Posted on 03/11/2009 8:56:05 AM PDT by AreaMan
How Soccer is Ruining America: A Jeremiad
Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it. Social critics have long observed that we live in a therapeutic society that treats young people as if they can do no wrong. Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind, no matter how many times they watch the ball going the other way. Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return.
What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.) The linear, two-dimensional action of soccer is like the rocking of a boat but without any storm and while the boat has not even left the dock. Think of two posses pursuing their prey in opposite directions without any bullets in their guns. Soccer is the fluoridation of the American sporting scene.
For those who think I jest, let me put forth four points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games—and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.
1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal’s dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability. Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with their feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone’s face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, “Trick or Treat, smell my hands”? Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God’s wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.
2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes, and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.
Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables. We also spent a lot of time in the outfield chanting, “Hey batter batter!” as if we were Buddhist monks on steroids. Our chanting was compensatory behavior, a way of making the time go by, which is surely why at soccer games today it is the parents who do all of the yelling.
3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that. More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score. Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery. Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.
4) And then there is the question of gender. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls. Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.
Let me conclude on a note of despair appropriate to my topic. There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy, and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch. The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.
Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves. Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and relevision are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.
I should know. I am an overworked teacher, with books to read and books to write, and before I put in a video for the kids to watch while I work in the evenings, they need to have spent some of their energy. Otherwise, they want to play with me! Last year all three of my kids were on three different soccer teams at the same time. My daughter is on a traveling team, and she is quite good. I had to sign a form that said, among other things, I would not do anything embarrassing to her or the team during the game. I told the coach I could not sign it. She was perplexed and worried. “Why not,” she asked? “Are you one of those parents who yells at their kids? “Not at all,” I replied, “I read books on the sidelines during the game, and this embarrasses my daughter to no end.” That is my one way of protesting the rise of this pitiful sport. Nonetheless, I must say that my kids and I come home from a soccer game a very happy family.
Stephen H. Webb is a professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College. His recent books include American Providence and Taking Religion to School.
As far as I can tell from my travels, it is a purely home-grown American concept. And the people "blaming" it on soccer are projecting in the worst way.
Ahh yeah...Ice Fighting (a.k.a. Hockey)
Unnngh! You had to remind of hockey now that my Stars are in the tank.
Regardless of the sport I am sick of my kid coming home with a trophy or medal from every sport he participates in, regardless of wither they ever won a single game. Mementos and souvenirs are fine, that’s what the team picture is for, but the everybody needs a trophy to feel like a winner thing is ridiculous and only harms these kids down the road when they get in the real world and the boss does not give them a raise and bonus for just showing up.
Association football appeals to social levelers because the rules have been constructed (as many have here indicated) to minimise scoring opportunities. As such, those who oppose competition in principle found it congenial.
The anticompetitive types made common cause with the litigation-shy city recreation departments, who saw the risk of expensive lawsuits much reduced by embracing soccer. Couple this with a notable “white-flight” reluctance of many suburban parents to seek athletic activities for their children which would not pit them against “inner-city” teams, and it becomes clear why American association football represents much of what has gone wrong with American society in the last 40 years.
But, the bottom line remains, that it was the atmosphere surrounding association football in the U.S. that was objectionable, and that in turn was merely symptomatic of several deeper social problems. Association football itself is an eminently respectable sport wherever it is not a plank in some broader poltical agenda.
My Jackets are tearing it up this week; an 8-2 win at Detroit and a 2-0 win against the Bruins last night. We might actually see the post season this year.
If anything, the nature of the sport makes it harder to "level."
Kids who are first learning to play the game are completely capable of playing to 0-0 ties; I would venture to say that half of the games played by beginners end with scoreless ties.
Any low-scoring game is disproportionately likely to end in a tie.
This pleases social levelers greatly.
The fact that the game was equally foreign to almost all American children was considered another point in its favour by the social levelers who pushed association football in the U.S. in the 1970s—not only would the games be more likely to end in ties, the fact that none of the children knew the game and few had developed any of the important skills of the game made it additionally attractive to those who wished to put all the children on the same level.
Us and about six other teams, but we've lost six in a row at home.
I certainly wish the best for the Jackets, we still love Hitch down here.
So your problem appears to be more with tie scores rather than social-leveling. (Although I see why the social-levelers went after baseball with such a vengeance).
More of a historical accident, than anything . . . but still.
I am convinced that College Football overtime rules are part of a global communist conspiracy.
Thanks. Hitch is the best thing to ever happen to this team.
Soccer is where ‘everyone is a winner’ started. The sport anyone can do because even if you’re just standing on the field the people actually running around will eventually get back to that area of the field.
American rules football destroyed American interest in the development of association football. When it was reintroduced in the 1970s, it was essentially as a foreign import.
I don’t have a problem with soccer. I have a problem with what it meant to a lot of its original advocates—lots of tie games and no one is measurably better than anyone else.
The ties were a symptom (and desired result) of this thinking, not the underlying problem.
All I am pointing out is that is why most American men are never going to be interested in it.
There are other reasons too. We already have three major sports that are American-made. How many people are going to play a European sport when it means you have to drop one of the other native games?
Chalk onto it the stigma of ‘everyone’s a winner’ and that just isn’t appealing to most goal-driven people in the US.
I think there’s two big problem Europe has embracing American football.
The first is that it’s American and it’s an important part of the European psyche to reject all American things.
The second is that when we tried to give them some football it was a pathetic minor league. American football is one of those sport that really doesn’t work well in the minors. Most other sports when two fairly evenly matched teams play the game is pretty entertaining, might not be the crispest and most dynamic play anybody has ever seen but it’s fun. Anybody that’s ever seen bad NFL teams (like the old “bay of pigs” days of Green Bay vs Tampa for instance) knows that when two bad football teams play it sucks. I think it’s because football is such a timing oriented game, if somebody is in the wrong place at the wrong time the whole play falls apart. I tried watching NFL Europe games and they were just bad, they were worse than 4th quarter pre-season NFL ball, I don’t blame the Europeans for not going.
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