The nephew of a British World War I veteran has come across a letter his uncle wrote about the famous 1914 Chrismas truce in the trenches around Ypres that included an impromptu game of soccer between the warring sides. Says Imperial War Museum historian James Taylor:

‘Various accounts of the truce exist so to have one surface after not been seen for almost a century is quite remarkable.

‘This letter is of great historical value and the truce was the last bit of chivalry of the First World War.

‘The war had already been costly but it was about to get far worse.

‘One of the reasons they were playing football was because they weren’t able to communicate very well due to the language barrier.

‘This was a way for them to share something. It wouldn’t have been an organised match or anything, more of a free-for-all kick around.

‘There is something appealing about the idea that nations could settle their differences in sport rather than war.’

The truce and the deceptive impressions it left would come to symbolize, in the estimation of many, the death of the pre-modern world and the belief that the war would soon be over.

Sgt. Clement Barker was among those who was overly optimistic. He survived the war, which continued on through three more Christmases without another truce, or another football being kicked out of a trench in a similar fashion.

I’ve been putting this off for a couple of weeks now but can’t wait any longer: I’m taking a bit of a break from most of my online activity, including this blog.

There’s so much I wanted to write about here before I stepped away, including the end of The New York Times’ series on gender equity (and the departure of the writer from the sports desk); a lawsuit challenging the Title IX 3-part test at the high school level; and a new era for the U.S. men’s soccer national team with the appointment of Juergen Klinsmann as head coach.

But I’ve got plenty of offline writing and reading I want to get to in the next few weeks that I have been delaying for far too long. And like anyone who spends an increasing amount of time on the Web, I just need to get away from it for a while. It’s hard to unplug and even harder to stay unplugged because you’re afraid you’re going to miss something, especially on social media.

From my series on women’s sports to blogging about the Women’s World Cup and a few other things, it’s been a blast digging deep into subjects I care about, and that readers have been responding to. I want to resume all that soon, but I desperately need to recharge, refresh and relax.

So I’m spending the rest of August tackling those projects, and enjoying what’s left of the summer.

See you in September, and thanks for being a reader.

The club that calls the Estádio do Maracanã home tried to keep it open, but the famed Rio de Janeiro stadium that played host to the 1950 World Cup final has shut its doors for the next two years while it’s upgraded as the finals venue for the 2014 World Cup.

The Maracanã once could boast of being the largest stadium in the world, holding an estimated 200,000 spectators for the 1950 final, which Brazil lost to Uruguay. Among the mourners was the father of Pelé, who as a young boy promised his father he would help win a World Cup for Brazil. Eight years later, at the age of 17, he did on the first of three occasions, and toward the end of his legendary career, Pelé scored his 1000th goal at the Maracanã.

The tragic deaths of three spectators due to an upper deck collapse in 1992 led to the capacity of the Maracanã being reduced substantially. A recent renovation sliced the limit to 82,000, and the new capacity will be smaller still — around 76,000 — and is to include a retractable roof.

The project is six months late getting started and will cost a bundle — an estimated $400 million. But if the refurbishment can maintain the magical atmosphere of a typical Fluminense vs. Flamengo match, then perhaps it will be more than worth it.

• At Extracurriculars I have written about “Female athletes, their bodies and distorted perceptions” that only figure to continue to heat up: Serena Williams and her body, the LPGA Tour’s mommy conundrum, media coverage of women athletes and the return of Caster Semenya to the women’s track and field fold.

For all the caterwauling about women athletes not getting a lot of press, that’s just a tiny sampling of what’s going on out there. I’m not going to pronounce a forthcoming “Golden Age” or anything, but the agony aunts who fuss that women in sports are invisible are focused on all the wrong things. As usual.

To those of you weary about reading about these topics here: Soon there will be a new home for these missives, so I do appreciate your patience. The Gonzo post above has further crystallized ideas I’ve had about these matters for close to two decades now, and shortly I will be realizing them elsewhere, and at long, long last.

• A friend of mine and a very talented writer visited South Africa a year ago to write about a soccer team that was getting headlines, but for all the wrong reasons. The story by John Turnbull of The Global Game about an openly lesbian side has resonated during the World Cup.

Turnbull, who prefers watching women play the game, was recently interviewed by the CBC and explained the reasons for his approach to following soccer from a cultural perspective, especially as it relates to gender:

“There always seems more at stake when women play. They are doing it for love. There isn’t much money for women’s players. It’s a journeyman existence, sometimes going against the wishes of your family and friends. A lot of things are pushing against you.

