U.S.-Iran Soccer Match More Than a
Sporting Event
The
buzz building for weeks has reached a crescendo of anticipation over kabobs,
rice and shirazi salads in West Los Angeles restaurants and in the aisles of
tony Beverly Hills boutiques.
Among Iranian students, shopkeepers, professionals
and businessmen from the West San Fernando Valley to Irvine, Santa Ana and other
Orange County communities, conversations inevitably turned this week to what
some have taken to calling the "Diplomacy Bowl": Sunday's soccer match
between the U.S. and Iranian national teams at the Rose Bowl.
"The game is being talked about everywhere,
in homes and among families," said journalist Homa Sarshar.
Her weekly television show and articles in local
Iranian newspapers reach a large segment of Southern California's estimated
600,000 Iranians--a concentration so heavy on the Westside that some have dubbed
the area "Tehrangeles."
For Sarshar, the game is much more than a sporting
event.
"It's political," she said. "It is
a means being used by the Islamic Republic of Iran for rapprochement with the
United States."
And the United States is using it for the same
purpose, she said.
In that sense the match echoes the Ping-Pong
diplomacy of the early 1970s, when a table tennis team from the People's
Republic of China toured this country, helping to create a thaw in Sino-American
relations.
Those matches, in part, paved the way for
President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China and the normalization of
relations between the two countries.
Iranians in Southern California are very much
aware of the political implications of Sunday's game, but that realization has
not diminished excitement surrounding the event.
"No American sporting event has ever made me
this excited," said Niloufar Lavian, 23, as she and her friend Tanaz
Shakeri sipped tea in the Javan Restaurant in West Los Angeles. "I'm
American but I still love my mother country."
Beverly Hills psychologist Nanaz Pirnia is caught
in a similar bind.
"I'm torn between two lovers now," she
said. "Iran and America are both my countries."
At her Music Gallery on Santa Monica Boulevard,
Neda Matinfar has sold hundreds of T-shirts commemorating the event. Sohrab
Rostamian is passing out flags with the Stars and Stripes on one side and the
green, white and red Iranian flag on the other at his Nashr-E Ketab Bookstore on
Westwood Boulevard.
But those are not the flags that fly in Iran
today. They have a lion, sword and the sun on the middle white panel that flew
before the revolution that ousted Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979. The new
Iranian flag has an Islamic symbol in that spot.
Still, Iranians hope Sunday's match may be the
first step toward easing tensions between their native and adopted homelands.
"I am 100% against the regime in Iran, but my
hope is that this game will bring people together," said Shanaz Torbati,
another diner at Javan.
A relaxation of tensions would make travel easier
between the two countries, Iranians say, enabling them to visit relatives or to
take their children to a country some of them have never seen.
"Maybe it will be easier to go back, or
easier for Iranians to come here," said Alireza Morovati, president of the
Radio Voice of Iran in Santa Monica.
Morovati is also concerned about Iran's image in
countries around the world.
"In the eyes of the world, they call Iran a
terrorist state," he said. "We are not terrorists."
That may be a tough image to sell to many
Americans who still have all too vivid memories of revolutionaries storming the
American Embassy in Tehran and parading blindfolded U.S. hostages through angry
mobs.
"I never blame my American friends for
feeling sort of funny about Iran and Iranians," said psychologist Pirnia.
She said Iran has always received bad press, "stories about how destructive
Iranians have been to others and to themselves."
When Mohammad Khatami was elected Iran's president
two years ago, some observers predicted that his election would loosen the iron
grip mullahs, the clerics who rule Iran, had exercised since the revolution
brought the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.
In the Iranian community here, Khatami has severe
critics who say wholesale executions and discrimination against women and
religious minorities have continued under his leadership.
Some of those critics plan to protest against
Khatami's government on Sunday, but they insist that their demonstration will
not be disruptive. And, they emphasize even more, the protest is in no way
directed at the Iranian team.
"Iranians will stand for the U.S. national
anthem but will sit down during the anthem for the Islamic Republic," said
Jimmy Sedghi, a business consultant. "Then they will sing 'O, Iran,' a
patriotic song."
That song has been around for 50 years, said
Sarshar, and it "has been used as a weapon to oppose the regime. The song
is a uniting factor between dissidents here and there."
In a gesture reminiscent of American sprinters
Tommy Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, the demonstrators
will wear black gloves on their right hands and raise their clenched fists
"to show opposition to the mullahs," Sedghi said.
But Sedghi and other critics of Iran's government
distinguish between the government and the Iranian people. They fully support
the team, he said.