All this technico-political blather about soccer and America has made me desperate to talk about something purely artistic, in a more compressed, specific way that is less likely to get caught up in vast cultural nets. So let me start what I think (as I'm writing this sentence) will be an occasional blog series where I'll "close-listen" to my favorite songs of all time. I shall call this series Track-Flayer, in honor of the almost certain and doubtlessly icky injustices I will commit against great songs by subjecting them to hyper-analytic commentary.
First up, just cause I feel like it: The Dismemberment Plan's "Ellen and Ben." It's a happy choice because I've wanted to dedicate one of my first posts in this new effort to Mr. Jef Samp, who got me blogging and hosted both of my previous blogs, and also happened to get me into The Dismemberment Plan, a glorious D.C. pop-punk band that ripped us all a new music-hole from 1993-2003. You can read more about them here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dismemberment_Plan
But, unlike writers on certain music sites (cough, cough) I don't want my reviews in this series to have much do to either with band biography or my personal biography, except where it's particularly relevant. I'm an old-fashioned New Critic, damn it, and I don't care about much except the text (or in this case the song), and I think things are actually true about it, and that certain texts can actually be better than others, and I hate you "po-mo" youngsters taking scare quotes to my argumentative mailbox. Get off my property!
First of all, logistics: if you don't know this amazing song, you can listen to it here
or just get the mp3 for $0.99 from various places, or for $0.00 from places you may know, but I'm not privy to any more in my old age. I'll give you a couple days to listen to the song a few times (like I said, it's an amazing song, so it shouldn't be so bad), and then I'll follow up with my thoughts.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Coda: Possible Rule Changes to Soccer.
Now, some of Americans' dissatisfactions with soccer could never be allayed by changes to the game. I can't see how the lack of fine-grainedness in scoring, for example, could ever be fixed without changing the game utterly, nor do I think it should be. One of the best features of soccer is how all-important a single goal can be, and Americans can appreciate that. But most of them, I think, could be solved with simple rule changes that I'm shocked haven't already been made (but I realize that's my idiosyncratic American shock at the refusal of a deeply traditional game to innovate). Here are the five simple rule changes that I think would turn soccer into a much more appealing sport, especially to Americans.
1. A public game clock that stops.
2. Instant replay.
3. Severe penalties for flopping.
4. More substitutions.
5. Games decided in overtimes, not on penalty kicks.
1. It's so simple that it sounds like a truism to most Americans, but if you have a timed game, you should have an official timer, and an official time kept on a scoreboard for everyone to see. And that clock should always stop when play is not going on. If there were a person whose job it was to instantly stop the clock when the ball is kicked out of bounds, when a player goes down with an injury, when a foul is called, so many problems would be solved, and so much more drama would be created. Time-wasting tactics would end, because the clock would stop if you faked an injury, and the clock would already be stopped while you were taking your sweet time setting up a free kick. On the other hand, when a team, and the crowd, knows there are exactly 28 seconds left in a game, it creates a drama and urgency that the ends of soccer games don't always have.
2. Instant replay would end a lot of the ugly flopping and cheating (not to mention bad offsides calls), and ensure that a big game is not decided on one bad call. If coaches had a challenge option as they do in American football, where they have, say, three red flags they can throw during the game if they think their player was fouled, was actually onside, or an opposing player flopped, that would immediately discourage all the shady dealing that goes on, and ensure that the big, important calls are gotten right.
3. Nobody would flop if they knew that, if they were caught, they'd get a red card. So make flopping a red card offense; in combination with instant replay, that will scare players out of dishonesty, because the penalties would be too great. Alternatively, institute a rule that if a player is down for more than one minute, he must be removed from the game and replaced with a substitute. I bet you'd see a lot of players getting up faster from their supposedly life-threatening injuries if you did that, and viewers would thank you for lessening the time they have to watch a guy writhe on the ground in fake pain.
4. Why not allow unlimited substitutions in soccer? In ice hockey, teams manage to sub players in and out without clock stoppage, and it's actually kind of fun to watch them execute a line change. If not unlimited, why not, say, 10 per game? It would vastly improve the quality of play in the late game--instead of a bunch of incredibly tired players wasting time and generally playing slow, careless, boring soccer, you've got a bunch of fresh subs doing their damnedest to tie the game, or preserve a victory. Plus, you'd add a lot of strategy, in that with more substitutions, you could bring in more specialized subs; coaches and fans would have a lot more to think about and discuss.
5. Penalty kicks are dumb. The game of soccer should be decided by soccer. Play sudden-death overtime after sudden-death overtime until someone scores a winning goal. It's important to note, though, that the implementation of this change relies on change 4 above. The reason you can't play endless overtimes in soccer now is that most players are dead tired after a couple of them. But, with more subs (and additional subs allowed for each overtime period), you can play forever. And even if you end up with really tired players after 5 or 6 overtimes, what's so bad about that? The fittest team, the one that can play decent soccer the longest, will win, which is fine by me. Other than eliminating penalty kicks, the great thing endless overtimes would do is put a stop to the kind of carelessness you see in soccer overtimes currently, where all the exhausted players are just kind of treading water, trying not to lose, because they know penalty kicks are coming. If they know that they have to actually score a goal to win, they'll play much more exciting soccer.
Will these changes happen? Probably not. As I said, soccer is a deeply traditionalist sport, and deeply resistant to change, unlike American sports. But, hey, for all I've said, soccer's okay the way it is, at least as I personally am concerned. I love the sport--it has so much tension, so much amazing athleticism and skill, so much heroism--and will continue to watch it and cheer for my teams. It just could be so much better, and could really appeal to Americans as a whole, and it kills me when I contemplate how few and minor the changes are that would accomplish that, and yet soccer's unwillingness to change at all. For me, soccer is like an underachieving, alcoholic uncle who I'm rooting for nonetheless because he's got a great heart.
Tell me your ideas for changing soccer, and your personal feelings about soccer as it is, and then we'll move on to new topics (yay)!
1. A public game clock that stops.
2. Instant replay.
3. Severe penalties for flopping.
4. More substitutions.
5. Games decided in overtimes, not on penalty kicks.
1. It's so simple that it sounds like a truism to most Americans, but if you have a timed game, you should have an official timer, and an official time kept on a scoreboard for everyone to see. And that clock should always stop when play is not going on. If there were a person whose job it was to instantly stop the clock when the ball is kicked out of bounds, when a player goes down with an injury, when a foul is called, so many problems would be solved, and so much more drama would be created. Time-wasting tactics would end, because the clock would stop if you faked an injury, and the clock would already be stopped while you were taking your sweet time setting up a free kick. On the other hand, when a team, and the crowd, knows there are exactly 28 seconds left in a game, it creates a drama and urgency that the ends of soccer games don't always have.
2. Instant replay would end a lot of the ugly flopping and cheating (not to mention bad offsides calls), and ensure that a big game is not decided on one bad call. If coaches had a challenge option as they do in American football, where they have, say, three red flags they can throw during the game if they think their player was fouled, was actually onside, or an opposing player flopped, that would immediately discourage all the shady dealing that goes on, and ensure that the big, important calls are gotten right.
3. Nobody would flop if they knew that, if they were caught, they'd get a red card. So make flopping a red card offense; in combination with instant replay, that will scare players out of dishonesty, because the penalties would be too great. Alternatively, institute a rule that if a player is down for more than one minute, he must be removed from the game and replaced with a substitute. I bet you'd see a lot of players getting up faster from their supposedly life-threatening injuries if you did that, and viewers would thank you for lessening the time they have to watch a guy writhe on the ground in fake pain.
4. Why not allow unlimited substitutions in soccer? In ice hockey, teams manage to sub players in and out without clock stoppage, and it's actually kind of fun to watch them execute a line change. If not unlimited, why not, say, 10 per game? It would vastly improve the quality of play in the late game--instead of a bunch of incredibly tired players wasting time and generally playing slow, careless, boring soccer, you've got a bunch of fresh subs doing their damnedest to tie the game, or preserve a victory. Plus, you'd add a lot of strategy, in that with more substitutions, you could bring in more specialized subs; coaches and fans would have a lot more to think about and discuss.
