On my way to work on the first day of the World Cup soccer tournament last month, I turned on my radio to listen to a bit of the opening game. The predominant sound I heard wasn’t the announcers or even the crowd — it was a constant buzzing that sounded like a huge swarm of bees.
It was the vuvuzelas, and if you’ve watched any of the World Cup over the past four weeks, you know the sound to which I refer.
Fans at all of the venues in South Africa have been blowing the small, plastic trumpets for the duration of every game, and will continue to do so Sunday, July 11 in Johannesburg when Holland meets Spain in the final. At the outset of the tournament, complaints about the long, thin horns streamed in from announcers, fans and especially players, who said the incessant noise killed their ability to communicate.
Many newspapers around the world suggested an outright ban; even the Jerusalem Post had an article headlined “Buzz of the vuvuzela distracts Israeli World Cup viewers,” noting that the noisemaker “is overpowering the commentary and causing mayhem.” The article described the sound as resembling “a shofar mixed with the call of an elephant.”
A shofar. Hmm. Hold that thought.
As the World Cup continued, I couldn’t help but do a double-take during the opening sequence of ESPN’s TV coverage: In an artsy scene meant to evoke South Africa’s heritage, a young man on a hilltop raises a long, spiraled kudu horn to his lips, holds it high in the air and blows. Holy moly! I’ve seen that exact type of antelope horn before. In synagogue. Being used as a shofar!
And if the vuvuzela is a direct descendant of the kudu antelope horn, then there’s got to be a link between the shofar and the vuvuzela. Right?
To check on my theory, I turned to animal horns expert Maurice Kamins, who has made hundreds of beautiful shofars in his San Francisco garage. In 2008, I wrote a j. cover story about him.
Kamins told me his mind quickly turned to the shofar when he first heard the vuvuzelas. “How could it not?” he posited. Aha! I was onto something.
But then my theory took a turn south. While Kamins said there are similarities between the shofar and a South African kudu horn (which historically was used to communicate between villages and to beckon people to gatherings), there really is no link between a shofar and a vuvuzela.
That’s because the plastic vuvuzela probably descended from a bicycle horn and then an aluminum horn. “I doubt if there is a direct connection between the kudu and the vuvuzela — other than they both come out of South Africa.”
Moreover, a lot of Jewish World Cup viewers wouldn’t even draw a connection between the kudu horn in the ESPN opening and a shofar; after all, Orthodox Jews generally consider only a ram’s horn to be appropriate for a shofar.
Interestingly, I’ve been hearing a lot about shofars recently. Shofars and sports, actually.
At a world title boxing match at Yankee Stadium last month, then-champ Yuri Foreman’s walk to the ring was heralded by the sound of the shofar.
“Cheap publicity stunt,” Kamins assessed. “That’d go under the heading of ‘playing to the Jewish crowd.’ ”
Well, OK, but Rabbi Yosef Langer of Chabad of San Francisco certainly wasn’t playing to the Jewish crowd when he sounded his shofar at Pebble Beach at the conclusion of last month’s U.S. Open.
His golf-course blast came not in an official capacity, but as a “kickoff PR piece” for an event he’s organizing for 2011: a golf venture to Israel for people who might not normally visit the Holy Land.
“I waited until after the last putt,” Langer explained. “I was afraid of what would happen if I blew it during play.” Much outrage, no doubt.
Which brings me back to the vuvuzela, and a final comment, from Jasper Rees, an authority on the history of horn instruments. “If the vuvuzela is getting on your wick,” he wrote in a British newspaper, “imagine how the shofar felt to the occupants of Jericho.”
Andy Altman-Ohr lives in Oakland. Reach him at [email protected].