2002 World Cup gave Koreans joyful turbulence

A large crowd of red-shirted football fans cheer for the Korean team on a street in downtown Seoul as they watch the 2002 World Cup match between Korea and Poland on large TV screens, on June 4, 2002. / Korea Times file

By Andrew Salmon
Korea Times columnist

The world’s greatest sporting event may, in and of itself, be considered an extraordinary event, but in the days leading up to the 2002 World Cup, there was, as yet, no indication of the truly extraordinary scenes about to unfold across the streets and plazas of South Korea.

In 2002, I was working for communications multinational Burson-Marsteller. The firm, under the leadership of two diehard British football fans, Bill Rylance and Bryan Matthews, had undertaken the international PR for the 1988 Olympic Games, then formulated Korea’s PR strategy in the battle to make the 2002 World Cup a joint Korea/Japan event, rather than a solely Japanese one.

The campaign, branded “The Rightful Choice,” communicated to the world’s football powers that it was South Korea, not Japan, that was the leading soccer nation in Asia, based on past form in international tournaments. The strategy succeeded. 2002 would be the first World Cup jointly hosted by two nations.

Now, with the countdown to the kickoff approaching, the firm was managing international media relations for the event itself. The chemistry between the Korean organizers and the arriving sports journalists was positive from day one.

The press center, set up in COEX, offered free massages, acupuncture and Seoul city tours. I recall the sports correspondents’ team from Bloomberg returning from a visit to the youth quarter of Sinchon where they had drunk beer and dined on “budae jiggae.” They declared it one of the best evenings they had ever had.

The opening match, in Seoul, was an upset: Senegal downed champions France. With the tourney underway, I found myself with little to do. Things were running like clockwork; there were certainly no crises to manage.

And as the days passed, it became clear that Korea _ both team and nation _ was winning the affection of the assembled journalists in a way I had not seen before or since.

Why? The country was going crazy.

Absent the scenes seen in nations that actually win the World Cup; absent the celebrations in nations that have just won wars; or absent street parties such as the Rio Carnival or Berlin’s “Days of Love;” there can be few spectacles of public joy comparable to the scenes in Korea that summer.

While those scenes took place amid a football tournament, to a Korea watcher, the real action was not in the stadia, it was on the streets.

It started slowly. Korea had never won a World Cup match before its first game against Poland.

The nation sat up and took notice of Gus Hiddink’s team, which boasted, among others, pretty-boy striker Ahn Jeong-hwan and a promising young winger named Park Ji-sung, after it won 2-0.

When it came time to play the U.S., there was massive interest. Fans unable to get tickets gathered at giant LED screens in city centers. The match was a 1-1 draw.

Then Korea beat Portugal 1-0, igniting scenes of public ecstasy. When the “Red Devils” sunk football powerhouses Italy (2-1) and Spain (on penalties), things went ballistic.

A sea of red-shirted celebrants flooded downtown city streets, singing, dancing, linking arms, emoting. There was no leadership, no organization. Electrified by a joyous voltage, this was “people power” in its purest form.

It was a massive advance over the other great sporting event held in South Korea, the 1988 Summer Olympic Games.

Then, the world had been introduced to an anxious, freshly-scrubbed “Asian Tiger” economy; an uncertain new polity that had only recently emerged (in 1987) from over two decades of authoritarian rule and seemed uncertain how a democracy should act.

The stern-faced, semi-militaristic organization of the event was glaring. Noted Asianist Ian Buruma was appalled by the heavy-handed nationalism (“a process of nation-building… that encourages xenophobia”) and the militaristically choreographed mass-spectacles of the Games. He compared the ‘88 Games with Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics.

Things were different in 2002. Koreans now had 14 years of democracy under their belt, and the Kim Dae-jung administration, which took office in early 1998, had been the first opposition party to occupy the Blue House.

Kim had overcome the 1997-98 financial crisis with a comeback that stunned the world, was promoting a policy of open engagement with North Korea, and had a Nobel Peace Prize to his name.

His administration was also reaping the fruits of its predecessor’s heavy investments in hi-tech infrastructure: Korea was a technological powerhouse.

Admittedly, the economy was still a metal-bashing one, but flagship consumer products _ cars, cell phones, consumer electronics _ were more sophisticated, better marketed, than the clunky efforts of the 1980s. So Korea was already on the up when the Taeguk Warriors stared scoring goals.

