North Korea and Brazil Help Bridge the World's Divides

JOHANNESBURG — In some ways, the World Cup crossed most of its ideological divides at Ellis Park Stadium on Tuesday night.

Brazil, the No. 1 soccer nation of the past 50 years, played North Korea, whose team has taken part at this level only twice in that time span.

Brazil, whose stars are the best and the wealthiest globetrotters in the sport, was facing soccer nobodies from a secretive land that rarely allows its citizens to travel into the free world.

It was the No. 1 team in the rankings of the world governing body, FIFA, against No. 105.

What nonsense the Koreans made of this artificial rating. What pride they exhibited. And how they made Brazil sweat to close out a 2-1 victory in a stadium that once represented a divide in South Africa.

Ellis Park used to be a stronghold of the white Afrikaans game, rugby union. South Africa has moved on. So should everyone, away from the notion that the isolation of half of the Korean Peninsula makes its citizens and players somehow inferior.

Journalists were tersely reminded this week by the team’s coach, Kim Jong -hun, that his country must be called the Democratic Republic of Korea. FIFA lists the team as the People’s Republic. To much of the world, it is simply North Korea.

Such labels are obsolete when men are at play under the international laws of the game.

South Korea is at this World Cup, too, and performing well. Yet the two Koreas remain separated by a narrow military zone, with soldiers on the alert 24 hours, and their relations are sour.

Under such circumstances, how can a FIFA ranking of 105 mean anything in relation to North Korea’s ability to play? If it seldom competes against the outside world, it cannot gain points to climb the ladder. Those rankings, incidentally, are called the FIFA/Coca-Cola rankings, and we can only imagine how well that goes down in Pyongyang.

But this week was a breakthrough, of sorts. Koreans in the north were allowed to watch on television South Korea’s 2-0 victory over Greece.

This is a far cry from 1988, when the Seoul Olympics took the world’s athletes to the south, but Pyongyang staged an alternative event at its own vast stadium in Pyongyang. And then again in 2002, when South Korea and Japan co-hosted soccer’s World Cup, anyone was free to view it — except in North Korea.

At both of those events, the ultimate sadness was that while South Koreans thronged the streets in their millions to celebrate being at the center of world attention, their erstwhile kinfolk north of the D.M.Z. were left out. The world was at play on their doorstep, and they were kept away from it all as if behind a shuttered window.

The man who built up South Korea’s soccer association, Chung Mong-joon, has risen to be a vice president of FIFA. His father fled communism, went south, and founded Hyundai. Father and son were responsible, separately, for bringing the Olympics and then the World Cup to South Korea.

So the difference between people from the same land is an imposed one. Soccer is one of the few things that can bridge the differences. There have even been “friendly” matches between the northern and southern teams, always in the south, of course, and always heavily guarded.

If this week achieves anything, it might perhaps be that people are less condescending toward athletes isolated by politics and ideology.

If the North Korean camp is cut off from outside eyes, in contrast to Brazilians holding open training sessions to generate local support for the team, that cannot be the fault of the players. There are, inevitably, rumors that the guards are there more to keep the North’s players inside the camp than to keep the outsiders out.

But the exception, the approachable member of North Korea’s squad, is its striker, Jong Tae-se. Born in Japan, in an enclave where former Korean workers became part of the Japanese community, Jong enjoys the affluence and fame of a world-class soccer player, and the privilege of being allowed to come and go through Pyongyang more or less as he pleases.

On Tuesday, two faces of Jong were displayed. As the anthem of North Korea played solemnly over Ellis Park, he stood in line, his face broken up with emotion, his eyes openly weeping tears. Then the whistle blew, and Jong ran as if his liberty depended upon it. He chased, he harried, and he got in as many shots on goal as any man, on either side. In the end, however, Jong wasn’t blessed with a goal.

Brazil’s Maicon was so blessed, however, scoring a magical one. Robinho created the second with a fabulous pass that played three opponents out of the game at a stroke. But the last word, the last goal, was also a fine one, and it came from the left foot of North Korea’s Ji Yun-nam.

So the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea put on a display far more competitive than most people expected. That proved how little the world knows of sports history. In 1966, in the only other World Cup in which North Korea played, its team sensationally knocked out Italy, winning 1-0 in the English city of Middlesbrough.

The lesson then, as now, is that 11 men on any given day can shock 11 others who consider themselves superior.

According to Jong, his comrades are remarkably “pure,” they live to play the game, and no amount of money could make them happier in their goal.

This has been a remarkable opening, an opening perhaps of that shutter keeping out the world’s games. North and South Korea were drawn against one another in qualifying for this World Cup, and enmities arose over the playing of the anthems and raising of the flags, so much so that the second game between them, the designated home game for Pyongyang, was played in China.

Their paths are unlikely to cross at this World Cup, but similarities can be seen in their spirit, their bodies, their pride. They are clearly brothers in different national uniforms.

June 16, 2010 / By ROB HUGHES