“It’s always interesting to look at culture in terms of gender and women’s access to sport is sometimes a good indicator of how much equality a society gives its women.”

• Jason Fry of the National Sports Journalism Center (and an avid New York Mets fan and blogger) on the growth of the SB Nation conglomerate as  it launches blog networks in 20 cities and what it means for those sportswriters still working for newspapers:

“Much as I wish it were otherwise, these are anxious times — at best — to be a sportswriter for a newspaper, with SB Nation just the latest competitor to worry about. But if you’re a fan who likes to read, this is a golden age, marked by an explosion of compelling, entertaining stories from pressboxes and couches alike. And if there’s a limit to fans’ hunger for that content, we sure haven’t seen it yet. I worry about the future of newspapers, but I don’t worry about the future of sportswriting.”

•  More Intelligent Life, a culture magazine published by The Economist, with a long treatise on how global sports got so big, initially citing the spread of the British empire, and what has evolved since Brittainia no longer rules its own games:

“Big business used to have little to do with sport. Football clubs were owned by rich individuals who tended to be self-made men, from the world of property or used cars, rather than bosses of multinational companies. Rugby and cricket clubs, and German football clubs, were owned by their members and run by committees. Shirts carried no lettering apart from badges and a discreet manufacturer’s logo; business brands were confined to the hoardings round the side of the pitch.

“Within a generation, nearly all that has changed. Arsenal’s stadium is called the Emirates, after the airline that sponsors the team. Manchester United have just come to the end of a £56m four-year shirt-sponsorship deal with AIG; when AIG fell apart in 2008, United moved smoothly on to Aon, who will pay £80m for the next four years. The England cricket team’s shirts carry three lions and one mobile-phone company. National teams have their designated suppliers, their “official beer” and even ‘official cider.’ Tennis players and racing drivers have become human billboards, festooned with branding.”

• My latest freelancing assignment has begun, and it consists of a weekly television appearance between now and early July to discuss the World Cup.

• The World Cup brings out conflicted emotions, to say the least, among the American sports public and punditry, especially among those fans, journalists, writers and talk show hosts who can’t stand soccer or who think their countrymen who like the game are either delusional or fraudulent.

So when a writer I admire penned this yesterday — an attempt at deconstructing the psychology of American soccer fans, especially those who came to it as adults, via marketing and television — I was troubled by some of the assumptions and the desire to paint them as monolithic:

“There was a lot of high-minded fake smuggery after the 1994 World Cup here in the States, and I took it all back then as classic American us-vs.themism. I also used to think that this behavior was a function of guilt, some hyper-liberal yearning to reparate to the world for 80-plus years of sporting ignorance. But I’ve come to the conclusion that this has nothing to do with sports at all, that it’s more a need to take a chair at the table of a misunderstood minority. It’s a sort of social disease, a benign version of ‘the clap,’ as in, the desire to be part of shared applause.”

The history of soccer in America is checkered; a great chance was missed around the time of the first World Cup to make the sport more mainstream but it’s been a struggle to catch up ever since. The American soccer fans I know the best — not just those who show up at the pubs for the World Cup — simply like the game, and it’s not any more complicated than that. They immerse themselves in it worldwide and year-round, every year, and not just every four years. Many of them still follow American sports and teams just as avidly.

To suggest that one must have a reverence in something “organically” — whatever that means — is to close off the possibility of developing acquired tastes and new interests as life proceeds.

If that makes me an American soccer snob then fine. I’d rather be labeled that way than possess a puritanical insistence on authenticity so earnest and absolute that it risks becoming a contrivance itself.

• At Atlanta Soccer News I rounded up links about the World Cup “books” that have been officially submitted for 2018 and 2022, including the U.S. bid that includes my hometown as a venue.

It’s less than a month from the start of the 2010 World Cup, and as a reporting veteran of this unbelievable event (2002 in Korea and Japan) I speak from experience when I say there is nothing like this, up close and personal.

My favorite World Cup match? Of course, that unforgettable classic between Greece and Germany that they’re still arguing about today:

A busy day on the blogging front for me:

• At Blue Star Basketball, a post I’ve been working on intermittently for some time: The need to embrace women’s hoops 3.0. This is the time for the business of women’s sports, and women’s hoops, to be more fully developed, after more than three decades of political and social activism that still garners the major headlines.

• I’m playing around with the Tumblr platform and for the World Cup that’s about to roll around thought I’d post compelling material that goes Beyond The Touchline. Check out the video preview of “narco-soccer” in Colombia that will be featured on ESPN next month.