A Friendly Rant From Captain
Spaulding
WHY
AMERICA GETS NO KICKS FROM SOCCER
Sports champions
may announce on network TV immediately after
their final victory that they're going to Disney
World, but their ideal destination of choice is
really the White House. Ever since football
fanatic Richard Nixon began back-slapping the
annual champions of the college gridiron, it has
become de rigueur for athletes to
receive their ultimate crown of laurels on the
lawn in front of the Oval Office, standing next
to the President at the podium.
Two weeks ago,
D.C. United became the champion of Major League
Soccer, America's heretofore invisible pro soccer
league. The team's players and owners are up in
arms because an invitation has not been
forthcoming from Bill Clinton to visit his digs.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that they are
in essence his hometown soccer team, as they play
their games only a few minutes' drive from
Pennsylvania Avenue. For Clinton to snub them is
to snub their sport.
And an entire
country yawns.
The collective
tastes of a culture are reflected in the sports
it chooses to follow. And soccer doesn't suit the
tastes of Americans. We are a results-oriented
society; our foremost concern in almost any given
situation is the bottom line. Soccer is not a
results-oriented game, for the obvious reason
that scoring is at such a premium that a 0-0 or
1-1 tie is an ever-present danger (leading to
that most unsatisfying of all sporting overtimes,
the "shootout"). Soccer is a
process-oriented game where the beauty lies in
the details.
That is why the
game most uniquely suited to Americans, and which
has already proved to be our greatest sporting
export, is basketball. You don't need to take the
time to learn and understand basketball (although
the nuances can take years to master); the
uninitiated can pick up the game's idea and the
major rules after only a few minutes of
observation.
Thus, it is ideal
for export. But basketball is results-oriented,
not process-oriented. There is frequent scoring,
which makes it the fundamental opposite of
soccer.
Other sports
invented by our countrymen will never have that
same international appeal. Football is a game for
outlandish Goliaths, is beset with complicated
rules, and has a weird stop-start feel to it; the
armored and anonymous nature of the players
distances a newcomer from identifying with the
athlete, although the unparalleled brutal
violence of football makes it a natural for the
more rowdy of European soccer and rugby fans.
Also, it's a male-only sport, which is a huge
disadvantage.
Baseball is too
much like the Commonwealth sport of cricket, and
is too slow, arcane, and peculiar for a foreigner
to enjoy (unless the game is transplanted into a
Third World context upon a dependent nation by
American troops as it was in Latin America or
postwar Japan). And the Canadian sport of hockey
requires cold weather and/or sophisticated rink
equipment.
A writer for The
Times in London recently wrote an essay
about the idiosyncracies of American sporting
tastes. It was a thinly-veiled allusion to the
kind of American cultural imperialism that
Euro-eggheads are always moaning about, since it
concerned itself with the fact that Dr.
Naismith's game (especially thanx to Jordan,
Magic, Bird, and the NBA) was making significant
inroads into soccer's claim as The World's Sport.
He was as befuddled by the appeal of basketball
as he was by the Yank immunity to the seductions
of soccer. Why, he asked, would anyone want to
follow a sport where there was so much scoring?
The act of scoring itself is meaningless in
basketball because of the multi-digit team
tallies, he thought, whereas a goal in soccer is
of the utmost significance. "Basketball is
pinball in baggy shorts", he snorted.
He totally missed
the boat on that one. While both sports share the
same interests for aficionados in terms of
tactics, momentum, and the individual-vs.-team
dynamic, scoring is what elevates basketball and
lowers soccer--rather than the other way around,
as he had thought.
Basketball scoring
offers a wide variety of scenarios for either
coming from behind or protecting a lead that
soccer doesn't. You can only score one point at a
time in soccer (and hockey as well, although
hockey's more frequent scoring makes this less
problematic than in soccer); you can't go from
being behind to being ahead (or vice-versa) in
one fell swoop, which is a serious flaw in the
rules. In basketball, there are one-, two-, and
three-point scoring options at any given time.
The scoreboard dictates strategy, which is why
basketball is results-oriented.
