Many nations take their football very seriously. Though hooliganism has become a catch-all word for sport-related violence and mischief, it has its roots in football. In many cases football games seem to act as a proxy for national pride. It was considered the final proximate cause of the Football War in 1969 between El Salvador and Honduras. The sport also exacerbated tensions at the beginning of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s when a Red Star Belgrade at Dinamo Zagreb match devolved into rioting in March of 1990. I will add my own anecdote and say that when the USA beat Mexico in the 2002 World Cup my Mexican girlfriend and I broke up for almost 3 weeks. Fortunately we were able to reconcile and get married 2 years later.
This past weeks Lexington column in the Economist has an article titled, "The odd man out--America's coolness towards football is another example of American exceptionalism".
Amid this global fervour the United States will stand out like a temperance
preacher at a Bierfest. Football is not quite the non-sport that it once was.
The American team is not bad. There are a few pockets of football enthusiasts,
mostly in posh suburbs and Latino-crowded inner cities. Fans will be able to
follow the game without resorting to Spanish-language channels. But football
still remains a distant also-ran behind American sports such as baseball,
basketball, hockey and American football (in 2002 only 3.9m Americans watched
the World Cup final, compared with 95m who watched this year's Super Bowl). The country that dominates the world's popular culture is hopelessly marginal when it comes to the world's most popular sport.
We're hopelessly marginal at soccer, yet despite this we've fielded a "not bad" team that managed to qualify for the World Cup. It must be made up exclusively of kids from posh suburbs and Latinos from crowded inner cities since those are the only people who seem to care about the sport.
America's marginality is underlined by its failure to export its own sports. Baseball is popular in Japan and Central America, and basketball has recently become a craze in China; but that is a pretty poor record compared with the
British Empire's success in exporting one of the world's most idiosyncratic
games, cricket.
Who knew it was a foreign policy goal to export our sports around the world? Surely those entities with a vested interest in US-owned and dominated sports would like to see it, but I am pretty sure there's no Secretary of Sports at the cabinet level. And only if we had an empire as successful as the British Empire once was, the Sun would Never Set on the Baseball Stadium.
America is perhaps the only country that greets the World Cup with an orgy of football-bashing. In 1986 Jack Kemp took to the floor of Congress to contrast “European socialist” soccer with “democratic” and “capitalist” American
football. In 2003 a blogger even pointed out that a leading al-Qaeda terrorist
had been a European soccer player: “You don't see any former NFL players or
Major League baseball players joining al-Qaeda, do you?”
The author had to go back 20 years to dig up a quote by an ex-football player turned-marginally successful politician to prove how America greets the World Cup with an "orgy of football-bashing." Just in case you did not get the point, even a blogger on the internet thinks soccer is for terrorists!
Yankee hostility to football draws on deep wells of both patriotism and populism. The history of assimilation has been one of abandoning foreign sports(primarily football) in favour of American pastimes. The sons of football-playing parents knew that they had become good Americans when they could quote the batting average of left-handed Yankee players in losing seasons.
More recently, football has become embroiled in the culture wars. The most
prominent supporters of football, apart from new immigrants, are overclass
parents who want their little darlings to play a civilised foreign game rather
than the lumbering American performance that bears the same name.
Now that the author has proven that America is hostile to football, he explains that it's only natural due to the fact that patriotism and populism demand that new immigrants foreswear their old world sports in favor of becoming statistical machines.
I played soccer for 8 years in my youth. Although there were kids on my teams that could be described as coming from both "overclass" and "new immigrant" families (note the author's mutual-exclusiveness), both were far from the most prominent supporters. Amazingly, when I arrived at high school I began to play the "lumbering" American version as well. My life could have taken a number of paths beginning in high school. The fact that I am by traditional measures a well adjusted, dues-paying citizen I attribute to the discipline, commitment, tenacity, fairness and structure that American football taught me. Soccer was about fun, but football was about life.
Behind all this lies a bigger debate about America's cultural
idiosyncrasy. Americans like to think of themselves as global trendsetters and
standard-makers. But a raft of opinion polls since the Iraq war have
demonstrated that America is not so much a trendsetter as an outlier—more
individualistic, more religious, more nationalistic, more anti-government and
more gung-ho about the use of force than other countries.
When Americans are not completely self-absorbed in their populist, patriotic rhetoric, they're very busy worrying about setting global trends. As you'll recall, America was loved the world over--especially in Europe--before President YEE-HAW ruined our image by invading the kite flying, peace-loving nation of Iraq. All the people from virtually every nation on earth who are literally dying to get to our shores are outliers, too.
This evidence of American exceptionalism has provoked a fierce debate within the United States between “red” Americans, who are proud of their country's oddness, and “blue” Americans (mostly Democrats), who think that America should pay more attention to the rest of the world. It has also provoked an even fiercer backlash in other countries against America's “weird” values, such as its support for the death penalty and its predilection for unilateral action.
IF you are a "red" American you are proud of your oddness as defined by the fact that you may or may not believe that people who commit the most heinous of crimes may deserve to die. Heaven forbid you believe a nation has the right to act unilaterally. If you are a "blue" American you are superior (a Democrat!) because you pay attention to what(Europe)the(Europe)Rest(Europe)of the(Europe)World is saying because they obviously have your best interests at heart. Their track record proves it, too. I forgot, what's this have to do with football?
It is possible that American exceptionalism may wane in the next few years, particularly if the Democrats can recapture the presidency. Unilateral action is out of fashion, thanks to the Iraq mess. But when it comes to sport, American exceptionalism looks more enduring. It is hard to imagine America's indigenous sports being forced to cede much ground to soccer, short of a dramatic victory by the national team in July; and it is impossible to imagine the rest of the world abandoning their beloved footballs for pigskins or baseball bats.
The Democrats will surely flog this nation back into their rightful, supine place in the world if only enough people will open their eyes and see that Iraq is a total, broken, unsalvagable mess and will always remain so. Oh yeah, back to football. America, quit trying to cram pigskinned-wrapped baseball bats up the world's behind. They just won't go for it. Maybe if your "not bad" team can pull off a miracle upset, your nation will see the virtue that the rest of the world sees in football.
I am usually a big fan of the Economist, especially the Lexington column. I'm going to try to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that the regular authors of the column are all on holiday--maybe even in Germany for the World Cup--because this piece could have been written by an intern for The Nation.
1 comment:
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