5. Penalty kicks are dumb. The game of soccer should be decided by soccer. Play sudden-death overtime after sudden-death overtime until someone scores a winning goal. It's important to note, though, that the implementation of this change relies on change 4 above. The reason you can't play endless overtimes in soccer now is that most players are dead tired after a couple of them. But, with more subs (and additional subs allowed for each overtime period), you can play forever. And even if you end up with really tired players after 5 or 6 overtimes, what's so bad about that? The fittest team, the one that can play decent soccer the longest, will win, which is fine by me. Other than eliminating penalty kicks, the great thing endless overtimes would do is put a stop to the kind of carelessness you see in soccer overtimes currently, where all the exhausted players are just kind of treading water, trying not to lose, because they know penalty kicks are coming. If they know that they have to actually score a goal to win, they'll play much more exciting soccer.
Will these changes happen? Probably not. As I said, soccer is a deeply traditionalist sport, and deeply resistant to change, unlike American sports. But, hey, for all I've said, soccer's okay the way it is, at least as I personally am concerned. I love the sport--it has so much tension, so much amazing athleticism and skill, so much heroism--and will continue to watch it and cheer for my teams. It just could be so much better, and could really appeal to Americans as a whole, and it kills me when I contemplate how few and minor the changes are that would accomplish that, and yet soccer's unwillingness to change at all. For me, soccer is like an underachieving, alcoholic uncle who I'm rooting for nonetheless because he's got a great heart.
Tell me your ideas for changing soccer, and your personal feelings about soccer as it is, and then we'll move on to new topics (yay)!
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Soccer and America, Part III, Sub-Part III
Let's end up the argument, shall we? (I'm actually interested in other things than soccer, and am as eager as you probably are to move on.) This last point doesn't take much proving. I'll hit you with a couple obvious examples, and then move on to a coda, where I'll discuss rule changes that soccer might make (but won't) to appeal to more people in general, and Americans specifically.
3. Americans like their athletes to be strong, manly, honest, and sportsmanlike.
The best example of how soccer fails this test miserably is also, I think, the biggest reason that Americans detest soccer:
Flopping.
Americans, despite themselves, can really get into a soccer game, the back-and-forth, the drama, the athleticism; but then some colossal dipshit gets nicked in the shin (or, often, isn't touched at all), takes a massive dive, and pretends he's broken five bones and is in incredible, unutterable pain. For five minutes. Until he's miraculously just fine, and running around the field like nothing happened. This fails every test of the athlete for Americans: the athlete should be strong and manly (oops, he's crying like a baby), the athlete should be honest (oops, he's faking an injury), the athlete should be sportsmanlike (oops, he's engaging in one of the most odious forms of gamesmanship--see definition of "gamesmanship" below).
Yes, there is flopping in some American sports (basketball, in my opinion the weakest and most problematic of the three major American sports, is again the closest to soccer here in that players do flop a fair amount). But American sports don't produce flops on anywhere near the scale of soccer. It's just the opposite, in fact: Americans love sports where players pretend they're NOT feeling pain, even when they are. We like a baseball player, when he's just been hit by a 90-mile-per-hour fastball, to pretend like nothing's happened and calmly jog to first base. We like Curt Schilling's bloody sock. We like a hobbled Kirk Gibson hitting a home run and limping around the bases. We like Kerri Strug nailing a landing on a severely damaged leg. Our football players take massive, bone-crushing hits (and often play with broken bones, sprains, and so on), and pride themselves on popping right up afterward nonchalantly. If a football player is ever writhing on the ground in pain, like soccer players are routinely, you can be pretty sure he's really hurt, and will need to come out of the game. We like the strong, silent, straight-shooting types here in America, not the weak, loud, dishonest ones.
We could do with a definition of "gamesmanship" here, since I think it's endemic to soccer and deeply distasteful to Americans:
"the use of methods, esp. in a sports contest, that are dubious or seemingly improper but not strictly illegal."
This applies to flopping and the other shady tactics soccer players use, like jersey-grabbing, pushing, tripping, and otherwise constantly trying to gain an unfair advantage over their opponent. Are these tactics part of all sports? Yeah. But soccer takes it to a new level, not just in how often it's done, but in the lack of enforcement (no instant replay, shoddy refereeing), and the massive import that a simple jersey-grab, say, could have in a one-goal game. Other than flopping, one particularly grating piece of gamesmanship in soccer is time-wasting. When a team has a lead, they'll do all kinds of annoying things to waste time: taking too long to set up free kicks, kicking the ball lazily out of bounds, faking injury (if there were accurate time-keeping and clock stoppages in soccer, time-wasting would be impossible, but as I've noted, there isn't). It destroys what could be the drama of the end of a game, and replaces it with petty, ugly tactics.
Proved my point? I think so. Now, why do Americans go for those strong, honest, sportsmanlike athletes? Probably for much the same reasons that we love our Western heroes, our Doc Hollidays, who never shoot first but who silently put up with the dishonest tactics of their enemies, who show up for, and win, a gunfight even when they're in the final throes of tuberculosis. Like I've said, we are a deeply naive culture, which is a great asset in many ways (we don't see any reason why we can't rewrite the rules of society with something like, say, the Internet, or why we can't elect a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan man named Barack Obama as President), though of course it can be, and has been, a detriment too. We still do see things in terms of morality, good and evil, heroes and villians, and if someone is going to be a hero, he better damn well chin up and act like it. He or she better not cheat, and better overcome, rather than wallow in, weakness.
But what do you guys think? I'm sure that we do love these types of heroes, but I'm not completely satisfied with my explanation as to why. I feel like there might be something more to it that I'm missing.
Anyway, stay tuned for my little coda about possible rule changes to soccer that would solve a lot of these problems.
3. Americans like their athletes to be strong, manly, honest, and sportsmanlike.
The best example of how soccer fails this test miserably is also, I think, the biggest reason that Americans detest soccer:
Flopping.
Americans, despite themselves, can really get into a soccer game, the back-and-forth, the drama, the athleticism; but then some colossal dipshit gets nicked in the shin (or, often, isn't touched at all), takes a massive dive, and pretends he's broken five bones and is in incredible, unutterable pain. For five minutes. Until he's miraculously just fine, and running around the field like nothing happened. This fails every test of the athlete for Americans: the athlete should be strong and manly (oops, he's crying like a baby), the athlete should be honest (oops, he's faking an injury), the athlete should be sportsmanlike (oops, he's engaging in one of the most odious forms of gamesmanship--see definition of "gamesmanship" below).
Yes, there is flopping in some American sports (basketball, in my opinion the weakest and most problematic of the three major American sports, is again the closest to soccer here in that players do flop a fair amount). But American sports don't produce flops on anywhere near the scale of soccer. It's just the opposite, in fact: Americans love sports where players pretend they're NOT feeling pain, even when they are. We like a baseball player, when he's just been hit by a 90-mile-per-hour fastball, to pretend like nothing's happened and calmly jog to first base. We like Curt Schilling's bloody sock. We like a hobbled Kirk Gibson hitting a home run and limping around the bases. We like Kerri Strug nailing a landing on a severely damaged leg. Our football players take massive, bone-crushing hits (and often play with broken bones, sprains, and so on), and pride themselves on popping right up afterward nonchalantly. If a football player is ever writhing on the ground in pain, like soccer players are routinely, you can be pretty sure he's really hurt, and will need to come out of the game. We like the strong, silent, straight-shooting types here in America, not the weak, loud, dishonest ones.
We could do with a definition of "gamesmanship" here, since I think it's endemic to soccer and deeply distasteful to Americans:
"the use of methods, esp. in a sports contest, that are dubious or seemingly improper but not strictly illegal."
