Posted on 05/31/2002 9:28:33 AM PDT by xsysmgr
The most-watched sporting event in the world has begun, and most of my fellow conservatives in America are going to miss it.
While some of you no doubt are thinking that the Super Bowl and World Series are both months away, the event I'm referring to is the World Cup of Soccer, watched by an estimated 3.5 billion people around the world, including millions in the United States, almost all of whom are apparently liberals.
As a movement conservative and rabid fan of the beautiful game (that's soccer, by the way), I find myself as something of a de facto missionary for the sport to the political and cultural right. What is it about soccer that makes it (in America) the nearly exclusive domain of liberal sports fans?
Growing up in Ohio, I started following the game at age 12 via the weekly PBS program (should have tipped me off right then) Soccer Made in Germany, which featured a condensed match segment accompanied by English commentary. Youth leagues were just getting started in our part of the state, and my interest grew as I started coaching kids and playing in high school, but even then it was made clear that I was involved in an outsiders' game in a conservative area.
When I took an announcement of a big victory to my high-school principal one morning, I was greeted with a dismissive glare — it's not a real sport, after all. When my coach, the parish priest in a mostly Catholic town (and thus the only person for whom it was acceptable to be a fan) threw a party to view the 1982 World Cup championship match, only three players showed up. Once, before an afternoon match, my mom informed me that if I didn't cut the grass beforehand, I couldn't go to my own game. Does the high-school quarterback have to mow the lawn before his games?
As I became a more avid follower of the game during the '90s, I started wondering why all the soccer fans I was meeting were political and cultural liberals. I had moved to Washington, D.C. in 1994 to work for a member of Congress, and even the fans from the midwest, south, and west I was coming across via the vast and intricate underground soccer network (it exists, trust me) tended to be liberals. With conventional media coverage of soccer not abundant in America, soccer fans turn to the Internet for information. But a casual survey on the preeminent web gathering place for American fanatics — bigsoccer.com — again demonstrates an overwhelming presence of liberals among the rank and file. If I deign, on the other hand, to ask a fellow conservative about the game, I am treated to the usual pejorative responses.
For the uninitiated (those of you who don't persecute soccer, but just tolerate those who persecute it), such responses include "Soccer is not a real sport"; "Soccer is for girls"; "Soccer is a Commie game"; "Soccer is boring"; and the most damning of all, "So… you watch soccer… ?"
It is fair to note that soccer has had very mixed reviews from the American public in general, not just from conservatives. While the sport as a national youth activity has grown by leaps and bounds (an estimated eight million children are playing this year), the professional game has struggled to catch on. The U.S. went for almost 15 years without a top-flight professional league, and only time will tell if major-league soccer, the well organized and energetic effort to establish such a league here, will become an American institution. Soccer's TV ratings in the U.S. are low. While the women's national team attracted a lot of attention when they won the Women's World Cup in 1999, fan interest in that appears to have been quite specific to that event, much as it was for the Men's World Cup held here in 1994.
The main drawback to soccer for "traditional Americans" is that it is a game requiring some patience to appreciate. Baseball, the thinking man's game, has been affected by this national attention-span deficit to some degree, and traditionalists bemoan how the channel-surfing highlight culture has hurt the game. Turn on a soccer match and you are not likely to see something spectacular immediately (it's kind of like a Rembrandt in that way). While the seasoned fan can recognize the difficulty and artistry of a lengthy and complex buildup to an attempt at goal — often unsuccessful — much of modern-day, sports-viewing America wants feverish action, and wants it now.
There is, of course, huge interest in the game among many of our immigrant communities. Fans follow their homeland teams via satellite and cable telecasts of matches from abroad. In some cities, thousands of fans will gather at a theatre or recreational center to watch a closed-circuit pay-per-view match from South America, Africa, or Asia. Go as an American to a viewing place with a predominantly foreign clientele and you will still draw looks of surprise that a "Yank" or "gringo" would be interested in "their" game.
This perhaps touches near the heart of the issue for a lot of conservatives. Americans have typically come up with their own games to dominate. We invented football (even taking "soccer's" proper name and redefining it to an almost Orwellian degree), basketball, and baseball and made those our major sports. To the degree that these are played and/or followed elsewhere, they are American exports. While baseball is popular in Japan and parts of Latin America, and basketball in Europe and Australia, they are still "American" games first and foremost. Soccer will never be that. In fact, American football in part began, as legend has it, when a game of "soccer" became too boring, prompting a player to pick up the ball and begin running with it, and the rest is gridiron "pointyball" history.
Golf and tennis are also "foreign" in their origins, but they are not linked as closely to their international roots as soccer, and at any rate already had made deep inroads in the American cultural establishment by the early 20th century.
While eschewing anything deemed international or, worse, "European" suits the isolationist streak among certain conservatives, it seems to me that a much more proper Ameri-centric response would be to embrace the game for the purpose of demonstrating American superiority through it. For instance, doesn't saying "We play the best football in the world" kind of have a hollow ring to it? I mean, who else is there? But if the U.S. were to produce professional soccer leagues that rivaled those in Italy, Spain, England and Germany, and a national team that could defeat the likes of Brazil, Argentina, and France, how much crow would the internationalists have to eat then?
