I once said that if Ronald McDonald had been a Columbian, he'd look exactly like this.
Posted on 08/03/2004 3:12:33 PM PDT by swilhelm73
While people from Oslo to Athens and from London to Vladivostok were avidly following the European football championship in June, Americans ignored it. In the United States, the only way to see the Greece-Portugal final, or any other match in the tournament, was to make a special, costly arrangement with a satellite broadcasting company or to find a pub that was showing one of the games. Any such pub would invariably be located in an obscure corner of a large city and filled with people speaking languages other than English. Euro 2004 was the latest episode in the long history of American indifference to the world's favourite sport, which continues despite strenuous efforts to put the game on the same footing as America's three major team games: baseball, American football and basketball. Why have these efforts failed?
One reason has to do with the existing popularity of the big three. Even in as large and wealthy a country as the United States, where the national appetite for playing, and even more so for watching, games is enormous, the cultural, economic and psychological space available for sport is limited and that space is already taken. Baseball, American football and basketball have long since put down deep roots, claimed particular seasons of the year as their own (although they now overlap) and gained the allegiance of the sports-following public.
A fourth team sport, ice hockey, is widely played across the northern tier of the country and has a professional league with teams located across the border in Canada and throughout the United States, even in cities whose climates are so benign that ice has never formed in them: indeed, the franchise in Tampa, Florida, won this year's championship. The presence of four major team sports - more than in any other country - has made the barrier to entry in the competition for the affections and the dollars of American sports fans extraordinarily high, so high that even the world's most popular game has not been able to surmount it.
One in particular of those three sports - basketball - poses a singular obstacle to the national acceptance of football. The two are too similar for them both to succeed. Each belongs to the family of games whose object is to put a ball (or similar object) in a goal.
Because the two games are similar, they have the same kind of appeal. Both are easy to follow; you can immediately understand the point of each one. The rules and strategies of cricket, baseball, rugby and American football, by contrast, are less straightforward. The action of a basketball game and of a football match are easier to follow than that of other team sports as well because the ball is larger than in cricket and baseball and is never hidden in a tangle of bodies or a scrum, as it is in American football and rugby.
Football and basketball are also easier to play than the other team games. They do not require elaborate equipment and satisfactory informal games can be staged without the full complement of players. And both football and basketball players can perfect their skills practising entirely alone.
Spectators see the same thing in the two games: episodes of spontaneous coordination, with players devising and implementing schemes for scoring. They see, that is, acts of creation. If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.
The two games are both played partly in the air. Basketball players spring off the floor to launch shots at the basket and soar to capture missed shots as they bounce off the rim, even as football players leap upward to intercept a kicked ball with their heads to control it, tap it to a team-mate, or redirect it into their opponents' goal. Football and basketball are therefore the team sports that most vividly evoke a common human fantasy: to leave the ground and fly through the air.
This is why, perhaps, football and basketball are the team sports with the widest global appeal. It is no surprise that each of the two has established a beachhead in the last great expanse of unoccupied sports territory, the People's Republic of China. Their marked similarities, however, also mean that the two sports duplicate each other. They provide the same satisfactions. For spectators they are, in a sense, alternatives. North Americans don't need football because they already get what it has to offer from basketball.
There is, too, the problem of the frequency with which football matches end in a draw. Americans want conclusive results from their games. Baseball and basketball have rules forbidding draws: the two teams must play until one of them wins. Draws were more common in American football until two decades ago when, responding to the national irritation with them, the managers of the sport changed the rules. Now collegiate games cannot end in draws and professional contests very rarely do.
Most American sports fans would regard the method used for deciding international championship matches that end in a draw even after extra time - the penalty shoot-out - as absurdly arbitrary and no more fitting a way to determine a winner than flipping a coin.
There is a remedy for what is, in American eyes, football's gravest defect. The game's rules could be changed to make scoring much easier, which would mean that even if the match were drawn at the end of 90 minutes, one or the other team would almost certainly score in extra time.