Many outsiders mistook the carnival ambience for soccer mania. “We thought we were crazy about football in Ireland,” an astounded Irish fan said on TV. “But we have never seen anything like this!”

In fact, football had little to do with it. In Korea, soccer comes a distant second to baseball in viewership, and many fans were unaware of what they were watching: Although football is one of the world’s simplest sports, I had to explain the offside rule to a group of screeching colleagues watching Korea-U.S.

Those who seriously wanted to watch Korea’s matches would have had a far better view from their living room TVs than from the midst of a crowd squinting at a distant LED screen. But they would have missed the electric atmosphere.

What was underway was a series of mass gatherings _ Koreans, a distinctly communal people, love gatherings of all kinds, from family get-togethers to political demonstrations _ fuelled by mass passion.

Public displays of emotion have always been part of the Korean social psyche, but this time the mass consciousness was being leveraged to express tribal delight at success in an international event, rather than for political advantage, as in rallies, or in anger, as in strikes and demonstrations.

Perhaps most critically, the joyous sea of red that flooded downtown Korean cities was not the centrally managed mobilization of the 1988 Olympics. It was bottom-up, not top-down.

There was no leadership visible, none of the hierarchies under which Koreans arrange their day-to-day lives. This was joyous chaos.

Though Korea-centric _ the national flag, sported in an unprecedented range of creative designs, was prominently displayed _ the celebrations were all-inclusive. Fans of all nationalities were catching the fever, donning the colors, joining in.

I recall watching a group of Europeans buying “Be the Reds” t-shirts from a street stall near Namdaemun and replacing their own jerseys on the street there and then.

A few voices _ this writer’s among them _ had argued, pre-Cup, that Konglish buzzwords could be misconstrued. “Be the Reds” resounded like a communist slogan; “Korea Fighting” sounded like a hooligans’ rallying cry. Yet nobody got the wrong impression.

Adding spice to Korean joy was schadenfraude, for Korea had clearly outdone arch-rival Japan, not just in sporting terms _ the Japanese team was far less impressive than the Korean _ but in public enthusiasm.

A British journalist who covered both nations was scathing of the Japanese; an uninformed observer visiting that country, he reckoned, would not even be made aware that the World Cup was underway. In Korea, it was impossible not to notice.

Some got carried away. Korea Times columnist Mike Breen _ a red handkerchief tied round his pink pate _ was filmed by a local TV station dancing deliriously outside City Hall. When he had calmed down enough to be quoted, he confidently predicted that Korea was going all the way to the final at Yokohama.

That did not happen, but the team, reaching the semi-finals, did better than anyone could have predicted. The Red Devils went down to Germany, and then matched up against Turkey to battle for third place.

On 29 June, the day of the Korea-Turkey match, the threatening realities hanging over the peninsula violently intruded when a South Korean patrol boat was shot to pieces in a firefight with North Korean vessels on the maritime border in the West Sea. Four sailors died.

Yet even that could not dampen the party mood. Turkey won, 3-2, but Korea ended the World Cup with the “Most Entertaining Team” award.

The World Cup granted South Korea an iconic new image: as a fun loving, youthful and inclusive nation. This was a far cry from its pre-2002 brand, when the nation had variously been perceived as a war-torn wasteland; as a sea of smokestacks; as an aggressive exporter of copycat products; and as a violent riot-scape.

One legacy of the World Cup would continue _ albeit in a way that nobody anticipated. Later in 2002, amid a fraught national election, the nation was rocked by the largest anti-American demonstrations in its history.

The leaderless, bottom-up organization; the massing of predominantly youthful demonstrators; the displays of high emotion; all were recognizable from the World Cup.

The incident that sparked the protests was the killing by U.S. troops of two schoolgirls in a traffic accident; some observers were surprised that public anger was not directed at North Korea for its deliberate killing of South Korean sailors. Similar protests would flare again in 2008, over the perceived risks of U.S. beef imports.

Since the World Cup, mass mobilization, loosely arranged via the Internet or mobile telephonics, has become ever-more spontaneous.

For politicians, this makes these displays of public sentiment far more difficult to lead, control, or leverage.

In this sense, the cheering crowds of the 2002 World Cup could be seen as the successors of the “people power” pro-democracy protestors of 1987.

However, the question now must be, whether similar, spontaneous protests in the future will be animated by informed rationality or simply by raw emotion.