The American Saga of Slow-Moving Sports: Soccer and Baseball
I went to get a haircut during the Greater Hartford Open and the head of the salon, an Italian immigrant, asked who I thought was going to win the World Cup.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” I said.
The truth hurt him. Here is this nice, older guy getting all lathered up about Italy’s chances in the world’s greatest sporting event, and here is one of the locals, a sportswriter, no less, giving him a blank stare and a curt response when all he wanted was a little conversation about his favorite sport.
Let me start off by saying that I am not your basic soccer know-nothing. I know that if you want to see great legs, you don’t watch Madonna, you watch Maradona. I know that Edson Arantes do Nascimento is not a Bolivian railroad, it’s the real name of the sport’s Babe Ruth, Pele. I know that what we call the field is really the pitch. I know the difference between a corner kick and an oil slick: A corner kick is much harder to make.
When my parents shipped me off to summer camp for one awful summer when I was 11, soccer was my best sport. You did not need to be eight feet tall or six feet wide or have X-ray vision. All you needed was the ability to run and hustle. That, plus an athletic supporter you trusted, was all a young boy needed to excel.
When I was starting out in this business in the ethnic polyglot neighborhoods of Trenton, N.J., I covered high schools where it was thought that sissies played football and real men played the real futbol, soccer. And while not all the soccer games I covered were quite as exciting as certain episodes of “The Brady Bunch,” at least you were spared the sight of teen-agers built like the Pillsbury Doughboy masquerading as offensive linemen. To play soccer, you had to be fit.
There is no better sport for kids than soccer. Equipment is minimal, and so is the risk of serious injury. It is great for physical fitness and it does not take a high level of skill for a youngster who might be otherwise unconfident about his or her athletic ability to have a good time and a good workout.
Soccer is the world’s most popular sport. The World Series, Super Bowl, National Basketball Association finals and Stanley Cup combined pale when compared to the worldwide impact of the World Cup.
Which is why it deeply saddens me to inform soccer aficionados and all you other lunatics out there that soccer and the World Cup is never going to catch on in our country. Former President Carter will be planting peanuts on the White House lawn before soccer captures the imagination of Joe Fan.
Soccer’s biggest obstacle to becoming a mass spectator sport in this country is a lack of tradition. What popularity soccer does enjoy here was handed down from immigrant fathers to their sons. But as sons eagerly assimilated into American culture, they discovered a new sport: baseball.
Some people believe soccer will never be popular in this country because it is inherently dull, because there is so little scoring, because the players are so spread out on the field, because it takes so long for action to unfold -- and that when it does, most of it comes from the hooligans in the stands.
If that is so, then why is baseball so popular in the United States? Baseball, too, is inherently dull. Does anybody really believe there is anything exciting about a pitcher making eight lazy throws to first to keep the runner close? About a batter stepping out of the box and spitting in the dirt? How often have you sat at home switching channels, switching back to the baseball game only to find the same hitter fouling off pitches? A bunch of 8-year-olds playing musical chairs can be more exciting than some baseball games.
Want to know the bold, brazen, awful truth? If baseball were new to our shores, if it were introduced to the United States in this era of television, as soccer has been, it would fall flat on its face. What advertiser would pay three cents to push his wares on a new sport that moves at a snail’s pace? Given the current popularity of football and basketball in the United States, the new sport of baseball would not have a chance.
Do you see baseball catching on in the rest of the world? Of course not. It is basketball that is becoming the international sport of choice.
Sure, baseball caught on in postwar Japan because of American servicemen, and because the Japanese made it their business to imitate everything Western. But outside of North America and Central America and parts of the Far East, baseball means nothing to the world.
Baseball is uniquely American, and most other cultures can no more fathom its appeal than we can fathom cricket. But baseball is an American tradition, the language of which permeates our culture.
When you kiss a girl, the guys say you have “made it to first base.” When the Democrats made fun of George Bush’s patrician upbringing at their 1988 national convention, they said he was “born on third base, and thinks he hit a triple.” The lead story in last Sunday’s New York Times Week in Review, a story about the world’s changing economies, was headlined “Triple Play.”
When you talk about soccer, most Americans don’t feel anything. In a country where the populace votes based on sound bytes instead of position papers, where people wait for the movie rather than read the book, there is not much room on an already crowded sports menu for a non-violent, slow-moving game with little scoring played by normal-sized men on a big green field.
We already have one of those. And we love it blindly. It’s tradition.