This applies to flopping and the other shady tactics soccer players use, like jersey-grabbing, pushing, tripping, and otherwise constantly trying to gain an unfair advantage over their opponent. Are these tactics part of all sports? Yeah. But soccer takes it to a new level, not just in how often it's done, but in the lack of enforcement (no instant replay, shoddy refereeing), and the massive import that a simple jersey-grab, say, could have in a one-goal game. Other than flopping, one particularly grating piece of gamesmanship in soccer is time-wasting. When a team has a lead, they'll do all kinds of annoying things to waste time: taking too long to set up free kicks, kicking the ball lazily out of bounds, faking injury (if there were accurate time-keeping and clock stoppages in soccer, time-wasting would be impossible, but as I've noted, there isn't). It destroys what could be the drama of the end of a game, and replaces it with petty, ugly tactics.
Proved my point? I think so. Now, why do Americans go for those strong, honest, sportsmanlike athletes? Probably for much the same reasons that we love our Western heroes, our Doc Hollidays, who never shoot first but who silently put up with the dishonest tactics of their enemies, who show up for, and win, a gunfight even when they're in the final throes of tuberculosis. Like I've said, we are a deeply naive culture, which is a great asset in many ways (we don't see any reason why we can't rewrite the rules of society with something like, say, the Internet, or why we can't elect a half-Kenyan, half-Kansan man named Barack Obama as President), though of course it can be, and has been, a detriment too. We still do see things in terms of morality, good and evil, heroes and villians, and if someone is going to be a hero, he better damn well chin up and act like it. He or she better not cheat, and better overcome, rather than wallow in, weakness.
But what do you guys think? I'm sure that we do love these types of heroes, but I'm not completely satisfied with my explanation as to why. I feel like there might be something more to it that I'm missing.
Anyway, stay tuned for my little coda about possible rule changes to soccer that would solve a lot of these problems.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Soccer and America, Part III, Sub-Part II
All right, folks, in this post I'm hoisting the second spar of my argument about why Americans don't like soccer, fine-grainedness. Without further ado, off we go:
2. Fine-grainedness. A lot of distinct characteristics of soccer evince a laissez-faire inexactitude that is deeply un-American, I think. From little details like how roughly ball placements are made when taking free kicks, to big, annoying ones like the fact that time is kept by the refs on the field, in an incredibly inexact, estimated way, AND FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW MUCH TIME IS LEFT IN A GAME MOST OF THE TIME (sorry, I really hate this one). Let's start with clocks, in fact, since I can draw an interesting and clear contrast regarding them. American sports using time all employ exact, public clocking mechanisms that go down to tenths of seconds, while refs in soccer keep time on the field, with no oversight from fans or replay officials, stopping it kind of when they feel like it, and starting it again around when they feel like it.
Clock stoppages are a very important part of American sports, in that they create discrete, small portions of play that are readily analyzable and discussable. An American football game is made up of one or two hundred single plays with clear beginnings and endings, and that's part of football's great appeal: each play can be dissected and discussed scientifically (with our favorite, silly little tools like telestrators and so on), and between plays there's time for new strategizing (on the parts of the coaches AND the armchair coaches).
Now, if an American football game and its hundreds of plays can be looked at as a collection of grains of sand, soccer is the piece of glass that that sand has been melted into. It's continuous, with very few stoppages, and all the strategy happens real-time. Fascinating, often, but not lending itself to exactitude, fine-grained analysis, or scientific record-keeping and statistical dissection. (That's part of why Billy Beane, Mr. I Brought More and Better Statistics to Baseball, is now on the case, as I mentioned before.)
I'll throw in a couple more examples of soccer's lack of fine-grainedness, in case I haven't convinced you yet with timekeeping and ball placements. One that relates closely to soccer's fairness difficulties is the scoring/penalty kicks situation. The game of soccer often isn't fine-grained enough to distinguish between the play of two teams. Goals are so hard to come by that, often, one team will dominate a game, but it won't show up on the scoreboard, and will then be randomly decided by penalty kicks, which is very frustrating to would-be American soccer fans.
Finally, let's look at the fact that substitutions are only rarely allowed in soccer. Americans love the strategy involved in the frequent, minute-to-minute substitutions made in baseball (pinch-hitters and relievers), football, and basketball (in fact, teams are granted unlimited substitutions in the latter two sports). When you just throw eleven guys out there and only allow three substitutions for the entire game, that's just not as interesting to us. We want the pace of our game and the timekeeping to be fine-grained, our scoring to be fine-grained, and our players, even, to be fine-grained, for a single position to be composed of several different players, used at various discrete points.
In fact, I encourage you guys to examine Americans' favorite sports with "fine-grainedness" as a criterion; you'll be impressed and even a little scared how ridiculously fine-grained they are at every moment. Instant replay in football, of course, is a great example. Refs (and us as viewers) will watch high-resolution replays from several angles for five or ten minutes on end before coming to a decision on the outcome of a play. Or take baseball. At any given time in a baseball game, managers and players are making minute calibrations: the position of the outfielders and infielders, the types and locations of pitches to throw to this specific batter based on the inning, outs, count, historic statistical tendencies, and so on. At any point in a football game, coaches are calling extremely complex plays, and quarterbacks are analyzing the minutiae of defensive alignments and calling equally complex audibles.
Our love for fantasy football, fantasy baseball, and so on shows maybe more than anything that we love thinking about these minutiae ourselves, not just watching them be thought about. I know people who are in five different fantasy leagues who can quote you exact statistics on NFL players for the last few years. I was one of these people as a kid. Despite the stereotype of the loud, dumb, boorish (usually Southern, in the caricatures I've seen) American, Americans, more than many other cultures, are actually nerds, and those of us who don't want to be out-and-out technology geeks will be nerdy sports fans instead.
Why this geeky American love for the fine-grained, the exact, the scientific? This speaks, I think, to Americans' love for innovation, invention, technology. We want to take things apart and see how they work, including our sports. Also, I'd like to say that it relates to the fact that we're an atomistic society. We like to be able to distinguish individual plays, individual players, individual moments. We don't like an undifferentiated flow of events. Old-fashioned? Yes. Not in keeping with current, relativistic, phenomenological European society? Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our stodgy America. But our stodginess isn't all bad, I'd say, though it's done some major damage to the world (and ourselves) recently. Eh? Discuss.
2. Fine-grainedness. A lot of distinct characteristics of soccer evince a laissez-faire inexactitude that is deeply un-American, I think. From little details like how roughly ball placements are made when taking free kicks, to big, annoying ones like the fact that time is kept by the refs on the field, in an incredibly inexact, estimated way, AND FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW MUCH TIME IS LEFT IN A GAME MOST OF THE TIME (sorry, I really hate this one). Let's start with clocks, in fact, since I can draw an interesting and clear contrast regarding them. American sports using time all employ exact, public clocking mechanisms that go down to tenths of seconds, while refs in soccer keep time on the field, with no oversight from fans or replay officials, stopping it kind of when they feel like it, and starting it again around when they feel like it.
Clock stoppages are a very important part of American sports, in that they create discrete, small portions of play that are readily analyzable and discussable. An American football game is made up of one or two hundred single plays with clear beginnings and endings, and that's part of football's great appeal: each play can be dissected and discussed scientifically (with our favorite, silly little tools like telestrators and so on), and between plays there's time for new strategizing (on the parts of the coaches AND the armchair coaches).
Now, if an American football game and its hundreds of plays can be looked at as a collection of grains of sand, soccer is the piece of glass that that sand has been melted into. It's continuous, with very few stoppages, and all the strategy happens real-time. Fascinating, often, but not lending itself to exactitude, fine-grained analysis, or scientific record-keeping and statistical dissection. (That's part of why Billy Beane, Mr. I Brought More and Better Statistics to Baseball, is now on the case, as I mentioned before.)
I'll throw in a couple more examples of soccer's lack of fine-grainedness, in case I haven't convinced you yet with timekeeping and ball placements. One that relates closely to soccer's fairness difficulties is the scoring/penalty kicks situation. The game of soccer often isn't fine-grained enough to distinguish between the play of two teams. Goals are so hard to come by that, often, one team will dominate a game, but it won't show up on the scoreboard, and will then be randomly decided by penalty kicks, which is very frustrating to would-be American soccer fans.
