World Cup will never fully catch on in the United States
Published 12:00 am Thursday, June 22, 2006
June 22, 2006.
The largest sporting event on planet Earth has now been under way for about two weeks. Look hard enough and you may find a few people here with an interest.
In South Korea, 80,000 gathered in a square to watch their team’s game on a big screen TV – a very big-screen TV. No sporting event anywhere captures the world’s imagination like the World Cup, yet we here in America have a fleeting interest at best.
It begs the question: Why hasn’t World Cup soccer grabbed America’s fancy?.
1. The scoring. It was announced Tuesday that the 2,000th World Cup goal had been scored. In HISTORY. We like high-scoring affairs here. We like offense.
The first World Cup was played in 1930 and this is the 18th World Cup tournament. That averages out to 111 goals per World Cup. This year, there will be 60 games, so that’s fewer than two goals per 90 minute match. Jeez. Why not watch competitive needlepoint hosted by Bob Knight?.
2. We are jealous of their celebrations. In our leagues, anything more original than “Let’s go Buf-fa-lo” draws a 15-yard penalty. Our athletes have no opportunity to celebrate. Score the go-ahead touchdown in the final seconds of a national championship game and leap headlong into the band? No sir. You may offend your opponents.
At the World Cup, one player scores a goal and you’d think he was fleeing from Interpol, teammates in tow until they finally catch him, maul him, knock him to the ground, then let him up to put his sweaty shirt over his face and thrust his hands skyward. With only one goal scored per game, the overzealous response is warranted.
3. Lack of coherent rules. We are rules people, by the book. Holding is holding is holding. We have four umpires in baseball, three in basketball and seven in football. Yet in the World Cup one man calls it all. The linesmen are there to call out-of-bounds, offside and wave their cute flags. We throw flags. Offensively.
Sometimes a tackle is a foul, sometimes not. There are yellow cards and red cards, but only the man in the middle, the Great Wizard of the World Cup, can judge the seriousness of such a violation. One man with that much power should be called dictator, not sir.
4. The fans. They put us to shame. From well before the start of a match until well after, the chanting, dancing, rhythmic drum beat of excitement never stops. Find a Vanderbilt-Middle Tennessee State football game tied at 3 in the third quarter and one can hear the popcorn popping in the concession stand popcorn machine. A World Cup match with a 3-3 tie is borderline national anarchy.
Our fans dress up with their team’s jerseys. Soccer fans dress up as gladiators and bovines.
5. We stink. We want to be good at things. We have the best baseball, best football, have stolen the best hockey from Canada and are the best at basketball – usually. At soccer, we can’t compete with teams that look at this event as life and death. As of this writing, the USA has lost one and tied one and scored zero goals. Italy scored for us to give us a tie. It’s simply un-American to play nearly 200 minutes of a sport and have one gift from our opponents to show for it.
6. And finally, the flops. When we hit our opponent, we hit our opponent. Nudge a World Cup player and he’ll swan dive, roll over three times, cry and call for a stretcher to cart him off the field. Los Angeles Rams defensive lineman Jack Youngblood once played the entire playoffs and a Super Bowl on a broken leg.
One should expect such with teams with players named Koifu, Kaka, Cocu – pronounced (Ca-coo) – and Ronaldo. Would you be more intimidated by a Ray Nitschke or a Ronaldo?.
So the World Cup may never catch on here. That’s OK. We can still watch the games with other countries’ fans going Cocu and the Americans playing like Kaka.