Bend it like Bjoerling.(enjoying both soccer and opera)

I was very young when I scored the World Cup-winning goal at Milan's San Siro stadium in the afternoon, then in the evening won an hour-long ovation at La Scala. The uproar greeting my spectacular shot and the tumult for my sensational high C sounded exactly alike.

Alas, the closest I came to realizing this lovely dream was around 1980 (the time of soccer's brief blooming in the U.S.), when I served as both opera critic and soccer correspondent for the Seattle Weekly. Some people thought this combination strange, but not I. It's no news that sport and the performing arts have much in common. Both are physical: both artist and athlete demonstrate the same intensification of natural ability by training and technique. I'd go further: spectators too may experience a degree of physical participation, especially if they have ever tried their hand, on however modest a level, at the same kind of performance.

Thus, I've come away from matches feeling drained, having--if only vicariously--seen a lot of action. I may have looked the image of passivity, but a close observer would have noticed odd little tensions and twitches, as if I too had to accelerate into space, rise high to get my head on a cross, avert disaster with a sliding tackle. In the opera house, too, there come moments when I'm acutely aware of the breath control required for the long legato phrase that's coming up, the precise placement demanded by the tricky interval that's imminent. Though dutifully quiet, I'm tensed for the attacca subito just ahead.

It doesn't matter that I'd surely make as bad a hash of my bicycle kick as I would of my G-natural: I know how it should be done, and I feel an added pulse of pleasure when it's done well. As when England's Steven Gerrard scored against Germany with a thirty-yard volley that could not have been more sweetly struck: he pinged it, you might say, like--well, like Jussi Bjoerling's Radames pinging those high As at "Sacerdote, io resto a te." Twice, too, I've seen spectators swayed backwards, like a field of corn in a gust of wind, by the sheer force of a special moment. Once it was when Bobby Charlton hit the crossbar with a shot so powerful that the woodwork twanged like a bow. The other time, at a Covent Garden Proms performance, was a packed audience's response to Jon Vickers's thrilling G in Florestan's "Gott! welch' Dunkel hier." Other sports, certainly, provide similar thrills, similar flashes of near-perfection. Yet I'd claim special links between opera and soccer. Both have been considered somewhat unnatural: I once read a denunciation of soccer based on the contention that one instinctively uses one's hands, so real football demands an unhealthy repression. And we all know that opera means people, flagrantly contra naturam, singing what they might more reasonably say. But this defiance of nature places a special premium on the ...