Finally, let's look at the fact that substitutions are only rarely allowed in soccer. Americans love the strategy involved in the frequent, minute-to-minute substitutions made in baseball (pinch-hitters and relievers), football, and basketball (in fact, teams are granted unlimited substitutions in the latter two sports). When you just throw eleven guys out there and only allow three substitutions for the entire game, that's just not as interesting to us. We want the pace of our game and the timekeeping to be fine-grained, our scoring to be fine-grained, and our players, even, to be fine-grained, for a single position to be composed of several different players, used at various discrete points.
In fact, I encourage you guys to examine Americans' favorite sports with "fine-grainedness" as a criterion; you'll be impressed and even a little scared how ridiculously fine-grained they are at every moment. Instant replay in football, of course, is a great example. Refs (and us as viewers) will watch high-resolution replays from several angles for five or ten minutes on end before coming to a decision on the outcome of a play. Or take baseball. At any given time in a baseball game, managers and players are making minute calibrations: the position of the outfielders and infielders, the types and locations of pitches to throw to this specific batter based on the inning, outs, count, historic statistical tendencies, and so on. At any point in a football game, coaches are calling extremely complex plays, and quarterbacks are analyzing the minutiae of defensive alignments and calling equally complex audibles.
Our love for fantasy football, fantasy baseball, and so on shows maybe more than anything that we love thinking about these minutiae ourselves, not just watching them be thought about. I know people who are in five different fantasy leagues who can quote you exact statistics on NFL players for the last few years. I was one of these people as a kid. Despite the stereotype of the loud, dumb, boorish (usually Southern, in the caricatures I've seen) American, Americans, more than many other cultures, are actually nerds, and those of us who don't want to be out-and-out technology geeks will be nerdy sports fans instead.
Why this geeky American love for the fine-grained, the exact, the scientific? This speaks, I think, to Americans' love for innovation, invention, technology. We want to take things apart and see how they work, including our sports. Also, I'd like to say that it relates to the fact that we're an atomistic society. We like to be able to distinguish individual plays, individual players, individual moments. We don't like an undifferentiated flow of events. Old-fashioned? Yes. Not in keeping with current, relativistic, phenomenological European society? Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our stodgy America. But our stodginess isn't all bad, I'd say, though it's done some major damage to the world (and ourselves) recently. Eh? Discuss.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Soccer and America, Part III, Sub-Part I
Sorry for the delay on this one, folks. I should mention that Operation Condor is mysterious, involving intricate manipulations of global banking systems, commodities markets, and the cultural zeitgeist, and will disappear and reappear at odd intervals, like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. In any case, let's talk about Americans and their feelings towards soccer. I'm going to split this big post up, in order to make the portions more palatable. I realize I've been giving you perhaps too massive chunks of blabbery. In this post, I'll make a general outline, and cover the first, and maybe most salient, reason I think Americans don't like soccer.
I should mention that all these reasons I'm about to list are simply subjectively felt to be true, by me as a sports-loving American who talks to a lot of sports-loving Americans due to my bar. I'm not sure they can be objectively proven. If they're right, you'll probably intuitively sense they are as Americans yourselves. If you don't feel they're right, post a comment with your thoughts.
So, Why Americans Don't Like Soccer:
1. Americans want their sports to be fair.
2. Americans like their sports to be fine-grained, scientific, and exact.
3. Americans like their athletes to be strong, manly, honest, and sportsmanlike.
In my discussion of each of these three general topics, I'll mention a popular American sport that is loved in large part because it has the quality we like, then in what ways soccer often wantonly lacks this quality, with discussions of everyone's hated specific soccer rules and features along the way (penalty kicks, flopping, and so on). I'll finally make a suggestion as to what particularly American cultural backgrounds cause us to feel as we do.
1. Fairness. Golf, one of our favorite sports, is fairness metastasized. The ball goes in the hole, or not. There's no room for judgment calls by referees. Baseball, our "national pastime," contains similarly few opportunities for cheating, fouling, bad calls, and so on. The pitcher throws the ball, the batter swings at it or doesn't, and a fielder either catches the ball, throws the runner out, or not, in almost always a very clear-cut play. Yes, there are ball and strike calls, but these are normally straightforward, and are usually gotten right by the umpires even in borderline cases. (A fascinating fact unbeknownst to many is that umpires are now held accountable after each game by comparing their calls to those a strike zone-sensing computer makes, and ones whose calls don't match the computers enough of the time are in danger of losing their jobs.) Plus, a single ball or strike call is very unlikely to influence the outcome of an entire game. There are also borderline calls on the bases and so on, but again, these are often moot, and are few and far between compared to sports like soccer or basketball, where players are almost always fouling each other in one way or another, and it's entirely up to a referee to call something or not, any time he feels like it (the number one problem with the NBA currently, and a problem realized increasingly by the league).
Though American football has some more persistent trouble with fairness (holding calls and pass interference penalties are problematic), instant replay in football is worth noting here. Americans have embraced instant replay in their most popular sport in recent years, despite the fact that it slows down the game significantly. In other words, Americans would rather have their sports fair than fast.
I can't bring up fairness without bringing up steroids/drugs in American sports as a possible counterargument. If we love fairness so much, why were our baseball players juiced for so long? My response is that Americans have always hated performance-enhancing drugs, we've just been naive (a stereotype, but, in my opinion, definitely one with some truth), and ignorant of the fact that our heroes were using them for a long time. Athletes very often, for better or worse, have different values than Americans at large, but Americans love to think that their athletes share their values, and that can blind us to all the craziness that goes on behind the scenes amongst athletes. In any case, the instant the drug problem in baseball was revealed, it went all the way to a Congressional investigation--that's how seriously Americans take fairness in sports. (Geez, just look at how reviled Barry Bonds is, and how everyone wants to saddle him with that famous asterisk).
Whereas look at soccer: there was recently a huge match-fixing scandal in Italy that was way more far-reaching than any in American sports since the Black Sox scandal, and while there was an initial public reaction, it's basically been dealt with in a cursory way, swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. If that had happened in America, imagine the reaction. Which leads me to other types of unfairness endemic to soccer, which are nonetheless tolerated in the generally permissive culture that has become prevalent in contemporary Europe and elsewhere:
Massively Unfair Things about Soccer
1. Deciding a tied game on penalty kicks is a sham. This is a commonly mentioned one, so I don't think I need to say much more. I'll just say that penalty kicks bear so little relation to soccer as a game that they might as fairly end a soccer game by picking five players from each team to play three minutes of basketball against each other. The whole point of soccer is teamwork, is getting a player in a position to score easily through intricate, lengthy machinations. When you just put a guy right in front of the goal with the ball and only a goalie to defend, that's KICKING, not SOCCER. At that point, you're essentially randomly selecting a winning team.
2. The importance of referee calls in soccer is far too great. A referee can (and often does) essentially award a team a goal by giving them a penalty kick, or force a team to play one man down for an entire game by giving a red card. And this is a game that is often decided by a single goal. No referee in any American sport has such power. In basketball, refs can award free throws, but in a game where teams score over a hundred points, a couple of free throws are usually inconsequential. In football, a ref can award a team a near-touchdown on a pass interference call on a long bomb, but there's a fair amount of scoring in football, so these calls often don't matter, or balance themselves out with other pass-interference calls. And, yes, American refs can always eject players, but it's far, far less common in American sports than in soccer, and ejected players are always allowed to be replaced, unlike soccer.
3. Soccer referees are very often wrong, but there's no instant replay or oversight. In watching soccer, it's typical to see several egregious missed calls during a game (a foul call that wasn't a foul, or someone getting mugged and the ref not noticing). I don't blame the refs themselves (though there have been accusations of crooked refereeing in soccer), but a system which asks just a few refs to make constant calls (without the benefit of any time stoppage or review) all over a huge field during a very fast-moving game. Nevertheless, to Americans, all those missed calls are infuriating and unacceptable.
So, why this American obsession with fairness? I hate to bring up the old saw, but we are a religious and Puritan country in many ways compared to others. We may not be holding witch trials any more, but we care deeply that our sports are fair, that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and that cheaters never prosper. But feel free to play cultural doctor yourselves and give me a diagnosis.
