How They See It Over There

BrianH

BrianH

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This is from the Pioneer Press, Minnesota. I thought it deserved an airing on here rather than the Other Sports board:

"If the government really is serious about identifying illegal immigrants, it has a unique opportunity to record their whereabouts. All the Department of Homeland Security has to do is monitor the city-by-city television ratings of this month’s World Cup. Agents should be dispatched to any area where the ratings reflect an unnaturally high level of interest. That likely signals a concentrated pocket of illegals. No one who is actually from here cares about the most over-hyped, mind-numbingly boring event in the world.

Thirty years after soccer was supposed to be the next thing here, ESPN and ABC will again attempt to “educate” as well as entertain American viewers during the World Cup. The arrogance is astounding. The networks still think that Americans aren’t interested in soccer because we don’t understand it. In fact, just the opposite is true. We don’t like soccer because we do understand it. And it’s awful.

It’s time to quit apologising and tell the truth. When it comes to soccer we’re right and the rest of the world is wrong. If they want to dance in the streets of Cameroon or Belgium over this stuff, fine. But the sport does not suit American taste and we should stop feeling guilty about it.

Americans are an industrious people. We use our hands. We catch footballs. We throw baseballs. We hit golf balls by gripping a piece of equipment. It is unnatural for us to put our hands behind our backs and try to “pass” a soccer ball to a team-mate by bouncing it off our heads. We aren’t circus seals and no one’s going to toss us a fish if we do it right.

Yes, America may be the only country that doesn’t go goofy for soccer. We’re also the only remaining superpower. Don’t you see a connection there?

I’d rather have a colonoscopy than watch a minute of it. Soccer’s the rest of the world’s problem. Let’s not even fake it any more."
 
I feel the same about DIY but that is because I am no good at it not because it is intrinsically worthless. Perhaps that's the link he is missing .
 
From Newsday

Columnists Ellis Henican

World Cup soccer doesn't score here

June 16, 2006

I've been studying the teams' starting rosters. I've been reviewing the corner-kick rule. I've been doing my best - and, no, it isn't easy - to find the hidden thrill inside 0-to-0 scores.

Now I'm making a list of soccer's one-name superstars: Beaz, Landon, Bobby, Goochi ...

Who are these people anyway? The next-season replacement for "Entourage?" Another edition of "Making the Band?"

They produce mass palpitations from England to Argentina. But my heart, like the hearts of most soccer-shrugging Americans, remains stubbornly cold and still.

"Soccer was not meant to be enjoyed," Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker. "It was meant to be experienced." And that explains a lot, bleakly.

Gopnik calls the World Cup "a festival of fate - man accepting his hard circumstances, the near-certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal. Nil-nil is the score of life. This may be where the difficulty lies for Americans, who still look for Eden out there on the ball field."

Well, yeah. Given a choice between Eden and "the near-certainty of failure," put me down for Eden, please. And I'm supposed to be embarrassed by the choice?

I didn't play soccer as a kid. I'll admit it. I'm from the Big Three generation: football, baseball and basketball. To me, soccer is hockey without the speed, the skating, the fights - or the sky-high scores.

If they can lower the mound in baseball, why can't they make the soccer goals twice as large - or put leashes on the goalies?

The 2006 World Cup has had its moments, I know, and it may have a few more.

I know I was thrilled to see Mexico stomp Iran. But honestly, that had nothing to do with the ball-handling prowess of either team or even geopolitics. It was more of a favorite-places-to-vacation analysis. Cancun has much better beaches than Tehran, and they don't toss you in prison for ordering a single tequila.

I'm hoping now the American team, which is actually pretty good this year, gets past Italy tomorrow - and for a very fine reason, too. I'm American. That's about as deep as most soccer loyalties go.

So how come we don't have better American hooligans? Perhaps the mob or the Latin Kings could help with this.

Oh, I know what the soccer promoters keep saying in the sports pages and on TV.

They say TV ratings are up from the 2002 World Cup. They say soccer is the world's favorite sport - and America's fifth or sixth, depending on whether or not you count wrestling. Definitely bigger than lacrosse, even with all the publicity the Duke team has been getting this year.

ESPN spokesman Mac Nwulu said ratings are up 65 percent from four years ago, to 2.6 million viewers. "Part of it is that more people are watching soccer" - plus "the U.S. is a much better team."

But 2.6 million viewers? O'Reilly gets that on a decent night, and he comes on more than once every four years.

Twenty million Americans, most of them kids, play soccer on a typical weekend. Their moms, definitely hotter than Little League moms, make up a whole political wave of their own.

How could such a powerful athletic engine generate such a widespread World Cup yawn?

I'll tell you how.

Of those 20 mil, 19.5 million get home exhausted from their soccer matches. They plop themselves on the couch. They spend the rest of the afternoon watching the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball - anything but more soccer.

You want speed? We got NASCAR. You want strategy? Baseball's got soccer way beat. You want goals? We have sports where people actually score some. Try basketball.

But only a beer-fueled hooligan would turn soccer fanaticism into a major part of his life.

Who cares if Beckham did marry a Spice Girl?

Email: henican@newsday.com
 
Americans lack class. Maybe it's because their forebears tried to wipe out whatever roots to history were native to their continent. Their psyche is one which demands gratification as instant and as cheap as their over-diluted coffee. They use money to buy art without appreciating it. And we expect them to understand association football?
 
I agree with a lot, but not all, of the american criticisms. They dont try to sell their baseball over here, thank god. All sports can be rendered pointless if cut down to the nuts and bolts, but what is the ratio of exciting games in this years world cup 1:5?? Plenty of elements in soccer are annoying, the professional cheating probably being the worst and while soccer shouldnt pander to the states in search of marketing dollars, soccer authorities should take their criticisms on board.

The fact that the balls are continuously changing, possibly in an effort to allow for more long range goals, suggests that this is done surrupticiously in any case.

I think it is the biggest game in the world becuase it is the simplest to play, not because it is the best or the most exciting.
 
Whatever the sentiments, you have to admit it is cleverly written stuff. And for the record, baseball is my 5th favourite sport, and the only one I ever bought a season ticket for.
 
Nicely observed, Gareth. What comes across (sigh... ) as in much American writing, however wittily performed, is their essential ethnophobia and their nationalistic triumphalism. 'Last world power' - yeah, and much good it does you to be so, too. Their overblown hysterics over Iran and Syria have come to an unseemly backing down in the face of the calm implacability from those countries. What are you going to do, 'world power' - blow the whole thing up, so no-one can play in it if it isn't playing your game? Trust American hacks to have to try to ally their sports with being the world's biggest bully.
 
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