With Us or Against Us? Americans and Soccer

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 2, 2006)

“World soccer rules desperately need an overhaul; in that regard, they would do well to look to the USA, which designs its game rules to ensure that the better team comes out on top.” – Thomas Rice, in a letter sent to USAToday.com

A friend and I have been trying to figure out why Americans -- that is citizens of the United States of America and not citizens of any other American country -- don’t appreciate the game of soccer, aside from the fact that they aren’t any good at it.

“Some of my male friends think the game is too hard to follow, or there’s not enough scoring. Or they just say that they don’t get it,” my friend says. She’s working on a theory of “a parallel between a country’s political history and its love of the game.”

The basic tenet is that people in countries with long histories of political unrest and uncertainty – such as some South American and European countries – are better able to understand, play, and cheer the game. Whereas in the US, with its relative political stability the past 200 years, the orderly, controlled, chess-like American football is the popular game.

She might be onto something, although I’m not sure the theory works in Asia, where the developed, orderly countries of Japan and South Korea are the football powerhouses, not the basket-case countries of Southeast Asia. But my friend would seem to have no less an adherent to her theory than Claudio Reyna, captain of Team USA the past three World Cup campaigns.

“When I see youth soccer, I see too much organization, too many kids standing around in line waiting to shoot," Reyna said in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated (as carried in an Associated Press article July 14).

Another theory I read of several years ago is that Americans have no feeling for real football because it is mostly a game of failure. That is, most Americans cannot believe anything good can have happened in a game that ended in a 0-0 draw, when it may have been all end-to-end action, with sparkling mid-field play and many near misses. Americans are too oriented towards results to enjoy such a game was the thinking, and I’m willing to go along with that, too.

But I fear the attitude displayed by the USAToday letter writer is more common. Americans don’t take to the game simply because it is not American. They can sit through the four hours it takes to play the official 60 minutes of an American football match, with all its timeouts, half-times, and commercial breaks for quarters and two-minute warnings. They can watch a baseball game into extra innings -- debating the wisdom of pinch-runners, pinch-hitters, suicide bunts, squeeze plays, and the hit-and-run -- much of the time while absolutely nothing is happening on the field. They will hang on until the last tenth-of-a-second tick of a basketball game in which the final 10 minutes is a series of trips to the foul line as the trailing team tries to mount a comeback. And then they’ll lecture the world on what needs to be done to make soccer a better, more exciting game?

It reminds me of the mother watching the military parade, proud her son is the only one in step.

There are the obvious parallels to be drawn in the American reaction and attitude towards real football and the US diplomatic approach to the rest of the world the past several years. And is there a whiff of racist nationalism of the kind that allowed Americans for decades to ignore, even ridicule, its domestic Negro baseball leagues, Asian and Cuban baseball, European basketball, and any sports – badminton, ping pong, rugby, skiing – at which the best and brightest stars are seldom homegrown American boys? Would a bicycle race ever have received coast-to-coast coverage in the US had not Lance Armstrong recovered from cancer and dominated and won the most famous of all cycling races for a record seven straight years?

But if we are going to make nasty insinuations, let’s go for the real low blow. Real football isn’t a major US sport, because soccer is too lean a game. Americans like their goals and their scores like they like their chicken. They want them to come in Herculean, super-sized buckets. They are not satisfied with preparations that rely on quality, style, presentation, and build-up. They want all-you-can-stuff-into-yourself buffets, jumbo, big-gulp drinks, 72-ounce, Texas-sized slabs of goals. It is un-American, un-thankful, ungrateful to walk away from a table wanting more, or from a stadium or living room couch not completely satiated with games, scores, wrap-ups, and half-time extravaganzas -- without several whole enchiladas as it were.

Man! It must really bite now that some itty-bitty, little Japanese guy has been beating all American comers in the annual Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July hot dog eating contest the past five years. How beautifully ironic is that? Shall we say it?

Must be hard to stomach.

Copyright © 2006 Lee Roy LeRoi