Why America Doesn't Like Soccer

In the oncoming month, you will learn more about soccer than you probably ever wanted to. This is because of the arrival of the World Cup, but more accurately, it’s because the World Cup is on ESPN. In other words, every NBA playoff highlight, every baseball score, and every NFL camp rumor will be preceded by speculation about Croatia’s chances in Group F. Suddenly, we’re supposed to believe that bars everywhere are full of people watching soccer, because that’s what’s on television.

Look, I like soccer. It’s great every couple of years, and I enjoy nothing more than a reason to drink in public at ten in the morning. However, I would guess I also share most Americans’ approach to soccer, which is that it’s on par with the Olympics – something to watch out of convenience once in a long while that makes you swell with nationalistic pride, and then you can go months on end without even the slightest desire to think about it.

This isn’t to say that soccer isn’t cool – it is, by any account, fun to watch, which is more than can be said about most televised baseball games. At the same time, though, I’m tired of the international community forcing it down America’s throat with the same condescending sneer every four years. Apparently because we don’t like soccer, we’re uncultured rubes, too shallow to pay attention to a game that doesn’t involve a violent collision every twenty seconds or 200 points per game. Other countries see America’s failure to embrace the game as crass and symbolic of our short attention span. But really, we just have too much other stuff on our plate, to the point that it’s impossible to cram one more sport into our waking hours.

It’s hard to claim that soccer is ever going to become a truly major American sport. We’ve been hearing this since the NASL was around in the 1970s, and American soccer’s foothold is still limited primarily to two groups: first- and second-generation immigrants and kids younger than 12. NCAA soccer has always been a relatively popular niche sport, but there still isn’t a widespread desire to watch it on TV.

Advertisers are trying hard, though. If you’ve been watching ESPN at all over the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably seen Gatorade’s “Whole New Ballgame” commercial, which shows the American soccer team walking into overseas stadiums around the world, to a chorus of boos and signs reading “Yankees Go Home.” The spot does an excellent job of stirring up some much-needed patriotism behind the U.S. soccer team, which, you may not know, is actually pretty good. I’ll admit that yes, this commercial makes me want to watch soccer. Still, the ads aren’t anywhere near approaching the level of NBA playoff commercials, where just watching Ben Wallace bench press in black and white makes me want to go outside and play some 3-on-3.

On the other hand, though, we have the other ads, which lead us to believe that soccer is an international language of peace – the driving force behind unity in Cote d’Ivoire and civil rights in Saudi Arabia. This is true only on the most superficial level, in that the sport is played the world over. What soccer really does, though, is give people an athletic reminder of a country’s political and social history. Not that this is bad – it’s just that a more honest assessment of the soccer’s sociopolitical influence involves massive, pre-organized brawls between Polish and German hooligans, English chants like “Ten German Bombers” (look it up), and Spanish fans making monkey noises at black English players Ashley Cole and Shaun Wright-Phillips. Soccer is the international language the same way that guns are – they’re both everywhere, but that doesn’t exactly resolve any conflicts.

So soccer is both the global uniter and the great divider, for better or worse. Meanwhile, the likelihood of America developing a culture of fanatical hooliganism surrounding soccer seems unlikely. There are some solid reasons for this:

1) We’ve got other stuff to do. American soccer will never have the kind of insane pipe-wielding fans that England has, mostly due to the fact that as long as the Philadelphia Eagles and Oakland Raiders are around, they’ll have that market cornered. American goons just already have other outlets, and they seem happy enough the way things are.

2) We don’t like losing. The United States is the (literal) Yankees of the international sports world. Americans are so used to dominating every sporting event that it’s a national tragedy when we come in second at anything, which is why we have no interest in paying attention to a sport where we field, at best, a high Tier 2 team.

3) We’re impatient. Not only are the other sports in America really popular, they’re also not at all like soccer. We generally don’t have the patience for sports that operate outside an organized structure. Basketball and football are great because we can easily quantify how one team dominates another – points, stats, and individual achievements. Soccer statistics give us only the barest understanding of what went on during a match, and there isn’t even a guarantee that the team that dominates every statistical category will win. Highlights do a miserably inadequate job of summing up a match, so it’s impossible to get a good feel for the game without planting yourself on the couch and watching the full 90 minutes.

4) We’re not Communists. Soccer doesn’t pander to our capitalist sensibilities. Baseball and basketball are all about individual achievement within the context of the team, whereas in soccer even the most brilliant run by a single player usually doesn’t produce anything. Soccer is much more fundamentally a team game than any popular American sport. The sense of accomplishment is only collective; the individual superstar’s heroic effort can easily be overlooked in a game where one goal is often all that matters.

