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.
4 comments:
So, you have mounted an argument for why one set of putatively American (U.S.) values are at conflict with some of the underpinings of the modern game of soccer. And I dig and appreciate the intellectual rigor - I like reading this kind of treatment of this kind of subject. All the same, I don't entirely buy it.
I'm also from the states, and I enjoy playing and (infrequently) watching a few sports. Those that I will participate in and watch tend to be more soccer-like than, say, baseball like. Ironically, the light cast from your perspective has helped me understand why I like soccer [and, near as I can tell, it's not because I'm some sort of closet facist].
For me, sports can be arrayed on a continuum ranging from intuitive to... I guess: "unintuitive". The thrust of intuitive sports can be explained in a simple sentence. Races are probably the most intuitive: "Be first to run to the end of this path", "swim back and forth twenty times, quick." Some combat sports are only slightly more complicated: "Knock him on his ass, before vice-versa." [And some are way more complicated - this is why I love watching epee, but foil bores me to tears (both are fencing events)]
Soccer is just a notch further than simple combat sports: "Kick the ball in their goal before they kick it in yours."
Without belaboring the point, nearly all modern sports have some ancillary rules ensuring a measure of fairness and safety. The difference between the rulebook of soccer and that of football is that 7 year olds can (and do, throughout the world) organize themselves into games of soccer that are essentially the same as what's played at world cup. 7 year olds cannot put together a recognizable game of football or baseball. Now, that's not to say that US parents don't put their young kids in football and baseball uniforms and involve them in talmudic discussions of the in-field fly rule and passing interference. And gradually, it sticks - which is why we've got a country full of football and baseball fans. I'm just saying: it don't come natural.
This "natural" or "intuitive" quality is, I think, at tension with what you perceive as the US's culturally focal commitment to fairness and fine-grainedness, in so far as the fussier you get about morally and statistically scrutinizing each element of play, the more obscure your rules get.
This wouldn't really matter except that part of what went into making the US was a desire to escape the Baroque intrigues of the courts of pre-modern Europe, in an experiment with democratic rule. Obviously, the scope of enfranchisement in our fledgling democracy was lamentably narrow by today's standards, but broad compared to contemporary models. Part of our founding ethos is that everyone [used advisedly] should be able to "get it" and participate meaningfully. Soccer, and similarly intuitive sports exemplify this virtue, football and baseball don't.
That's not to say soccer is somehow, ironically "more American" than other sports, but rather that the US is a pretty big place with a fairly weird (if relatively brief) history and that there's a lot of room for identifying consonant and dissonant aspects of the "American" experience in relation to any argument you care to mount.
Lastly, I wan't to acknowledge that I left out basketball because it's mostly soccer-like, which is to say "intuitive", which is, in turn, to say I like it best of the three focal US sports you identify. What I don't love about it is the frequent breaks in action which, I suppose, allow you to divide the plays into discrete, statistically analyzable elements.
Also, I didn't bother with the "manliness" bit. Yeah, flopping is lame, but you're overlooking a lot of rough stuff, including playing through legitimate injuries (because your team is out of substitutions), pretty much anything a goalie does, the fact that those red cards are given out for a reason, and lastly, my favorite part of the game: slide tackling.
I'm going to reply to you fully later, because your comments are interesting, but, for now, what you should know is that I essentially agree with you, but that I think we are arguing about different things. (Standard, but true.) I think we have the same concept of the soccer-basketball vs. football-baseball nexus.
Good points. Soccer is, by far, more natural and simple than baseball and football. Which is absolutely why American kids have taken to it in such vast numbers (something I meant to mention, but got lost along the way). Football and baseball, indeed, don't come natural. But please don't think that I'm saying that soccer fans are fascist. They love a sport that, I hope I've made clear, is beautiful, whatever flaws it may have. I don't think any useful parallels can be drawn between soccer and Fascism, other than that they were, at one time, both European pastimes.
I think the only flaw with your argument is that you think the American system of government is "natural" and "simple," as opposed to the Baroque European systems of rule. What I'd like to argue is that we were rebelling against the traditionalist, rough simplicity of European government, a system that treated America as a simple source of money and resources, without any nuanced idea of its political status (taxation w/o representation). We instituted a very complex system of government compared to the traditional monarchies of Europe (England's "way of doing things," i.e. constitutional monarchy, which was never actually written down, or the simple democracy instituted after the French Revolution)--NOT a pure democracy, but a representative democracy, where citizens don't get to vote directly for most of their rulers: Supreme Court Justices, Senators, or their President (the sole exception being the House of Representatives, which was designed as the "lowest" branch of government). The Constitution's checks-and-balances system, which I think you'll agree has yielded an extremely complex government, was based on lots of geeky discussion in Philadelphia one summer. Our Constitution, in short, is as nerdy as football or baseball is.
Also, I don't think I made it clear enough that the "manliness" thing is NOT a black-and-white issue, but rather one of gradations. I've seen soccer players do incredibly "manly" things: play through pain, beat the crap out of each other, and so on. My point is that it's all largely undermined by the frequent and egregious flopping.
And, yes, the fucking annoying constant breaks in play in basketball demonstrate one of the massive weaknesses of it as a sport: the fouling rules need to be completely revamped. I could write a post about it, but essentially they either need to be more strict or completely lax. Basketball, at the professional level, has become almost as bad as soccer, rules-wise.
Does that answer your questions? I'm happy to dither further.
One additional thing: I don't want to say that European government was "simple" in that it worked in a straightforward way. Just that it was more a culture, in the sense of an ingrained way of proceeding in regards to politics (and, again, I'm taking England's unwritten constitution, which relied on everyone having an intuitive understanding of precedent, as my main example here). Americans, with their love for exactitude and fine-grainedness, were the ones who had to write a constitution down based on a lot of nerdy political reading they had done, and thus build an intricate government from scratch based on complex principles like checks and balances, the "refinement and enlargement" delegates give to "provincial and parochial" views of the people at large, protecting the people from "the tyranny of the majority," and so on. Not to mention that, in our love for constant innovation, we designed the Constitution as a changing document. I mentioned Americans' love for fantasy football as an example of our nerdiness; if there is such a thing, what those guys were doing in Philadelphia that summer was a fantasy government league (in more ways than one, because Lord knows they didn't think the Constitution was actually going to be accepted or work).
To get back to soccer, just like old European systems of government, it is more of a culture than an exact, rule-heavy sport like football or baseball. The actual written rules of soccer are very simple, as you point out, whereas the complexity comes in the way that players have learned to play the game over time.
In other words, I don't think that Americans love "complexity" whereas Europeans love "simplicity"; I think that Americans like a certain type of nerdy fine-grainedness that is, for the most part, un-European. Make sense? Anyway, as you can tell, you've got me thinking; thanks.
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