By John Powers, 07/14/98
PARIS - Everybody's great-aunt died late Sunday night. That's apparently why nobody from Montmartre to Montparnasse was able to make it to work yesterday morning. If they did, their eyes were rimmed red from mourning. Or maybe it was from too much champagne on the Champs Elysees, as everyone stayed up all night - again - toasting Les Bleus.
''POUR L'ETERNITE'', L'Equipe, the national sporting daily proclaimed, after France had, improbably and unforgettably, won its first World Cup soccer crown and hung a final exclamation point on a tournament that seemed to take an eternity to complete.
It took 33 days - twice as many as the Olympic Games - to play 64 matches, more than half of them just to eliminate the Jamaicans and the Saudis and the Yanks. It took 10 days to reduce the final eight to one. Wars have been fought in less time than that. ''We've seen nothing but trees, we're sick of it,'' French midfielder Emmanuel Petit said, after 70 days of seclusion at the team's camp in Clairefontaine.
So it has become with the Mondial, which takes two years to complete, from the first (of 643) qualifying match to the final, and holds the planet in thrall like nothing else.
An estimated 37 billion (yes, billion) people in aggregate watched this Cup, 1.7 billion of them tuning in for the final alone. Three thousand print journalists and 850 photographers covered anything that talked or moved. And every seat for every match in every stadium, from the Stade de France's 80,000-seat flying saucer to St. Etienne's 36,000-seat cockpit, was sold out before the tournament.
More than 25 million people applied for the 2.5 million tickets, and the rest of the world - especially France's British neighbors - fumed when they realized that two-thirds of them were reserved for the French. So scams and corruption were inevitable.
Tens of thousands of foreign fans bought travel packages from fly-by-night agencies that promised tickets and never delivered. Thousands more bought forged tickets at face-value bargains. And a member of the French organizing committee's official tour firm stole a huge bloc of seats and peddled them on the black market. ''The ticket distribution system needs to be drastically overhauled,'' admitted incoming FIFA president Sepp Blatter.
Part of the problem this time was that the host country had some of the smallest stadia in recent history. Except for the Stade de France, which had to be built because no other venue had anywhere near enough seats for a final, only Marseille's expanded 60,000-seat Stade Velodrome and Paris's Parc des Princes had more than 45,000, and three of the 10 venues (St. Etienne, Toulouse, Montpellier) had fewer than 37,000.
Given the enormous demand, limited capacities, high prices, and blocs of tickets reserved for working media and sponsors, this was not an event for ''l'homme dans la rue,'' the man in the street. When French captain Didier Deschamps walked into the Stade de France for the quarterfinal match against Italy, all he saw in the tribunes were dark suits and ties.
''It looked like they were going to a funeral,'' Deschamps complained. ''The average guy who lives bleu-blanc-rouge from morning until night, where is he?''
L'homme dans la rue was in la rue with his face painted in tricolor, wearing a blue game jersey with Zizou's No. 10 on the back, watching the match with tens of thousands of others on the free big screen in the square in front of the Hotel de Ville and chanting ''On va gagner'' (We're going to win).
What gave this Cup its flavor was not so much what happened inside the stadia but what happened in the streets, as a whole country let itself become seduced by the Mondial and gave its heart to Les Bleus, who had broken it so many times before.
Most folks who knew the Cup and knew the French weren't sure that ever would happen. ''France hasn't really understood the importance of the World Cup,'' chief organizer Michel Platini sighed a month before the event.
Headaches were abundant at the start. The Air France pilots walked off the job and there were wildcat strikes on the railroad. English hooligans ran riot in Marseille and German neo-Nazi thugs raised havoc in Lens, leaving a gendarme near death.
But once Les Bleus started winning and heroes like Zizou (Zinedine Zidane), Lolo (Laurent Blanc), and Thuthu (Lilian Thuram) emerged, France forgot all else - work, sleep, restraint. The Cup hadn't been held here in 60 years and most people figured it wouldn't come back in their lifetime. And even if Les Bleus won it again, it never could be the same.
So as soon as Deschamps hoisted the golden trophy over his head Sunday night, l'homme dans la rue and everybody else headed for the Champs Elysees and partied ''pour l'eternite'' until a chill rain sobered them up and sent them home after dawn to prepare for Bastille Day today - and another great-aunt's funeral tomorrow.
This story ran on page E01 of the Boston Globe on 07/14/98.
© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