5) We don’t want to be like Europe. We like our athletes to be manly on and off the field. Part of the enjoyment of watching sports is conflating athletes’ successes with your own, and when those athletes do everything in their power to look like the cast of Queer Eye, this becomes distasteful. I realize the coolest thing in London and Paris is David Beckham’s preening androgyny, but there’s something incredibly irritating about seeing a striker score a spectacular goal and then strut around like a cockatoo doing a mating dance. The overly dramatic flops don’t help either. Soccer is more reliant on artistry and creativity than, say, baseball, which makes it susceptible to the occasional well-placed acting job. This is a problem in lots of sports where there are grey areas concerning fouls (see: Tim Duncan) but international soccer takes it to another level. Watching last year’s elimination-round game between the United States and Mexico was like watching the “agony of defeat” montage from ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

This doesn’t mean soccer will never become popular in the United States – it just means that it’s an uphill struggle. The first step is winning, and, as the American soccer team proved in 2002, that’s closer than we think. As Jamie Chisholm said in last issue, we should watch the World Cup. We should be cutting out of work and spending our June afternoons in sports bars with a beer, watching Landon Donovan and Brian McBride. But we probably won’t.

Alternate Universe Skip Bayless

“One thing I learned about the press it's a really powerful tool. And your shtick can't be, you get on TV and be evil every day. Because people believe what you say. And Skip Bayless is evil every single day.” – Charles Barkley

Being a sportswriter these days is tough. For example, coming up with an excuse to write a column every couple of days can be difficult, especially when your only identifiable “skills” is denying athletes credit and disagreeing with anyone who has a halfway reasonable approach to a story. For most men this would be a gimmick. But for one man, this writing style has defined his career so completely that to call him anything other than a god among hacks would be a disservice: Skip Bayless. It takes effort to be as consistently wrong as Bayless. For example, some recent headlines:

- UCLA will crush Florida in the NCAA men’s basketball national championship because the Gators underestimate the Bruins.

- Adam Morrison is overrated and will never succeed in the NBA.

- Tiger Woods has fallen off his game recently and is only succeeding because the competition has gone downhill too.

- Vince Young and Texas are incredibly overhyped and won’t stand up to USC in the Rose Bowl, which was immediately followed by…

- If the Houston Texans draft Reggie Bush instead of Vince Young, they’ll be kicking themselves ten years from now.

Of course, this isn’t even mentioning the absurd claims about white kids being afraid to play basketball and groundless claims that Troy Aikman is gay.

It’s just too bad that we didn’t have Skip around to comment on the events that shaped past generations. In another world, perhaps he could have shared his opinions with us.

April 14, 33 A.D. - “There’s been a lot of hype surrounding this Jesus Christ guy, but it takes a lot more than unsubstantiated miracles and wild stories to make it into the Religious Hall of Fame. Now people are getting all excited even though it took him three whole days to rise from the dead. This guy is no Apollo. Son of God? Color me unimpressed.”

October 23, 1415 - “This new longbow that the English have been building up is never going to have the impact that Henry V claims it will. Has anyone even seen the French knights lately? My prediction is that the French, with their heavy armor, will run roughshod over those mincing English yeomen. The French military have been dominating their enemies for years – there’s no reason they’re going to stop now.”

June 14, 1494 – “Columbus, Columbus, Columbus. That’s all anyone in Spain is talking about these days, but I’ve had enough of it. We’ve invested in two voyages to these supposed “islands,” and what have we gotten back for it? A bunch of malnourished natives and some odd-looking vegetables. And where are these bountiful riches we’ve been hearing so much about?”

October 18, 1692 – “The city of Salem has gone through enough. The upstanding citizens of this colony, myself included, have done nothing but cooperate with the Committee to Eliminate Witchcraft. Who’s a witch? Who’s innocent? We need to settle these issues once and for all, and there’s only one kind of closure that’s going to end this situation. It involves a stake and some fine Massachusetts kindling.”

December 10, 1799 – “This smallpox vaccine has gone too far. These stories of people

injecting one another in the buttocks with harmful chemicals sicken me. When we stoop to intervening in the natural progression of things, we start playing God. The age of innocence we once lived under, when we knew with absolute certainty that a man who contracted smallpox was going to die, is over. I, for one, won’t be associated with anyone who’s been vaccinated.”

March 12, 1885 – “Vincent Van Gogh is destroying the proud legacy of European painting. Haven’t we, the viewers, been subjected to enough torture at the hands of the Post-Impressionists? And that whole cutting-off-his-ear thing was nothing more than a carefully calculated publicity stunt.”

January 15, 1910 – “I’m a traditionalist – always have been, always will be. That’s why this assembly line idea sticks in my craw. Once we start mass-producing commodities, we lose all respect for the value of putting a hard day’s work into something. Henry Ford and this new-fangled manufacturing are ruining the American values this country was built on, and I won’t stand for it.”

December 11, 1941 – “People are going insane about the attack on Pearl Harbor like it’s some kind of catastrophe. Believe me, this is nothing to declare war over. After all, what has Hawaii ever done for us?”

September 18, 1947 - “Spare me all the concern about Jackie Robinson. The media circus surrounding this guy is unprecedented, and for what? A .296 average and 12 home runs? Please. Give me Pee Wee Reese on a bad day.”

February 3, 1950 – “Albert Einstein may have contributed a lot of scientific achievements to society. Not for me – I’m a finite universe guy, and nobody will tell me different. But regardless of what you think of his career, you have to assume the inevitable: he’s gay. The inattention to his wife, the pacifism – and don’t try to tell me that his famous paper on Brownian motion wasn’t Freudian.”

