Posted on 06/04/2002 10:08:50 AM PDT by GulliverSwift
I remember watching an episode of the Simpsons where the family saw an advertisement on TV for an exhibition soccer game at Springfield Stadium. The whole family was excited: "Yeah!!!"
So they went to the game, and all the characters, Crusty, Moe, the Simpsons, etc, were there. The teams were South American and you could hear the announcer calling the play-by-play with a Spanish accent.
The crowd was excited and cheering at first. And the Mexican announcer was excited the whole time as he said,
"He kicks the ball to Sanchez! He kicks the ball to Rodrigez! He kicks the ball to Sanchez! He kicks the ball to Rodrigez! He kicks the ball to Sanchez!"
The announcer's voice was shouting with anticipation as he described the exciting action of Sanchez and Rodrigez passing the ball back and forth (sounds like great World Cup action). The crowd was excited at first, but after four minutes, they fell silent. Then Homer shouted out, "Boring!!!"
To any of you Eurotrash, now you know why we can't stand soccer, or "football" as you Euro-femmes call it. It's BORING. Our football, the real football, is an improvement on the feminine type. Basketball is inovative, baseball is inovative, but soccer.... You kick the @$#&% ball back and forth for two hours--lots of drama!!!!.......and the score is 1-0.
Whew, with action like that, I don't know if I can keep from fainting!
The only reason why soccer is around the world is because of British and Spanish colonialism. We booted the Brits out before the bland game could be invented, and Brits being the boring females that they are, invented a game where you are required to kick a ball for 30 minutes before scoring a point.
So you may be wondering why the soccer "craze" hasn't caught on in the only country where men have more swimming clothes on their body than women. It's because we've got games that actually took creativity and innovation to invent.
If we wanted to be bored with something that's two hours and results in a score of 1-0, we'd watch a featherweight boxing match. Or a debate between Al Gore and George Bush.
Who do I want to win? Portugal or the U.S.?
I DON'T CARE!!
I foundly remember the days of my ill-behaved soccer team full of ex-pat Brits showing up at fields to play right after the safe "little league" games were done.
Reality is but a fleeting moment to these Martha Stewart worshippers.
It just seems to me that it would have required some form of coordination and promotion to have become (apparantly) a fact of life in 10 short years. I mean one or two families here and there aren't really enough to put together a youth soccer league. The idea came from somewhere and was promoted- there had to be enough people interested in such a thing to have created soccer leagues with teams and uniforms. And that interest would have had to cancel out Little League Baseball (presumedly- hence the term soccer mom). Who first coined this phrase? When do you remember first hearing it?
[I}t has made the amateur soccer world something close to the antithesis of the case in England and elsewhere. In America, soccer is essentially a stultifyingly safe and politically correct suburban past-time. As a New York Times writer recently bemoaned, "The game in the U.S. has become shorthand for happy families. A typical ad, which once might have taken baseball as a symbol of upper-middle-class values, now features a beaming child kicking a ball, with a text that begins: 'While Jessica takes an afternoon off to focus on scoring goals, her parents' Financial Advisor at Merrill Lynch focuses on meeting her family's goals.' The American game has come to be seen as a protective mother's heaven: nonviolent, suitable for children and female-friendly." It's perhaps no wonder that the next generation of ambitious young male American athletes would rather pick up a baseball bat or watch the superbowl. Even golf is more macho than soccer.
I get two more observations from his article: 1) Title 9 looks a like the Russian and East German sports programs of the Cold War era, a sustained government plan to develop sport for prestige and political reasons, hopefully without all the steroids and 2) intelligent agents of hegemonic America will have to at least feign an interest in soccer.
Whew, they won 3-2. No wonder everyone fights in the stands, it's the only way to make the game interesting.
During a basketball game, for example, there's always something going on (unless it's a blowout). Something important is always happening.