I should mention that all these reasons I'm about to list are simply subjectively felt to be true, by me as a sports-loving American who talks to a lot of sports-loving Americans due to my bar. I'm not sure they can be objectively proven. If they're right, you'll probably intuitively sense they are as Americans yourselves. If you don't feel they're right, post a comment with your thoughts.
So, Why Americans Don't Like Soccer:
1. Americans want their sports to be fair.
2. Americans like their sports to be fine-grained, scientific, and exact.
3. Americans like their athletes to be strong, manly, honest, and sportsmanlike.
In my discussion of each of these three general topics, I'll mention a popular American sport that is loved in large part because it has the quality we like, then in what ways soccer often wantonly lacks this quality, with discussions of everyone's hated specific soccer rules and features along the way (penalty kicks, flopping, and so on). I'll finally make a suggestion as to what particularly American cultural backgrounds cause us to feel as we do.
1. Fairness. Golf, one of our favorite sports, is fairness metastasized. The ball goes in the hole, or not. There's no room for judgment calls by referees. Baseball, our "national pastime," contains similarly few opportunities for cheating, fouling, bad calls, and so on. The pitcher throws the ball, the batter swings at it or doesn't, and a fielder either catches the ball, throws the runner out, or not, in almost always a very clear-cut play. Yes, there are ball and strike calls, but these are normally straightforward, and are usually gotten right by the umpires even in borderline cases. (A fascinating fact unbeknownst to many is that umpires are now held accountable after each game by comparing their calls to those a strike zone-sensing computer makes, and ones whose calls don't match the computers enough of the time are in danger of losing their jobs.) Plus, a single ball or strike call is very unlikely to influence the outcome of an entire game. There are also borderline calls on the bases and so on, but again, these are often moot, and are few and far between compared to sports like soccer or basketball, where players are almost always fouling each other in one way or another, and it's entirely up to a referee to call something or not, any time he feels like it (the number one problem with the NBA currently, and a problem realized increasingly by the league).
Though American football has some more persistent trouble with fairness (holding calls and pass interference penalties are problematic), instant replay in football is worth noting here. Americans have embraced instant replay in their most popular sport in recent years, despite the fact that it slows down the game significantly. In other words, Americans would rather have their sports fair than fast.
I can't bring up fairness without bringing up steroids/drugs in American sports as a possible counterargument. If we love fairness so much, why were our baseball players juiced for so long? My response is that Americans have always hated performance-enhancing drugs, we've just been naive (a stereotype, but, in my opinion, definitely one with some truth), and ignorant of the fact that our heroes were using them for a long time. Athletes very often, for better or worse, have different values than Americans at large, but Americans love to think that their athletes share their values, and that can blind us to all the craziness that goes on behind the scenes amongst athletes. In any case, the instant the drug problem in baseball was revealed, it went all the way to a Congressional investigation--that's how seriously Americans take fairness in sports. (Geez, just look at how reviled Barry Bonds is, and how everyone wants to saddle him with that famous asterisk).
Whereas look at soccer: there was recently a huge match-fixing scandal in Italy that was way more far-reaching than any in American sports since the Black Sox scandal, and while there was an initial public reaction, it's basically been dealt with in a cursory way, swept under the rug, and largely forgotten. If that had happened in America, imagine the reaction. Which leads me to other types of unfairness endemic to soccer, which are nonetheless tolerated in the generally permissive culture that has become prevalent in contemporary Europe and elsewhere:
Massively Unfair Things about Soccer
1. Deciding a tied game on penalty kicks is a sham. This is a commonly mentioned one, so I don't think I need to say much more. I'll just say that penalty kicks bear so little relation to soccer as a game that they might as fairly end a soccer game by picking five players from each team to play three minutes of basketball against each other. The whole point of soccer is teamwork, is getting a player in a position to score easily through intricate, lengthy machinations. When you just put a guy right in front of the goal with the ball and only a goalie to defend, that's KICKING, not SOCCER. At that point, you're essentially randomly selecting a winning team.
2. The importance of referee calls in soccer is far too great. A referee can (and often does) essentially award a team a goal by giving them a penalty kick, or force a team to play one man down for an entire game by giving a red card. And this is a game that is often decided by a single goal. No referee in any American sport has such power. In basketball, refs can award free throws, but in a game where teams score over a hundred points, a couple of free throws are usually inconsequential. In football, a ref can award a team a near-touchdown on a pass interference call on a long bomb, but there's a fair amount of scoring in football, so these calls often don't matter, or balance themselves out with other pass-interference calls. And, yes, American refs can always eject players, but it's far, far less common in American sports than in soccer, and ejected players are always allowed to be replaced, unlike soccer.
3. Soccer referees are very often wrong, but there's no instant replay or oversight. In watching soccer, it's typical to see several egregious missed calls during a game (a foul call that wasn't a foul, or someone getting mugged and the ref not noticing). I don't blame the refs themselves (though there have been accusations of crooked refereeing in soccer), but a system which asks just a few refs to make constant calls (without the benefit of any time stoppage or review) all over a huge field during a very fast-moving game. Nevertheless, to Americans, all those missed calls are infuriating and unacceptable.
So, why this American obsession with fairness? I hate to bring up the old saw, but we are a religious and Puritan country in many ways compared to others. We may not be holding witch trials any more, but we care deeply that our sports are fair, that the good guys win and the bad guys lose, and that cheaters never prosper. But feel free to play cultural doctor yourselves and give me a diagnosis.
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Soccer and America, Part II.
So what do these soccer arguments tell us about the foreign mindset? They're all false arguments, but they keep getting used, which tells me that there must be something in them which has great appeal to those making the arguments. You'll remember that the string running through them is the idea that Americans are uncultured, violent, brash, blindered, simplistic, and so on--in regard to soccer, they'll always add, but you feel like their argument is really a general one, and not specific to one little game. Is this just disinterested, unbiased academic commentary? No, of course not--foreigners are personally and nationalistically interested in America being weak and their country or region being strong. Did Red Sox fans hate the Yankees and their fans for all those years (calling them brash, violent, blindered, simplistic, and so on) in a disinterested way, or is it because they wanted the Yankees to go down and their Red Sox to go up?
George Orwell's article about nationalism hits the nail on the head here (and if you haven't read it, it's a beautiful piece of political thought):
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
A salient excerpt:
"A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade."
Cribbing from Orwell, I say that often, when you see people who harbor a violent anti-nationalist (in this case, anti-American) sentiment, it's pro-nationalist sentiment for some other country in disguise. I've talked to Venezuelans who say that America is the devil (which isn't surprising, because I think Hugo Chavez says that all the time). But it's not disinterested criticism of America; they have their own priorities. If you dig deep enough, you'll find that they think Chavez is building a Socialist paradise in Venezuela, or that South America will rise up to become a new global power when America falls. (No mention of how important South America and America are to each other, and that a true American depression would likely throw South America into one as well).
The inherent contradiction is this: while these folks pretend to be disinterested people who hate the imperialist asshole America has become, they actually want to be the imperialist assholes. In the same conversation, a European might denigrate America's economic imperialism, and brag about the economic clout now wielded by the European community. Europeans would love to exercise their former dominance over the rest of the world, but because they can't, they put on anti-imperialist airs. This reminds me of World Cup 2002, where the French feigned indifference to the silly sport of soccer (more a thing for those raucous Germans, really, or those hooligan English)--until their team started playing really well, and won the entire tournament, at which point the French were instantly rabid soccer fans. In the same way, Europeans will claim that they don't care about things as shallow and American as the singleminded pursuit of economic development; a true measure of a country is its culture, not its economy, they'll say. That is, until the American economy is crappy--now, Europeans can hardly conceal their glee when talking about the struggling dollar, the mortgage crisis, and so on (despite the fact that a bad American economy is bad for everyone, and has sparked economic trouble in Europe), all the time raving about the Euro, and the European community, and Europe as the new economic powerhouse of the world. Orwell: "Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception."
