America's Soccer Isolationism-Is Football An Omen? (Mega Hurl Alert-Hooligan 'Urine Bomb' Style)

Andrew Sullivan VIA London Times ^ | June 2, 2002 | Robert Samuelson

[codebreaker]

Link

More U.S. bashing from overseas on our foriegn policy and how it relates to the World Cup Tourney.

I think Andrew Sullivan somewhat agrees.

[gcruse]

America's Soccer Isolationism
Is football an omen?

Yes, the World Cup fans are getting ready in the United States as well. The Mexico games will be watched closely in Southern California; the Ireland games will be on above a few bars in Boston; beleaguered ex-pat Brits will be getting themselves out of bed at 5am in New York City before heading to the trading floor. But actual, real, living, breathing, non-green-card Americans? For them, the more pertinent question is: "What World Cup?"

America already has, you see, a World Series. Every run-down diner in Philadelphia and Baltimore has a "World-famous" cheese-steak sub sandwich. But the World Cup? It has as much traction in this country - if fewer Slovenian drag-queens - than the Eurovision Song Contest. As the rest of the entire world is glued to the telly, the one country with more actual responsibility for the world has no idea what's going on. It's hard not to remember the infamous old newspaper headline, summing up British isolationism in Europe: "Fog In Channel. Continent Cut Off." Only the right message this time would be: "Football On Television. America In Orbit Around Planet Earth."

Except, of course, you can't even call it football. Though American football is clearly derivative, it's just 'football' in America. The other game, where people kick a round ball toward a goal, is known as soccer. And then barely. The mother of Clint Mathis, the American team's sole star player, recalls her son's early years in the sport. ''I remember the first time my oldest son signed up for the youth league,'' she told the New York Times. ''I knew so little about it that I wrote down 'soccer' in my date book, only I spelled it 's-o-c-k-e-r.' ''

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Eight years' ago, after all, the United States hosted the tournament. It was part of a concerted effort by football enthusiasts in the U.S. to try and jump-start America's love-affair with the game. It didn't work. Despite a team that made it into the last 16, despite mounds of advertizing, marketing and promotion, it came and went leaving barely a residue beind. There are still only ten Major League Soccer teams in the entire country - and six of them are owned by the same man. The starting salary for a professional player is just L18,000. Despite this, the league has still lost a reputed $250 million in six years.

Worse, the game is seen by many as too feminized to attract a generation of young boys and teenagers. The United States Women's Football team is the best in the world; and it's a function of aggressive fostering - often by government-mandated sex equality regulations in school sports - of soccer for girls across America. Americans are rightly proud of this (although the achievement might have escaped your attention, as it has that of many Americans'.) But it 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.

These cultural resonances are, it seems, part of the American national DNA. This is a sports-crazy country, but it is also one convinced of its own exceptionalism. The myopia is sometimes remarkable. Baseball, for example, is treated as a desperately serious topic by distinguished writers, columnists and even presidents. At the same time, cricket is an object of unremitting mockery. Equally, the Americans don't feel left out of the World Cup. They are merely indifferent to it. This legacy of a long history of cultural separation from the old world is not one that will ever be easily expunged.

But now, increasingly, it seems a symbol of something else. This country that essentially runs the world is still somehow not culturally a part of it. America aborbs the rest of the world in ways no other country does - by waves of immigration that continue to this day. But the paradox is that it makes out of this multicultural soup a distinct culture, that is hard for outsiders to fully understand and stranger than most Americans are willing to concede. This difference is one reason why America does its global work so well - because it is recognized as distinct from the power-politics of the old powers. It's why it was able to rebuild Europe after the Second World War without really wanting a permanent stake in it, why it was able to win a Cold War and welcome Russia into NATO shortly afterward.

But this exceptionalism is also why the bafflement between Americans and everyone else is real and difficult and sometimes dangerously close to chronic misunderstanding. Football both divides the world into ferocious nationalisms, but it also unites them. America is not a part of that cultural, emotional unification, an enterprise that genuinely does bring together the boy in Tehran and the teenager in Glasgow or Buenos Aires. Even Osama bin Laden understood soccer more intuitively than baseball-fan president Bush. When you're a separate great power, that makes some international interactions tricky. When you're the hegemon, the Imperial Power in all but name, the cultural gulf can lead to misjudgement, errors, and simple lack of empathy. This goes both ways, of course. Only Japan and Cuba seem to have taken to baseball. And American football must seem like Star Wars to an average soccer fan in Cameroon. But the gulf between America and the world - symbolized by football - is a real and worrisome one. If unchecked, it can lead to own goals.

[hole_n_one]

Direct link to article is here

Are you and blam drunk?........lol!

[socal_parrot]

It's our world! Hell, we're paying for it.

