I'm not a huge sports fan, but a recent New York Times article about a new soccer museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil caught my attention. According to the article, it's a shrine with all the jerseys, balls and paraphernalia you might imagine, but it's also a museum that uses sport to explain a country; how "the national pastime has come to represent and inspire the multi-racial, samba-loving soul of the people" and how Brazil transformed an English schoolboy sport into "the beautiful game" of passing and dribbling that is Brazilian soccer today.
I was particularly struck by how the governor of Sao Paulo, Jose Serra, described his dream for the museum, "I imagined a museum fundamentally made up of ideas, memories and not so much of relics. I thought of something that would express the memory of our soccer, the great performances as well as our sufferings."
So I'll probably never see a World Cup game in person nor can I tell you about any of Pele's 1,282 goals, but, based on Jose Serra's dream, I'd love to see this museum of ideas and memories.
Above: Pele doing a bicycle kick
I am a sports fan, a footie fan, but am not much a fan of sports museums. I have found that only well written football books could provide me with the kind of museum of the mind I would want to visit. Books, ideas, words, someone speaking - that's what captures the spirit of something, the inspirational memory, of a thing for me. So - like you - I wouldn't mind going to that Beautiful Game museum too. Not a bad excuse to finally visit Brazil either.
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