One last example of the contradictory anti-American-at-all-costs mindset of these people: if you try to point out, when having that standard "Americans don't like soccer" discussion, that American women have embraced soccer, and play it in greater numbers than women in any other country, and that the American women's soccer team has been the most dominant in history, they'll mutter something about women's soccer not counting. Beliefs are that flexible for these types of people: they'll go from denigrating Americans for their lack of broadmindedness and culture to being out-and-out sexists, taking on whatever beliefs necessary to serve their pro-European or pro-South American aims.
Soccer is a convenient subject for these nationalists, because it's one of the few things they can flaunt as superior in their own countries; while looking down from their great heights of soccer culture on the unwashed masses, they can make ridiculously generalized statements about hundreds of millions of American people while seeming to be chatting disinterestedly about a mere sport. Soccer is a receptacle for near-racist beliefs, that disguises them just enough as dispassionate views about sport to let them slip by, unseen for what they are. (Unlike the Europeans, the Mexicans are more open about their racism; tens of thousands of them happily chanted "Osama" when the American soccer team played in Mexico City after the events of September 11.)
I'm being hard on foreigners here, but I don't mean to generalize; it's just one kind of foreign mindset that I've seen a lot of here in New York, a city full of people from other countries. I also know lots of foreigners who have no such nationalistic illusions. Anyway, in the interest of fairness, I'll end this discussion by bashing Americans a bit. Orwell accurately notes that a lot of intellectuals unhappy with their own country (and there are quite a few of us in America today), but needing an outlet for their natural human nationalistic sentiments, will desperately search for, and eventually locate, another region or country to serve as a paragon of virtue. Thus the phenomenon of intellectual American soccer fans (of whom I've seen plenty, during the Euro). Distaste with America gets transformed into love of European sport. It's very fashionable among New York intellectuals to be a knowledgeable and passionate European soccer fan; these intellectuals, sadly, end up using the same false arguments that Europeans use to explain to their friends why America's boorish working and/or middle classes don't like soccer. But they're worse than the Europeans, because unlike them, they come from America, and know its people well, and they should know better.
Now that I've looked at the nationalistic urges that drive foreigners' explanations of why Americans don't like soccer, I'll turn to Americans and a more detailed discussion of the game of soccer itself in Part III. Why don't we love soccer, really? For lots of reasons, but nothing that fits neatly into a facile nationalistic narrative.
George Orwell's article about nationalism hits the nail on the head here (and if you haven't read it, it's a beautiful piece of political thought):
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
A salient excerpt:
"A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade."
Cribbing from Orwell, I say that often, when you see people who harbor a violent anti-nationalist (in this case, anti-American) sentiment, it's pro-nationalist sentiment for some other country in disguise. I've talked to Venezuelans who say that America is the devil (which isn't surprising, because I think Hugo Chavez says that all the time). But it's not disinterested criticism of America; they have their own priorities. If you dig deep enough, you'll find that they think Chavez is building a Socialist paradise in Venezuela, or that South America will rise up to become a new global power when America falls. (No mention of how important South America and America are to each other, and that a true American depression would likely throw South America into one as well).
The inherent contradiction is this: while these folks pretend to be disinterested people who hate the imperialist asshole America has become, they actually want to be the imperialist assholes. In the same conversation, a European might denigrate America's economic imperialism, and brag about the economic clout now wielded by the European community. Europeans would love to exercise their former dominance over the rest of the world, but because they can't, they put on anti-imperialist airs. This reminds me of World Cup 2002, where the French feigned indifference to the silly sport of soccer (more a thing for those raucous Germans, really, or those hooligan English)--until their team started playing really well, and won the entire tournament, at which point the French were instantly rabid soccer fans. In the same way, Europeans will claim that they don't care about things as shallow and American as the singleminded pursuit of economic development; a true measure of a country is its culture, not its economy, they'll say. That is, until the American economy is crappy--now, Europeans can hardly conceal their glee when talking about the struggling dollar, the mortgage crisis, and so on (despite the fact that a bad American economy is bad for everyone, and has sparked economic trouble in Europe), all the time raving about the Euro, and the European community, and Europe as the new economic powerhouse of the world. Orwell: "Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception."
One last example of the contradictory anti-American-at-all-costs mindset of these people: if you try to point out, when having that standard "Americans don't like soccer" discussion, that American women have embraced soccer, and play it in greater numbers than women in any other country, and that the American women's soccer team has been the most dominant in history, they'll mutter something about women's soccer not counting. Beliefs are that flexible for these types of people: they'll go from denigrating Americans for their lack of broadmindedness and culture to being out-and-out sexists, taking on whatever beliefs necessary to serve their pro-European or pro-South American aims.
Soccer is a convenient subject for these nationalists, because it's one of the few things they can flaunt as superior in their own countries; while looking down from their great heights of soccer culture on the unwashed masses, they can make ridiculously generalized statements about hundreds of millions of American people while seeming to be chatting disinterestedly about a mere sport. Soccer is a receptacle for near-racist beliefs, that disguises them just enough as dispassionate views about sport to let them slip by, unseen for what they are. (Unlike the Europeans, the Mexicans are more open about their racism; tens of thousands of them happily chanted "Osama" when the American soccer team played in Mexico City after the events of September 11.)
I'm being hard on foreigners here, but I don't mean to generalize; it's just one kind of foreign mindset that I've seen a lot of here in New York, a city full of people from other countries. I also know lots of foreigners who have no such nationalistic illusions. Anyway, in the interest of fairness, I'll end this discussion by bashing Americans a bit. Orwell accurately notes that a lot of intellectuals unhappy with their own country (and there are quite a few of us in America today), but needing an outlet for their natural human nationalistic sentiments, will desperately search for, and eventually locate, another region or country to serve as a paragon of virtue. Thus the phenomenon of intellectual American soccer fans (of whom I've seen plenty, during the Euro). Distaste with America gets transformed into love of European sport. It's very fashionable among New York intellectuals to be a knowledgeable and passionate European soccer fan; these intellectuals, sadly, end up using the same false arguments that Europeans use to explain to their friends why America's boorish working and/or middle classes don't like soccer. But they're worse than the Europeans, because unlike them, they come from America, and know its people well, and they should know better.
Now that I've looked at the nationalistic urges that drive foreigners' explanations of why Americans don't like soccer, I'll turn to Americans and a more detailed discussion of the game of soccer itself in Part III. Why don't we love soccer, really? For lots of reasons, but nothing that fits neatly into a facile nationalistic narrative.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Soccer and America, Part I.
Foreign (very often European, but not exclusively so) folk theories about why Americans don't like soccer pretty predictably fall into one of a few related categories (and I've checked with my resident Englishman to confirm and add to these theories, lest you think I'm just making this stuff up):
1. Americans only like simple sports. Soccer is too intricate for them to appreciate.
2. Americans only like sports with lots of exciting commercials/ads to break up the action. Soccer has fewer commercials, so Americans don't like it. (Or, American advertisers are actively preventing soccer from being shown in America, because it doesn't provide them with enough advertising opportunities.)
3. Americans just don't have the attention span to watch a game for 45 straight minutes at a time without a break.
4. Americans like sports with lots of scoring. Soccer doesn't have much scoring, so Americans don't like it.
5. Americans are self-obsessed to the point of ignoring the rest of the world. So they don't understand how meaningful soccer is to European, South American, Central American, etc. nations, and thus underappreciate it.
The string running through all these arguments is that Americans are boorish, blindered, uncultured, or just plain dumb. But I'll take each theory in turn:
1. Probably the most obviously untrue of all the arguments. The most popular American sports are incredibly complex and intricate. Have you seen an American football playbook? Not to mention that baseball, more than any other sport, has high-level statistical analysis ingrained in its culture (there's a whole statistical field devoted to the study of baseball, sabermetrics). In fact, far from being overwhelmed by soccer's intricacy, Americans are working to add more science to the study of soccer: Billy Beane and other people who have helped bring the statistical revolution to baseball are now trying to bring it to soccer, which still operates on old-school subjective measurements. Go to any serious baseball fan blog, or football fan blog, and you'll see educated, nuanced thought and argument (check out, for instance, www.athleticsnation.com, where you'll see discussions of VORP, WHIP, PECOTA, and so on, statistical analyses foreign to the relatively simple sport of soccer). Americans love dissecting their sports, and their favorite sports are often ones rich and complex enough to permit endless dissection.
