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Soccer

The Source

My American History professor at Illinois College boiled it down to this. He said, “Democrats don’t understand soccer but they pretend to be interested. Republicans assume it’s a plot.” He was the same guy who said, “You can tell a Democrat from a Republican by the way they mix drinks. A Republican will measure out the booze and tonic carefully. A Democrat will pour until the color looks right.” No matter your political persuasion, if you’re like me you’ve tried to watch soccer. You’ve tried to understand it. Tried to like it. In fact, you might be in one of those handfuls of Americans who can watch, understand and enjoy it all at the same time. I try. I really do. I keep confusing it with rugby. A British friend once told me that soccer is a gentleman’s sport played by ruffians while rugby is a sport of hooligans played by gentlemen. He went it on to state it more graphically: “Soccer is rugby where the players have teeth.” I once traveled back from New Zealand with their national rugby team, the New Zealand Blacks. At that time they were the most feared rugby players in the world. These chaps took up a great deal of room on our Air Australia flight, and if they were coming down the aisle you didn’t. You couldn’t. My Brit’s description proved correct as I was never able to count more than three working teeth in any one New Zealand head. The highlight of the trip was when the team stood up as one halfway through our Pacific journey and began singing. These guys were good!… although their lack of teeth caused their final number to come one “Amathing Grathe, how thweete the thound…” Now that the World Cup has exploded onto the globe, many of us Yanks have again taken up the challenge of understanding soccer, the game which most of the world has the poor understanding to call “football.” For most of us, it’s a sticky wicket. Because of the distances the soccer ball must travel, television close-ups are almost impossible. The typical soccer announcer sounds nothing like the adolescent screamings heard from most football sportscasters, and the ball seems to bounce up and the down field interminably before something meaningful happens. Okay, I realize that if I knew more about the game I’d be able to see that something significant was indeed going on, but perhaps I need to watch the game with my own personal translator. I recently dined one of Beardstown’s great Mexican restaurants on the night the Mexican team was playing France. I meant the evening to be a dinner meeting with a couple of my choreographers, but we made the mistake of sitting on the side of the café with the big-screen television. Although the game ended in a 0-0 tie, our little dance meeting turned into two hours of screaming excitement in a language that stretched my memory of two years of IC Spanish. And, like my time in that class, I had the feeling that I was missing something. I can see the game’s appeal. All that running calls for young men and women of extreme endurance, and a game that’s most often determined by a single goal must require a great deal of skill. And it’s cheap to rehearse. I’ve seen kids kick around a goat’s skull on the dusty streets of third world nations, all dreaming of one day being their country’s greatest sports hero. So far goat-skull kicking hasn’t made it into the U.S. physical education although I think it’s more civilized than dodge ball. Perhaps its our lack of dead goats that’s kept us out of the world soccer rankings. I don’t understand the penalties at all. If you committed a slight no-no the ref holds up a yellow card. Badder boo-boo’s receive a red car. Commit murder and they’ll trade you to France. Soccer players hug a lot. Although I’ve never been in an NFL locker room, I suspect that soccer players out hug us. This can be good or bad depending upon the sweat level of the hugger. Maybe the very act of chasing a ball up an down a very large field for what seems like an extraordinarily long time builds up a tension that only the relief of a goal can hug out of you. Several decades ago when the Green Bay Packers ruled the NFL, they traveled to London and took another NFL team along with them for an exhibition match. The British quickly bought up every seat in the huge stadium to watch this sport that had so taken the colonies by storm. At half time most of the crowd got up and went home. To their estimation it was the most tedious affair they’d ever witnessed. One departing Brit said, “You play for five seconds, blow a whistle, then take a minute recess. Where’s the fun in that?” I guess it’s as Grandma always said, “Depends on how your raised, boy.”