Soccer in America
(Warning: contains overwrought allegory)
The NYT has a lead article today on some podunk burg in Georgia where a local kids' soccer team is composed entirely of refugees from other countries, torn by famine or war. I read a bit of it while in line at the drugstore; the opening grafs were an eye-opener: the mayor of the town forbid the playing of soccer in the park. "It's just baseball and football as long as I'm mayor," he said, paraphrasing. You can just hear the cornpone drawl in his voice that connotes pig-ignorance to everyone else in the country who's finished middle school. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the target audience of the Democratic Party.
This highlights something else, however. I'm obviously a soccer fan; I like the game. You may or may not like soccer - it's not the perfect sport, because there's no such thing: every sport has its problems and foibles that true players and fans overlook. (And yes, this obviously applies to players as well. There is a stuffy, elitist undercurrent among geeks where actually watching sports is déclassé, probably due to echoes of stereotypical high-school clashes between jocks and geeks...the usual thesis given is one doesn't watch sports, one plays them, which is rather like saying you don't watch movies you can't act in. Anyway, end of digression.)
The point is, whatever you think about the game, soccer is the only sport in the U.S. that has a movement among elites to actively eradicate it. Radio-transmitter-enabled knuckleheads from Rush Limbaugh to Jim Rome will commit a huge amount of jaw time to denigrating the sport, tearing it down...inviting callers to give their Two Minutes' Hate. It permeates all the way to backwards-ass bigoted mayors in the South and the guys at the bar, anywhere, at any time. You can argue the designated hitter rule, or whether the receiver had both feet in bounds, or who the best quarterback or point guard is...but with soccer, the whole idea of the sport itself is on trial on every AM radio and barstool, 24x7...even after considering that other sports have been rude citizens of our cultural landscape. Baseball took away the '94 Series over pure greed. The NFL is an ugly reality TV show with flashy graphics, starring violent criminals and malcontent millionaires, and has no respect for its fans, cities, or history.
The Times set up this article as a case-in-point, but they did hit the nail on the head as to why: soccer is the world's sport, not America's. It's the Great Equalizer, allowing upstart African and South American countries and citizens to play the big boys on a regular basis with a good chance of winning, where muscle-bound steroid cases nor towering brutes have any advantage over the normal-shaped guy who can just keep running.
To the bigots and conservatives and jingoists and yes, sports fans of our country, equality - soccer - is a threatening concept. It strips away part of that national myth that makes us different, and better, than everyone else on Earth...forces us to look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that we're just another country, not necessarily the best...and that maybe, every so often, we have the flaws and make the mistakes that come with being a nation of mere human beings. Maybe we don't need to invade countries to get what we want. Maybe whites aren't better than blacks. Maybe football players and soccer players are just athletes, and their games are just games...things that are fun.
It's enough to make any of the lower 50% of our citizenry retreat to their jingoistic, profoundly insecure braying. We need to have our (sometimes literally) larger-than-life heroes, and if Michael Vick needs to smuggle some weed or the Yankees need to buy some opponent out of his contract or Mark McGwire needs to take horse pills or Ray Lewis needs to stab someone every so often, that's okay with us, as long as we know they're still "number one".
Those who cling to the myth may do so out of weakness, but they do it with tenacity. The alternative is to admit that Galileo was right - that we aren't the center of the universe - and people and nations are often willing to kill or die before thinking that way. And for what? What awaits on the other side of that wall? It might be death, but it's the death of old ways...part of the process of maturity. On the other side are just "the bleeding hearts and artists"...or a bunch of East Germans, just like you, glad to be back together again...or maybe it's just a bunch of kids from the Congo or Haiti or Bosnia, who wanna play soccer in America.
The NYT has a lead article today on some podunk burg in Georgia where a local kids' soccer team is composed entirely of refugees from other countries, torn by famine or war. I read a bit of it while in line at the drugstore; the opening grafs were an eye-opener: the mayor of the town forbid the playing of soccer in the park. "It's just baseball and football as long as I'm mayor," he said, paraphrasing. You can just hear the cornpone drawl in his voice that connotes pig-ignorance to everyone else in the country who's finished middle school. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the target audience of the Democratic Party.
This highlights something else, however. I'm obviously a soccer fan; I like the game. You may or may not like soccer - it's not the perfect sport, because there's no such thing: every sport has its problems and foibles that true players and fans overlook. (And yes, this obviously applies to players as well. There is a stuffy, elitist undercurrent among geeks where actually watching sports is déclassé, probably due to echoes of stereotypical high-school clashes between jocks and geeks...the usual thesis given is one doesn't watch sports, one plays them, which is rather like saying you don't watch movies you can't act in. Anyway, end of digression.)
The point is, whatever you think about the game, soccer is the only sport in the U.S. that has a movement among elites to actively eradicate it. Radio-transmitter-enabled knuckleheads from Rush Limbaugh to Jim Rome will commit a huge amount of jaw time to denigrating the sport, tearing it down...inviting callers to give their Two Minutes' Hate. It permeates all the way to backwards-ass bigoted mayors in the South and the guys at the bar, anywhere, at any time. You can argue the designated hitter rule, or whether the receiver had both feet in bounds, or who the best quarterback or point guard is...but with soccer, the whole idea of the sport itself is on trial on every AM radio and barstool, 24x7...even after considering that other sports have been rude citizens of our cultural landscape. Baseball took away the '94 Series over pure greed. The NFL is an ugly reality TV show with flashy graphics, starring violent criminals and malcontent millionaires, and has no respect for its fans, cities, or history.
The Times set up this article as a case-in-point, but they did hit the nail on the head as to why: soccer is the world's sport, not America's. It's the Great Equalizer, allowing upstart African and South American countries and citizens to play the big boys on a regular basis with a good chance of winning, where muscle-bound steroid cases nor towering brutes have any advantage over the normal-shaped guy who can just keep running.
To the bigots and conservatives and jingoists and yes, sports fans of our country, equality - soccer - is a threatening concept. It strips away part of that national myth that makes us different, and better, than everyone else on Earth...forces us to look at ourselves in the mirror and realize that we're just another country, not necessarily the best...and that maybe, every so often, we have the flaws and make the mistakes that come with being a nation of mere human beings. Maybe we don't need to invade countries to get what we want. Maybe whites aren't better than blacks. Maybe football players and soccer players are just athletes, and their games are just games...things that are fun.
It's enough to make any of the lower 50% of our citizenry retreat to their jingoistic, profoundly insecure braying. We need to have our (sometimes literally) larger-than-life heroes, and if Michael Vick needs to smuggle some weed or the Yankees need to buy some opponent out of his contract or Mark McGwire needs to take horse pills or Ray Lewis needs to stab someone every so often, that's okay with us, as long as we know they're still "number one".
Those who cling to the myth may do so out of weakness, but they do it with tenacity. The alternative is to admit that Galileo was right - that we aren't the center of the universe - and people and nations are often willing to kill or die before thinking that way. And for what? What awaits on the other side of that wall? It might be death, but it's the death of old ways...part of the process of maturity. On the other side are just "the bleeding hearts and artists"...or a bunch of East Germans, just like you, glad to be back together again...or maybe it's just a bunch of kids from the Congo or Haiti or Bosnia, who wanna play soccer in America.