In soccer, though, you can bash a beer bottle over the head of the guy beside you, push the fatty in front of you, and head butt the German behind you, and still nothing will have happened during the game. A guy can knee you in the back, a boy can throw soda at you, and the score will still be 1-2. After 45 minutes of getting your @$% kicked, you decide to look up to see how the game's doing, it's 1-2.
So I guess I don't blame them for fighting. It's the Europeans' way of compensation, kind of like viagra.
Give me break, please, international rugby is played by the men of appropriate size and speed, wearing pads is (like gun-control) simply a wrong idea which actually results in more injuries.
Just out of curiosity, how well can the Saudis play wearing their thobe? Or, do they hire "football mercenaries"? (grin)
Go Ireland!
I think I start to be pretty clear on all that- I just aint connecting the dots on where soccer entered the picture. Like I said- I had never heard the term "soccer mom" when I left, and soccer wasn't that popular either. It still would've been Little League baseball. How did this demographic group sieze upon soccer as their sport du jour?
It just seems to me that it would have required some form of coordination and promotion to have become (apparantly) a fact of life in 10 short years. I mean one or two families here and there aren't really enough to put together a youth soccer league. The idea came from somewhere and was promoted- there had to be enough people interested in such a thing to have created soccer leagues with teams and uniforms. And that interest would have had to cancel out Little League Baseball (presumedly- hence the term soccer mom). Who first coined this phrase? When do you remember first hearing it?
One other thing - soccer moms used to all drive minivans, and a lot still do. They're behind the big popularity rise of the SUV, though.
Well, to be honest, I don't know why they settled upon soccer, or why it happened all of a sudden. I started to hear the term bandied about shortly before the four-year mark of the Late Great Unpleasantness.
My hypothesis is that this generation of women are the first to really be the result of full post-1960s upbringing. I mean, they were schooled from the mid 1970's onward, when the liberal-social-engineer educrats had finally had their hand fully on the tiller, so to speak.
I also hypothesize that they settled upon "soccer" because it didn't already have a tradition built around it, and they could make it androgynous, "safe," non-competitive (trophies for everyone), etc. Most other children's sports in America already have a tradition built up, and breaking the old traditions then re-casting it in their squishy mold would be met with too much resistance. (Especially in ice hockey or American football, but I digress...) So, soccer was promoted to young mothers as this wonderful sport, and they enrolled their children and demanded school soccer teams and so forth. The pre-existing soccer professionals were likely to have been floored by this attention, and just so happy to have someone to coach that they didn't see the social implications.
It is only recently that I've ever heard Americans dis' soccer. Contrary to popular conservative belief it is NOT political and has as little to do with liberalism as does belly button lint. Nobody ever told me it was a gay sport when I was a kid yet I come from an ultra conservative background. Having played it as a child in pickup games, I can say that it is just as physically demanding as many other sports and I really don't understand the animus one sees towards the sport here on FR. The US military certainly aren't "girly men" but that was one of our favorite sports to play for PT- probably for the same reason it is popular throughout the world- it's cheap and you don't need anything more than a ball. I know nobody on this board is going to call the US Army a bunch of wimps because they like soccer.
I'm sure you're right. The thousands of football players, coaches and trainers who have been doing it for the past few decades have probably got it wrong. Based on your advice, I think the NFL will probably go no pads and helmets as early as next season. Thanks for setting us straight on that.
Sorry, repost: Sure they will kill each other because nobody simply knows how to tackle, it is just another proof of how horribly screwed up Americal Football is comparing to Rugby Football. And, hey, I am always right.
Soccer was chosen mainly because it is non violent and non-threatening to women.
Don't you know they're being forced at gunpoint to wake up at 2 am and watch it?!?!?!?
Seriously, my friends that aren't into soccer just don't realize it's on. Probably due to the fact that they're sleeping during the live games and working during the same day replays.
These people who say that they just can't escape soccer matches that are on in the dead of night, then get on FR to start a thread about how much they hate soccer, then defend their point of view through 400 posts....
Well, there's something else happening there besides "I just don't like soccer."
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