To be honest, my attraction to soccer is just that I like the game. But if the lure of American superiority is enough to get you interested in the game (kind of like when Americans get interested in things like bobsledding and Greco-Roman wrestling during the Olympics), so be it.
The time is ripe. Following the explosion of youth leagues, the quality of the American player development system has improved exponentially. We are even making some inroads on the rosters of clubs in England, France, Germany, and Holland. If American conservatives dedicate themselves to backing American soccer, the resultant energy and optimistic buzz might just push the U.S. men's national team to the final rounds of this summer's World Cup, or at least lower the percentage of the fans sitting next to me who voted for Mondale, Dukakis, and Gore. Help a brother out already! Strike a blow for federalism, apple pie, and the gold standard, and make a commitment to watch the World Cup this June.
By the way, the matches, played in South Korea and Japan, are airing live at 2:30 a.m., 5 a.m., and 7:30 a.m. EST. Happy viewing.
— Robert Ziegler lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and children, and directs media relations for a nonprofit public-policy group.
How, yawn, clever.....don't football players play in tights?
I love soccer. I've played the game, coached it, and now, my children play it. (BTW: they love the game too.)
Is it boring? I don't think so. There is grace, teamwork, flashes of individual brilliance -- and more -- in every match at every level. You just gotta know what to look for.
What I don't understand is why some people (including those in this forum, apparently) think it has to be a competition about which sport is best. Do I think baseball is boring? Yes. Do I think golf is boring? Yes. Do I slam those who watch it? No.
Come on, FReepers. Let's see some toleration. After all, it's only a game.
A fun game to play as a kid. That's it.
BWAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHAAA
Wrong. Football was invented when American college boys, playing rugby, got tired of getting kicked in the face while down and losing their teeth. They ruled that play stopped when a player was down, which is sensible and which proves we're more civilized than the British. Then, to eliminate constant scrums, they instituted the down and distance system, and the rest is history. From that point, the forward pass has been the only other revolutionary departure.
Soccer is boring, but so are golf, baseball, auto racing, equestrian sports, and NBA regular season games. So I won't hold boring against it; some people seem to like tedium, and I don't have to watch.
When I put on my sports-purist hat, however, what does bother me about soccer is too many games (not to mention tournament games and championships) being decided by penalty kicks and/or those shootoffs (or whatever they're called) to break ties. It is as if basketball games routinely ended up tied and we settled on a freethrow shooting contest to decide the matter. A little more scoring would solve the problem.
I say this as a fan of defense. I loathe the designated hitter, the shot clock, the three point shot, etc. But soccer is overbalanced the other way. Probably all they would have to do is expand the goal a foot or two to turn boring 1-1 ties-with-shootouts into exciting 9-7 type games.
Hillarious. Someone who enjoys watching people drive around in a circle 500 times calls another sport gay....
I can understand someone being indifferent to a sport, but I don't understand the outright hostility that some show towards a sport.....
Soccer really is a great game. It does require some smarts and creativity, though.
You bet. A helluva lot better than 12 minutes of the ball in play during a 3-4 hour pointyball borefest.
However, soccer is not a popular spectator sport in the USA because, in my opinion, soccer has been "solved." The fact that the woman's world championship soccer game was decided on a penalty kick after a 0-0 tie proved to me that professional soccer teams have learned to be skilled enough, strong enough, and have enough endurance to prevent the other team from winning. They have simply figured everything out, and that's about it. Soccer has simply become to easy for the pros. Thus, I think the solution is simply to make the field smaller and force the game to be more fast paced. Hockey operates on the same principles as soccer, but it doesn't suffer from the same "slowness" stigma.
The lack of popularity among Americans when it comes to international play is simply that you can't really go to see any of the "away games" to root on the USA. It's easy for the British football hooligans to travel from country to country in Europe cheering on their country. In the USA, you're stuck hopping on a flight across the Atlantic if you want to do that.
Do baseball and golf fans write editorials criticizing people who are not fans of the sport? No. Do they criticize and belittle people who dont like the sport? No. Do they question the mental capacity and "culture" of those that don't like the sports? No.
Do soccer fans do all of the above and more? Yes.
A very close friend is Dutch by birth (came to Canada 20 years ago) and I watched the recent European Cup matches with him at the local pub. The team from his hometown won in the end so he was a very motivated viewer. With the help of someone who could explain the game as it was being played I realized that soccer, like Formula 1 racing, can be very exciting if you pay attention to the nuances of on-field play, the strategies employed to set up breaks, substitutions etc. I agree that it doesn't posses the raw excitement of North American sports, and I can never imagine a game having the intensity of playoff hockey, but there's a lot there if you're willing to take the time to watch.
Only real issue I still have with the sport is ending a tied game with penalty kicks. I say make them play till they drop.
Any mediocrity can play and look good; thats why its so popular with housewives; their kids can play and run around and suck and not stand out.
It's simple, monotonous, beauracratic, mundane. Its socialistic.
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