the worst possible ways.