October 27, 1968 – “Some might say that Bob Beamon’s incredible long jump signifies the capacity of sport to transcend human shortcomings and inspire all of us. But the first thing I thought was that Beamon was on steroids, and we should question everything in his athletic career, past and future. He’s betrayed the fans, he’s betrayed his country, and most of all, he’s betrayed us, the sportswriters, who believed in him for so long.”

The Cinematic Baseball All-Star Team

1) Alejandro Heddo, Rookie of the Year
I was originally going to list Heddo as just “Fat Mets Hitter,” but I decided I’d do some actual research and look up his name. It’s really not important, though, since this character was the inspiration for the on-field antagonist in pretty much every baseball movie ever: fat, dirty, loud-mouthed, terrifyingly awesome. The best part about Heddo is the fact that you know that in the months before the movie was made, the casting director was watching a Phillies game, saw John Kruk step up to the plate, and said “YES! Get me that man!” Also, kudos to the writers for casting a white guy as a player named “Alejandro.” That’s laziness.

2) Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn, Major League
Dominating fastball combined with something that very few other movie pitchers have – an almost-believable delivery. To go off on a tangent, actors in baseball movies always manage to destroy the viewer’s suspension of belief – they always wear their pants too tight, or their socks too high, or helmets with two ear flaps, or they just look wrong. For example, here’s a skill I bet all of you have without even knowing it. If you enter a room and a National League baseball game is playing on TV on the other side of the room, even if you’re too far away to identify any of the players, you’ll still be able to tell when a pitcher is hitting. Why? He just looks wrong. Most MLB pitchers spend at least a couple of hours per week hitting, and they still can’t pull off the illusion of normalcy. Most actors get handed a bat and told “Here – look menacing.” Sheen at least looks kind of like he belongs out there, which is nice. Also, on the subject of Vaughn, if anyone ever went directly from the California Penal League to professional sports, you know he would immediately become a superstar. There’s hope for you yet, Marcus Vick.

3) Roy Hobbs, The Natural
Pluses: Supposedly one of the most talented players in the history of baseball. Minuses: 1) The believability factor. Robert Redford isn’t really reminding anyone of Ted Williams out there. 2) A critical part of Hobbs’ rise to fame was striking out “The Whammer,” which is probably the least intimidating baseball nickname ever. We also never get really to see Hobbs play defense, and based on his girlish throwing arm in the movie’s final scene, that may be for the best.

4) Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez (young form), The Sandlot
Under most circumstances I would have to choose the older Benny, since he already plays in the major leagues. However, Old Benny is a pinch runner, which in the dugout hierarchy is generally just above bat boy. Also, he gives the press box an extremely Ace-and-Gary-esque “thumbs up” gesture immediately after his climactic steal of home. That sort of thing doesn’t exactly command respect in the clubhouse. Meanwhile, Young Benny hits a baseball so hard he destroys it at the age of around 12, something that it took Roy Hobbs until his late thirties to do.

5) Jack Elliot, Mr. Baseball
Elliot’s understanding of team play would be an important addition to a team filled with selfish superstars. He’s also apparently pretty strong, as he singlehandedly carried the most predictable plot in the history of film. Also, in the movie, the Yankees replaced him with Frank Thomas, who in 1992 was quite the impressive young prospect, so he must have been pretty good.

6) Pedro Cerrano, Major League
Pluses: Was later elected President of the United States. Minuses: A little eccentric, and as a Cuban defector you probably can’t be sure of his exact age. Still, it’s Dennis Haysbert. As if playing Cerrano wouldn’t get him free drinks for life, he also starred as “The Hammer” in Mr. Baseball and, obviously, David Palmer. Dennis Haysbert could play pedophiles for the rest of his career and strangle a puppy on live TV and I would still ask him to sign my girlfriend’s chest if I saw him in public.

7) Bobby Rayburn, The Fan
So Wesley Snipes plays a hugely hyped San Francisco Giants leftfielder with an up-and-down relationship with his fans, and then his fans finally turn on him after his career goes south due to an unfortunate leg injury. Huh. Rayburn edges out Major League’s Willie Mays Hayes due to the fact that he can actually hit.

8) Steve Nebraska, The Scout
An impressive hitter with a 100-mph fastball, it would be difficult to leave Nebraska off any All-Star team. Kind of a head case, but if Barry Bonds can keep his job, then the guy who pitched a perfect game in the World Series can too.

9) Air Bud, Air Bud 4: Seventh Inning Fetch
Uday Hussein had three copies of Air Bud movies in his private film collection. If that doesn’t scream that Air Bud belongs on this team, I don’t know what does.

Manager: Walter Matthau, The Bad News Bears
Watching Joe Torre decompose on the bench every October since I was twelve has taught me one thing: the easiest way to manage a successful baseball team is to have enormous, saggy jowls and an unnecessarily morose expression all the time. In other words, Matthau should win 100 games with this team.