Diplomacy 101
It's the World Cup!!! Yippee!And I'm not the only one who thinks that, either. Living in New York, it's hard to disaggregate soccer enthusiasm into its two constituent parts, namely, the growing sense of World Cup excitement among Americans, and the preexisting enthusiasm among the foreigners and recent immigrants who so enliven this city. I can't tell: are we that much more aware of the WC than we were four years ago, or is it just that NYC is that much more cosmopolitan than Ithaca, New York? The latter is clearly true to some extent, but then again, a renowned college town is hardly lacking for successful students (and academics) from other countries.
Either way, people here are watching the World Cup. And this, despite the fact that America is currently poised to go down as soon as possible, perhaps without scoring even once (though we can always hope).
At work, I've seen people bring their company-issued laptops to the office, so that they can bring them into the break room and work while watching the game. On the streets, bars and restaurants have the games on; while buying lunch today, some 20 people were huddled outside the window just to watch the USA game on inside. A friend tells me that his trading floor had the game on instead of MSNBC. Another friend suggests that one could surely make a killing off the London markets if you made a point of calling just as England was scoring a goal. ("Their brains would be addled," to paraphrase his point.)
And, of course, there's nothing like the World Cup to bring out national rivalries. This doesn't yet really apply to most Americans, who would of course prefer their side to win, but who also feel that they have very little invested in the contest. Soccer is not a particularly American sport. None of us really know who the main competitors are, anyway.
But people are walking around the streets in team colors. They bring national flags to work, hang them in doorways, dress up their bars to favor one nation or another, and make a point of following their team's games. Certain matches take on added significance: an Angolan acquaintance was devastated when Portugal beat his team handily, even though this was to be expected. (Angola, I hasten to point out, was once a Portuguese colony.) Imagine the strong feelings surrounding a USA-Iran match, if such a thing could happen (and it could, theoretically, though it won't). Does anybody remember when upstart Senegal beat reigning champion France on the first day of 2002's World Cup? It was a popular victory in a way that the Yankees beating the Red Sox could never be.
I'm a big fan of national pride through sporting contests. Sports provide one of very, very few ways through which we can all come together as a single nation supporting a single cause, proud of our country, and leery of dissenters, without being frighteningly jingoistic. I do think moments of national unity are good: they are stabilizing, they make people feel like they are supported and part of something bigger than just themselves, and (obviously) they help sometimes very different community members to band together behind a shared cause. I broadly approve of these things--it's just that I just think that such moments should be orchestrated around things other than political causes. Thus: sports!
More than that, though, I think national rivalry through sports is good. The Indians and the Pakistanis may not be the best of friends, but surely it is a step in the right direction that both sides are deeply invested in winning their regular cricket matches against one another. They can boo the other team, wear national flags, cheer their own side, crowd around TVs en masse, and loathe the good batsman on the opposing team, but they each need the other for the match ever to get off the ground. Sporting contests are strange beasts: they are contests, yes, but each requires a mutual respect and an agreement on everything from ground rules to location. We could bomb random country X any day, but we couldn't play them in soccer unless they agreed to a number of mutually-acceptable rules.
And it's not just the teams that have to enter into the joint project of a match before they try to humiliate one another on the field; in most cases, especially the ones where the feelings run the highest, governments have to do this, too. Pakistan opened its borders to thousands of Indian cricket fans during their last Test match, negotiated a new cross-country bus service with the Indian government, and had to figure out where Indians were going to stay in their country. In the Japan-Korea World Cup, those countries had to work together economically, structurally, and politically--and the Japanese had to welcome finalist China into their midst along with a multitude of Chinese fans. Despite huge fears that this would go off badly indeed, it didn't. To be sure, the Japanese fans booed the Chinese team (which went home in ignomy having played poorly indeed), but after the match they turned around and hawked their World Cup wares to every Chinese tourist that would buy them. And the Chinese? Well, they bought them.
posted by Skay @ 7:22 PM
4 Comments:
To answer your first question: it's NYC. Or maybe the people you notice/hang out with. The vast majority of this country - urban folks included - are still completely apathetic about the World Cup.
And why shouldn't they be? The best NBA playoffs in over ten years are coming to a close, and baseball's myriad controversies are drawing attention to the sport in a huge way.
You know what would make soccer a popular spectator sport in the US?
Hands. Soccer needs hands.
Soccer does have hands, donovan. Using them, though, is a penalty.
My very English parents-thus "football" watchers (and the term is far more appropriate here than to the NFL/CFL game-told me of a 1-0 nothing game between Trinidad/Tobago and ... I forget the other team. No one scored until the last seconds of the match, yet they called it a great game.
In any other sport, such a low score would be a travesty, or even impossible according to the scoring method.
But I agree with you, Skay; sport is a great unifier. If only we could substitute a soccer match for war.
Problems in Afghamistan? Play a round robin with Al Queda, Hammas, the US, Canada and the UK.
In 1972, Team Canada played Russia in a series often referred to as a 'summit meeting'. Talk about national pride at stake! I don't remember it because I was a newborn, but it is still discussed and reverred today-probably because Canada won the series.
Donovan: I believe you that it's NYC. I don't particularly think it's just the people I hang out with. Funny story about how the city differs from the rest of the country: a group of people at the office were chatting today, wondering what the new makes cars are called these days. We don't know. Well, of course not: we don't drive.
Donovan, you might like this book excerpt about the shortcomings of soccer for the American viewer: http://www.slate.com/id/2142554/. I find it both amusing and in some ways quite truthful indeed. Plus, I suppose I'm not immune to some self-flattering rhetoric a la "REAL Americans are honest."
Ha! Eggers' article made my day. I just laughed one of those hearty chuckles that causes the people around you to give you funny looks.
In all seriousness though, I have my own (completely speculative and nearly untestable) theory as to soccer's lack of popularity in this country, and it has to do with what I think makes a sport interesting to watch in general.
The appeal in sports, for me at least, is watching small victories accumulate and build up to larger ones. Think of long drives down the field in (American) football, or rallies in baseball that consist of getting players on base and advancing them. Of course, there are so-called big plays in both sports (eg, Hail Mary passes and home runs), but they don't usually decide games by themselves.
Basketball, of course, is made up entirely of small, cumulative victories. It has in common with tennis that there's a no such thing as a "big play," at least not in the sense described above.
Soccer, at least to the comparatively uninitiated, has no such thing. Small, tactical victories aren't rewarded on a regular basis. One play blows the entire game open. It's like the coitus interruptus of sport.
(Of course, the same could be said about hockey, which I figure is more popular here than soccer because it's played faster, on a smaller surface, and more violently, than soccer)
I, for one, would love to see Major League Soccer adopt some radical rule changes to increase scoring (or the possibility of scoring). Instituting the equivalent of basketball's backcourt violation would do wonders, as would getting rid of the absurd offsides rule.
And why not? It's not like other sports haven't changed their rules around. Football added a forward pass, basketball a 24-second shot clock. Baseball used to consider one-bounce catches in the outfield fly outs, and they changed that rule (to say nothing of how many times they've raised and lowered the height of the mound). All of these changes definitely made their sports better. Of course, this wouldn't make the United States better in international soccer (they'd effectively be playing a different sport here), but it might get people a lot more interesting in watching it.
Post a Comment
<< Home