Altering the rules to encourage scoring is an old and well established practice in American sport. In the course of the 20th century, baseball, American football and basketball each did so several times. The changes helped to sustain, and indeed to expand, the popularity of all three, since, as one astute student of baseball put it, 'offense [scoring] is making things happen. Defense is keeping things from happening. People would much rather watch things happen.'
To do the same thing for football might well require dramatic modifications in the way the game is now played - the abolition of the offside rule, for example, or awarding points that count in the final score for corner kicks, which, as in prize fights that do not end in knockouts, would give an advantage to the side that makes the most determined efforts to score.
Why has this not happened in the US? One possible reason is that such changes would make the American version of football substantially different from the game played everywhere else, and here Americans are reluctant to be out of step with the rest of the world. If that is the case, then the failure of the world's most popular sport to gain full acceptance in the world's most sports-obsessed country suggests that there are, after all, limits to American unilateralism.
· Michael Mandelbaum is one of America's leading authorities on US foreign policy and international relations and the author of The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (Public Affairs)
With Hillary wearing that piece of body armor known as "Ol' Crusty", I wouldn't give the Frenchman much of a chance...
and let them use their hands, too.
So am I!! Nothing like a day of good old woodsball!!
bump
Speaking of soccer on the telly, it doesn't sound right with American/Canadian announcers IMO.
ff
I have. What is it?
ff
There's plenty of that now as it is. The worst part of the game IMO. Thankfully there are refs that call them on it.
One of the most entertaining sports scenes in recent memory involved a game between Columbia and some other South American country about ten years ago. Columbian star Carlos Valderrama (the guy who with the large blond afro) was fouled hard from behind, and lay writhing on the ground "in agony" while play continued. After about a minute of this, the Columbian training staff checked him out and went so far as to bring a stretcher out onto the field, and hauled him off to the sideline. As soon as they set it down, he sprang up from the dead and bolted back out onto the field -- afro waving in the air as he ran.
What a show. LOL!
Oh, I forgot. In our contemporary cultural cesspool, Hip Hop is the most popular form of music...
I once said that if Ronald McDonald had been a Columbian, he'd look exactly like this.
Dangit boy! That stuff you just put out is what we try to avoid steppin in Texas, But, if you think boring is nuanced, well bless your little heart.
Aw cricket is easy too. But, Curling,...now there is a wonderfully nuanced spectator sport.
LOL
Subtlety in baseball is Greg Maddux throwing a big fat slider to Barry Bonds in april when he has a 10-0 lead just to get Bonds looking for another big fat slider game 7 of the NLCS.
I'll tell ya what 3rd and a yard for a first down inside field goal range with less than 10 seconds to go in the game is a hell of a lot more exciting than a bunch of guys kicking a ball around a field and maybe scoring once every day and a half or so.
I agree. I think soccer is boring, and I should know, I watch baseball, NASCAR, and golf.
But soccer is too large a sport worldwide for anyone to claim it sucks, and those that claim it's un-American are just plain silly.
There may not be a lot of action in soccer, and there is not alot of scoring, but it takes one hell of an athelete to run up and down a field for sixty straight minutes with no breaks or time outs. It takes major athletic ability to handle the ball with the feet like world class players can. It takes amazing teamwork to run offense/defense at the top levels.
Back when I grew up playing football/baseball in the 70's-80's, there were no soccer leagues until one reached high school. Because of Pele, I wanted to learn to play, but had no where to go. Now, my semi-rural Georgia county has a soccer complex, and the sport has taken off here amongst the kids. And I, for one, am glad to see it.
About another ten years, and pro soccer will overtake NBA basketball in revenue/fans. Let America win a world cup and see what happens.
read later bump
We'd like soccer more if you removed the goalies. We don't allow goal tending in basketball and Americans like to see lots of scoring.
I suppose that our lack of appreciation for subtlety applies to auto racing as well. Watching a Formula One race where the driver who is in the lead at the first turn of lap one will win the race is far too subtle for American audiences. We prefer watching 20+ drivers running bumper to bumper three wide at Talladega all trying to figure out how to get to the front without getting hung out to dry or wiping out the whole draft.
No, it's just boring.
No, it's just boring. I guess American Football is too complex for you.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.