2. There's a lot to be said for having regular breaks in the action of a sport (beer runs! Potty breaks!), but Americans love a lot of sports that don't have regular commercial breaks. Take golf (an example that I'll bring up again and again, since it's a very popular televised, and played, sport in America, but in most ways is more "boring" than soccer). There are very long periods without commercials, and Americans are perfectly happy to sit through them. As for the "advertiser conspiracy" argument, I just don't buy it. There are all kinds of television events that are "commercial-free" in America (not to mention the extremely popular Tivo/DVR commercial-skipping possibilities which Americans have embraced); with these events, corporate America can still get its collective jollies by "sponsoring" them or inserting other subtle advertisements. Plus, soccer provides companies with great advertising opportunities--almost too great. Soccer players are forced to wear large corporate advertisements on their jerseys, something that even our supposedly slavish commercial society hasn't done to our baseball or football or basketball players. Advertisers in America would salivate at the thought of that kind of exposure; the New York Red Bulls not only have Red Bull jerseys, but Red Bull as the name of their team, for God's sake.
3. The attention span argument I don't buy either, for similar reasons to the advertising argument above. Americans are perfectly happy to watch four-hour baseball games, four-hour football games, extremely long golf events, NASCAR events, and so on. A soccer game only takes about two hours. Yes, these long American games have breaks in them, but often there will be significant periods without breaks. Baseball half-innings, to name one example, can take an hour or longer if a team scores a lot of runs. In short, there are many times where television coverage will stick with a game for a long time without a break; those are often times when Americans are glued to their screens, rather than getting bored and looking for something else to watch.
4. Quickly dismissed: Americans love golf, which doesn't have "scoring" so much as "tracking". Americans love NASCAR, where there is no "scoring" until the very end of the race, when each car comes in first, second, third, and so on. Americans have recently embraced cage-fighting, where there isn't "scoring" until someone is pinned. Americans are more than happy to watch a tight, exciting, 1-0 baseball game. Scoring ain't the issue. It's more futility and carelessness that gets to them, but that's a topic for the third soccer post.
5. Yeah, Americans are self-obsessed. We have a huge country that is complicated enough to take up all of our attention sometimes. But we've adopted and fallen in love with many sports that aren't natively American: golf (I told you, it's a great argument against soccer snobs who deride Americans as too infantile to like a slow, elegant game), boxing/fighting, baseball (debatable, but it is largely based on cricket), and so on. We even got excited about curling during the last couple Winter Olympics. In short, it's very possible for a non-"American" sport to gain our attention; soccer just hasn't done it in a huge way.
What lie above are specific arguments. But I give to you, readers, free of charge, the most powerful general argument against any of these theories about why Americans don't like soccer:
The Canadian Rebuttal.
Any time a European tries to tell you why you and your uncultured American ilk don't like soccer, just proceed as follows:
Frenchman (twirling his mustache): You see, Americans do not like football because they must have their action, their brutality, their bells and whistles and explosions and commercials.
American (twirling his testicles): So Canadians must have their action, their brutality, their bells and whistles and explosions and commercials? Because they hate soccer more than we do. Barely anyone in Canada plays soccer or watches soccer.
Frenchman: Umm...well, no, Canadians are very cultured compared to Americans, but...umm...I must go and eat some cheese.
In other words, there are all kinds of very populous places in the world that haven't embraced soccer in a feverish way (America, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, and so on). Japanese people love American baseball far more than soccer--does that make them boorish? Canadians love ice hockey more than any other sport--is that because they need violence and speed, and can't stand more refined sports like soccer? Australian people love their own Australian Rules Football--because they have short attention spans and can't stomach the slower elegance of soccer? It's dumb to blanket all of these countries with the label of "uncultured". They're plenty cultured, just in a non-European way.
So the thing I hope you're now thinking, when considering America and the rest of the non-soccer-loving nations, is that there are very specific regional reasons why countries have adopted certain sports, and not others, as national pastimes, and it's ridiculous and borderline racist to claim that the only reasons lie with the minds or physical makeups of the people in those countries. It's like when Republicans were claiming that the problem with "winning the peace" in Iraq was that Iraqis are just crazy, when the actual reasons for the Iraqi insurgence are complex and local cultures and histories. Those kind of facile arguments only seem to work when foreigners are talking about America, because of the prevailing, simplistic world opinion about America these days, where anything sufficiently general and negative will be accepted with a knowing nod by fellow members of the extra-American elite.
So there. If you think my arguments are weak, saw away and I shall counter-saw. Prepare yourself for Post the Second, where I'll examine how foreign opinions about Americans and soccer reveal more about foreigners than Americans.
1. Americans only like simple sports. Soccer is too intricate for them to appreciate.
2. Americans only like sports with lots of exciting commercials/ads to break up the action. Soccer has fewer commercials, so Americans don't like it. (Or, American advertisers are actively preventing soccer from being shown in America, because it doesn't provide them with enough advertising opportunities.)
3. Americans just don't have the attention span to watch a game for 45 straight minutes at a time without a break.
4. Americans like sports with lots of scoring. Soccer doesn't have much scoring, so Americans don't like it.
5. Americans are self-obsessed to the point of ignoring the rest of the world. So they don't understand how meaningful soccer is to European, South American, Central American, etc. nations, and thus underappreciate it.
The string running through all these arguments is that Americans are boorish, blindered, uncultured, or just plain dumb. But I'll take each theory in turn:
1. Probably the most obviously untrue of all the arguments. The most popular American sports are incredibly complex and intricate. Have you seen an American football playbook? Not to mention that baseball, more than any other sport, has high-level statistical analysis ingrained in its culture (there's a whole statistical field devoted to the study of baseball, sabermetrics). In fact, far from being overwhelmed by soccer's intricacy, Americans are working to add more science to the study of soccer: Billy Beane and other people who have helped bring the statistical revolution to baseball are now trying to bring it to soccer, which still operates on old-school subjective measurements. Go to any serious baseball fan blog, or football fan blog, and you'll see educated, nuanced thought and argument (check out, for instance, www.athleticsnation.com, where you'll see discussions of VORP, WHIP, PECOTA, and so on, statistical analyses foreign to the relatively simple sport of soccer). Americans love dissecting their sports, and their favorite sports are often ones rich and complex enough to permit endless dissection.
2. There's a lot to be said for having regular breaks in the action of a sport (beer runs! Potty breaks!), but Americans love a lot of sports that don't have regular commercial breaks. Take golf (an example that I'll bring up again and again, since it's a very popular televised, and played, sport in America, but in most ways is more "boring" than soccer). There are very long periods without commercials, and Americans are perfectly happy to sit through them. As for the "advertiser conspiracy" argument, I just don't buy it. There are all kinds of television events that are "commercial-free" in America (not to mention the extremely popular Tivo/DVR commercial-skipping possibilities which Americans have embraced); with these events, corporate America can still get its collective jollies by "sponsoring" them or inserting other subtle advertisements. Plus, soccer provides companies with great advertising opportunities--almost too great. Soccer players are forced to wear large corporate advertisements on their jerseys, something that even our supposedly slavish commercial society hasn't done to our baseball or football or basketball players. Advertisers in America would salivate at the thought of that kind of exposure; the New York Red Bulls not only have Red Bull jerseys, but Red Bull as the name of their team, for God's sake.
3. The attention span argument I don't buy either, for similar reasons to the advertising argument above. Americans are perfectly happy to watch four-hour baseball games, four-hour football games, extremely long golf events, NASCAR events, and so on. A soccer game only takes about two hours. Yes, these long American games have breaks in them, but often there will be significant periods without breaks. Baseball half-innings, to name one example, can take an hour or longer if a team scores a lot of runs. In short, there are many times where television coverage will stick with a game for a long time without a break; those are often times when Americans are glued to their screens, rather than getting bored and looking for something else to watch.
