On Sunday morning, I took a few hours to watch The Game of Their Lives, a British-produced documentary about the 1966 North Korean World Cup squad that fought it's way into the quarterfinals of that year's tournament.
On one level, it's an incredible sports story. The North Koreans were virtual unknowns on the world football scene, and only managed to qualify due to a wide-scale boycott of the process by most of Africa and Asia. In 1966, FIFA only allocated one qualifying position for all of Africa and Asia, something most of those national football federations found to be deeply insulting. So just about everybody on those two continents decided to sit it out.
As a result, only North Korea and Australia vied for the spot in the finals -- which was contested over two games in the Cambodian capital of Pnhom Penh. To say the Aussies were unprepared was an understatement, as the North Koreans drop-kicked them 9-2 on aggregate.
On another level, it's a story about sport bridging gaps between cultures -- in this case between the North Koreans and the locals in Middlesbrough, the small English city where they were based and would play their three preliminary round matches. The North Koreans were decided underdogs, and the folks in Middlesbrough couldn't help but root for them as they took on the USSR, Chile and finally Italy -- the last which they shocked 1-0 to propel them to the quarterfinals.
But it's the final elements that make this film all the more shocking and disturbing. Because as it recounts the 1-0 win over Italy -- truly a monumental sporting moment -- the vintage footage of the game is interspersed with shots of North Korean propaganda posters, many of which display brave soldiers positioned behind smoking machine guns or about to pull a pin on a hand grenade.
So, as great a sporting achievement as it might have been, The Game of Their Lives is ultimately something awfully disgusting -- an unvarnished piece of propaganda that might as well have been produced completely on the dime of one of the most heinous regimes in human history.
Somehow, and I'm not sure exactly why, I managed not to turn it off, and made it all the way to the end to see the North Koreans fall to Portugal 5-3 in the quarterfinal match in Liverpool -- this after taking a 3-0 lead in the first few minutes of the match.
And though I couldn't help but admire the play of that North Korean team, a part of me couldn't help but be relieved that they lost, thus depriving the barbarians who run that excuse of a nation an even larger propaganda victory.
And I was left wondering if there has been another way to tell the story without soft soaping the reality of life in the functional equivalent of a nation-sized prison camp. Apparently, for the producers of this documentary, the answer was no. Shame on them.