Additionally, the
difficulty of scoring in soccer makes the game
prone to excessively-defensive slowdown tactics.
Basketball's shooting clock eliminates such
stalling; in American football you can score a
lot of points in a hurry if you have the ball
(and you are assured of getting the ball if the
other team is excessively conservative on
offense, unless they are clearly better than you
and can run the ball down your throat), which
likewise eliminates that problem; and in baseball
there is no clock--you can keep scoring ad
infinitum, in theory. Again, a sport dominated by
the scoreboard creates game fluidity; a two-goal
lead in soccer is more formidable than a
twenty-point lead in basketball.
In terms of a
process-oriented game where the play itself
equals or exceeds the importance of the outcome,
the only parallel Americans have with the English
love of soccer is our enshrinement of baseball as
the national pastime, a grand exception to every
sporting dictum Americans hold dear.
There are several
reasons why baseball goes against America's
sporting grain. First, it is our oldest and most
documented (in both journalism and literature)
sport and is more deeply ingrained in our culture
than any other game. The game predates the Civil
War, and the Cubs, Braves, and Reds were fighting
for the National League pennant the summer that
the Sioux and Cheyennes invoked the slaughter
rule against Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at
the Little Big Horn. The long history of baseball
is our balancing act to our national obsession
with novelty, which is one reason why the
continual screwing around with the game by the
lords of baseball is helping to kill the major
leagues.
Also, its unique
character (the defense has the ball; there is no
clock; there is no rectangular playing field with
goals at either end; play always commences in the
same precise manner of the pitcher trying to
throw the ball past the batter to the catcher)
gives it a niche.
Next, its
circumstances reflect the development of the
country at large. It was appropriated by German
and Irish immigrants before the turn of the
century, and Italian, Polish, and Jewish
immigrants afterwards, making it a psychic port
of entry into America for newcomers and a venue
in which they could succeed in American culture
on America's terms. It is no coincidence that
such national heroes as Gehrig and DiMaggio were
the sons of immigrants. It is also no coincidence
that the breaking of baseball's color barrier by
Jackie Robinson in 1947 was an American civil
rights milestone matched only by the Brown vs.
the Board of Education decision, the Selma
bus boycott, and King's "I Have a
Dream" speech.
Baseball has a
pastoral feel of open greenery and easy pace to
it, a feel psychologically important to the urban
masses who made the game what it is. It was the
first media sport, the first sport to produce
larger-than-life athletes like Babe Ruth and
Dizzy Dean. And it can be and is played in
America everywhere and by everybody (as opposed
to football and hockey) if we include its
offshoot of softball.
But baseball's
decline (oddly enough, because in part the people
who run the major leagues think that they have to
make the sport more like football or basketball)
as our contemplative and cerebral sport does not
necessarily leave a vacuum that soccer can fill.
Baseball was a touchstone of our culture that
left it immune to our thirst for speed, scoring,
and scoreboard-related drama; soccer is an alien
import which cannot fill that cultural gap.
D.C. United--even
the name sounds like a half-baked attempt to
imitate the grand old franchises of English
Premier League soccer. If Anglophiles really
want to introduce a British sport Americans could
fall in love with, they should start a
professional rugby league here. The shirts are
always a wonderful fashion accessory...and the
Captain loves a good scrum as much as the next
bloke.
E-Mail Captain Spaulding.
Previous
Mountaintop Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me #1-- One Margarita Too Many?
Hooray
For Me #2-- Spitting at the Generations
Hooray
For Me #3-- The One-Eyed Spokesmodel
Hooray
For Me #4-- Semisardonic Over Semisonic
Hooray
For Me #5-- Bury My Brain at Wounded Knee
Hooray
For Me #6-- Tempest in a B-Cup
Hooray
For Me #7-- Princess Diana
Hooray
For Me #8-- Get Back, Honky Cat
Hooray
For Me #9-- Mother Teresa
Hooray
For Me #10-- Selling Johnny Cash
Hooray
For Me #11-- Is the Male Ego a Hairy Beast?