4. Quickly dismissed: Americans love golf, which doesn't have "scoring" so much as "tracking". Americans love NASCAR, where there is no "scoring" until the very end of the race, when each car comes in first, second, third, and so on. Americans have recently embraced cage-fighting, where there isn't "scoring" until someone is pinned. Americans are more than happy to watch a tight, exciting, 1-0 baseball game. Scoring ain't the issue. It's more futility and carelessness that gets to them, but that's a topic for the third soccer post.
5. Yeah, Americans are self-obsessed. We have a huge country that is complicated enough to take up all of our attention sometimes. But we've adopted and fallen in love with many sports that aren't natively American: golf (I told you, it's a great argument against soccer snobs who deride Americans as too infantile to like a slow, elegant game), boxing/fighting, baseball (debatable, but it is largely based on cricket), and so on. We even got excited about curling during the last couple Winter Olympics. In short, it's very possible for a non-"American" sport to gain our attention; soccer just hasn't done it in a huge way.
What lie above are specific arguments. But I give to you, readers, free of charge, the most powerful general argument against any of these theories about why Americans don't like soccer:
The Canadian Rebuttal.
Any time a European tries to tell you why you and your uncultured American ilk don't like soccer, just proceed as follows:
Frenchman (twirling his mustache): You see, Americans do not like football because they must have their action, their brutality, their bells and whistles and explosions and commercials.
American (twirling his testicles): So Canadians must have their action, their brutality, their bells and whistles and explosions and commercials? Because they hate soccer more than we do. Barely anyone in Canada plays soccer or watches soccer.
Frenchman: Umm...well, no, Canadians are very cultured compared to Americans, but...umm...I must go and eat some cheese.
In other words, there are all kinds of very populous places in the world that haven't embraced soccer in a feverish way (America, Canada, Australia, China, Japan, and so on). Japanese people love American baseball far more than soccer--does that make them boorish? Canadians love ice hockey more than any other sport--is that because they need violence and speed, and can't stand more refined sports like soccer? Australian people love their own Australian Rules Football--because they have short attention spans and can't stomach the slower elegance of soccer? It's dumb to blanket all of these countries with the label of "uncultured". They're plenty cultured, just in a non-European way.
So the thing I hope you're now thinking, when considering America and the rest of the non-soccer-loving nations, is that there are very specific regional reasons why countries have adopted certain sports, and not others, as national pastimes, and it's ridiculous and borderline racist to claim that the only reasons lie with the minds or physical makeups of the people in those countries. It's like when Republicans were claiming that the problem with "winning the peace" in Iraq was that Iraqis are just crazy, when the actual reasons for the Iraqi insurgence are complex and local cultures and histories. Those kind of facile arguments only seem to work when foreigners are talking about America, because of the prevailing, simplistic world opinion about America these days, where anything sufficiently general and negative will be accepted with a knowing nod by fellow members of the extra-American elite.
So there. If you think my arguments are weak, saw away and I shall counter-saw. Prepare yourself for Post the Second, where I'll examine how foreign opinions about Americans and soccer reveal more about foreigners than Americans.
Okay, first subject: soccer and America.
What, too trivial a first investigation, you say? I disagree. I think it's a great jumping-off point: a surprisingly rich topic that has been preoccupying me for a while. In examining commonly held world opinions about Americans' not liking soccer very much, then looking at what are, in my opinion, the real reasons Americans don't like soccer very much (if, in fact, that is the case, which I think is more debatable than many commentators would have us believe), I'll tilt a specific example at the massive windmill that is the general "culture of America versus that of the rest of the world" issue--suffice it to say, a very popular opposed pairing these days.
This is kind of a fascinating subject for me (like I said, I'm fucking obsess...I mean, preoccupied), so I'm breaking my blog posts up into palatable portions. In Posts the First and Second, I'll claim that foreigners' attempts to explain Americans' diffident attitude towards soccer reveal more about foreigners than Americans themselves. In short, the foreign folk theories are completely false, but through them you can see foreign insecurities and foreign posturing against the American juggernaut. At the same time (I'll say in Post the Third), the more I think about why Americans actually haven't embraced soccer, the more I see that there are some interesting and particularly American reasons that we haven't, reasons that do set Americans apart from much of the rest of the world. They're just not the reasons foreigners would like to think we have.
So here's my general outline:
Post the First: Foreign folk theories about why Americans don't like soccer, and how they're wrong. Including such rhetorical gems as The Canadian Rebuttal, which I permit you to use next time a boorish European tries to lecture you about soccer.
Post the Second: What the foreign folk theories about Americans and soccer reveal about foreigners themselves. Including such revelations as The Inherent Contradiction in the European Mindset.
Post the Third: My own theories about the reasons Americans haven't embraced soccer, and how those reasons are peculiarly American. Including such war-horses as The Persistence of Puritanical Thinking in America.
Sound good? Post the First shall appear forthwith.
This is kind of a fascinating subject for me (like I said, I'm fucking obsess...I mean, preoccupied), so I'm breaking my blog posts up into palatable portions. In Posts the First and Second, I'll claim that foreigners' attempts to explain Americans' diffident attitude towards soccer reveal more about foreigners than Americans themselves. In short, the foreign folk theories are completely false, but through them you can see foreign insecurities and foreign posturing against the American juggernaut. At the same time (I'll say in Post the Third), the more I think about why Americans actually haven't embraced soccer, the more I see that there are some interesting and particularly American reasons that we haven't, reasons that do set Americans apart from much of the rest of the world. They're just not the reasons foreigners would like to think we have.
So here's my general outline:
Post the First: Foreign folk theories about why Americans don't like soccer, and how they're wrong. Including such rhetorical gems as The Canadian Rebuttal, which I permit you to use next time a boorish European tries to lecture you about soccer.
Post the Second: What the foreign folk theories about Americans and soccer reveal about foreigners themselves. Including such revelations as The Inherent Contradiction in the European Mindset.
Post the Third: My own theories about the reasons Americans haven't embraced soccer, and how those reasons are peculiarly American. Including such war-horses as The Persistence of Puritanical Thinking in America.
Sound good? Post the First shall appear forthwith.
Operation Condor is go.
I have yet to meet a mime who can do a "man trapped inside a blog" routine, but imagine me, your faithful Rauschenberg, doing one now.
What did I just do? I was messing around on the Internet, having fun, clicking a few things saucily, and all of a sudden I'm saddled with a whole new entity, with needs and demands and three a.m. feeding sessions.
And the worst part is, I had a blog back in the nineties, before there were "blogs" (I just called it my "personal website"). Why don't I preserve the dare I say towering legacy of the pioneering and seminal Levee Wash (my old Berkeley musing-page), instead of inexplicably choosing to add another stream of words to the waterlogged delta of today's blogosphere?
Still, I'm thinking this blog could be good for me personally--in running my bar, I've gotten away from writing, specifically, and the practice of arranging my thoughts, in general--and good for all the people I haven't had much time to stay in contact with. Operation Condor is my militaristic push to reclaim my inner intellectual life. I'm staying until the peace is won. As REM said, welcome to the occupation.
What did I just do? I was messing around on the Internet, having fun, clicking a few things saucily, and all of a sudden I'm saddled with a whole new entity, with needs and demands and three a.m. feeding sessions.
And the worst part is, I had a blog back in the nineties, before there were "blogs" (I just called it my "personal website"). Why don't I preserve the dare I say towering legacy of the pioneering and seminal Levee Wash (my old Berkeley musing-page), instead of inexplicably choosing to add another stream of words to the waterlogged delta of today's blogosphere?
Still, I'm thinking this blog could be good for me personally--in running my bar, I've gotten away from writing, specifically, and the practice of arranging my thoughts, in general--and good for all the people I haven't had much time to stay in contact with. Operation Condor is my militaristic push to reclaim my inner intellectual life. I'm staying until the peace is won. As REM said, welcome to the occupation.
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