RealClearSports: This will be your fourth World Cup, do you feel South Africa is ready for this?

Grant Wahl: I'm feeling a lot of excitement, here in Johannesburg, more and more so as we get closer to the opening game. You see South Africa's flags on people's cars, sides of buildings and sides of houses, South Africa jerseys ... and scarves, it's everywhere. I've lived here for seven months and as the game gets closer, I think people are getting more optimistic about the team's chances.

RCS: Much has been made about the racial divide in South Africa, particularly that rugby is a white sport and soccer is a black sport. Are the white Afrikaners getting behind the Bafana Bafana?

Wahl: You go to a rugby match, it's 98 percent white and most soccer matches are 95 percent black. But for the World Cup, it's been a little different. The white community is supporting the South African team, and it does seem like all of South Africa is excited about this, they want the home team to do well. This could be like the 1995 Rugby World Cup (as portrayed in the book and the eponymous movie Invictus), uniting this country. This country has gone through a lot in the last 16 years and there are still a lot of scars in people's daily lives.

In many ways, this could be the most significant event in South Africa since 1994. For starters, they spent over $5 billion on infrastructure: airports, roads and high-speed rail link. There is a lot of concentrated wealth in certain parts of the country and yet there's also crushing poverty, sometimes side by side. In Johannesburg, ... some people are surprised when they first came here, including me, with the fortress mentality here. There are security walls with electric fences on top of that. ... But in the World Cup, people will see lots of South Africa because the matches will be played all over the country. Cape Town is a beautiful city, a lot like San Francisco, with wineries nearby, and Durban, it's another attractive destination. People will get to see a lot of this country.

RCS Interviews Grant Wahl