[gcruse]

The starting salary for a professional player is just L18,000.

No wonder soccer is slow to take off here.
Who wants to work for lira?

[winodog]

One day all your soccer bases will belong to US of A

[hole_n_one]

*

[gcruse]

 But the gulf between America and the world - symbolized by
 football - is a real and worrisome one

Look at it this way.  If we took up soccer seriously,
we would become the champions at it so often as
to engender nationalistic hatred and envy.  Be glad
we don't piddle in their puddle.

[codebreaker]

And Jim Rome likes to call it 'succer..'

[Brett66]

America is not a part of that cultural, emotional unification, an enterprise that genuinely does bring together the boy in Tehran and the teenager in Glasgow or Buenos Aires.

If soccer does this, then I'm all for it. I'd love for us to show up at a soccer match, get drunk and beat the hell out of some Iranians. We might as well join the rest of the rioters.

[codebreaker]

All the Americans are getting paid nothing for competing as well.

[codebreaker]

LOL! Gotta love those wacky hooligans..

[Dan from Michigan]

I don't have a problem with that article. I agree. The suburban part especially.

[gcruse]

                   REVIEW & OUTLOOK
                   The Other Football

                   World Cup fever is upon us. One of our colleagues reports from
                   Greenwich Village that his usually silent upstairs neighbors now keep
                   him up through the dawn hours with shrieks and pounding feet. All over
                   New York -- 13 time zones away from World Cup action in South
                   Korea and Japan -- the city's international denizens are filling bars,
                   bakeries, apartments and restaurants to watch games that air locally at 3
                   a.m. and 5 a.m. Soccer fans on the West Coast can get a bit more
                   sleep. What all this does for the productivity index we don't know, but
                   someone sure is having fun.

                   How to explain this strange obsession to Americans? While soccer has
                   its fans (and their moms) in the U.S., most Americans seem unswayed
                   by the passions that left Frenchmen weeping in Manhattan streets after
                   France's defeat by upstart Senegal, or that had one Spanish supermom
                   we know contemplating (temporarily) abandoning her first-born child to
                   watch the Brazil-Turkey match at 4 a.m.

                   Bliss it is for World Cup fans to be alive. As with the Olympics, part of
                   the appeal surely has to do with the meritocracy of sports. The game of
                   nations is often won by deceit and treachery but the game of soccer is
                   won by skill and talent capitalizing on unpredictability. Small nations
                   trounce big ones, ancient feuds are avenged.

                   It's the unpredictability, of course, that makes dictatorships almost as
                   nervous about sports matches as they are about democracy. The World
                   Cup is an event they can't control, and repressive powers everywhere
                   rely on absolute control of events. That's why North Koreans can
                   watch only selected, taped excerpts of games taking place a few miles
                   to the south. In Beijing, the authorities closely monitored students
                   watching China's defeat by Costa Rica, lest they gain some dangerous
                   notions.

                   We wish the Chinese and the North Koreans many more soccer games.
                   And to freedom-loving "football" fans around the globe we can only say
                   . . . Go-aal!

                   Updated June 5, 2002
 

[luvbach1]

Seven million kids and youth are playing soccer (I'll be damned if I'll call it football) in the USA. It is only a matter of time before the US takes the world cup. As for the comparison of cricket and baseball, when cricket develops its first Babe Ruth it will have taken a baby step toward parity with baseball which, even in its decline, has an unmatched lore and pantheon of famous and colorful players that cricket (or soccer, for that matter)will never match. Catch USA against Portugal tonight, 5 am EST.

[codebreaker]

And that is the crux of it-Americans do not like to be considered 'the same' as Cameroon..we are not.

The Olympics is quite enough of that stuff and no amount of PR will change it.

[gcruse]

no amount of PR will change it.

Lord knows, they try.

To me, ice hockey is sorta like
soccer only on ice.  When I lived in Canada,
I tried to get into hockey and managed to
only a little.  The closest I got was living
in San Jose when the Sharks had their
heyday.  Try as I might, I cannot get
interested in soccer.  It bores me blind.

[THX 1138]

This is a sports-crazy country, but it is also one convinced of its own exceptionalism.

That's because we are exceptional, dinkweed.

[al-andalus]

Yes, we are exceptional. I've lived aboad many years and have tried earnestly to get into soccer, but I just can't. About all I've managed to do is cultivate an interest in certain teams, i.e. checking the sports pages to see who won. But as far as actually sitting on a hard bench seat and watching 90 minutes of the stuff...or, even worse, watching it on TV with those wacky little commercials they run over the nonstop 'action' is pretty near impossible for a native-born American.

[LWalk18]

For a sport that the majority here on Free Republic find boring and insignificant, at least to Americans, it sure has inspired a lot of lengthy threads within the last few days.