Soccer Detractors Deserve a Good, Swift Kick
I thought the World Cup had succeeded, without the use of electro-shock therapy, in helping us get over this irrational fear of any game played without using one’s hands.
I thought we learned that soccer was not a threat to the republic, was not carcinogenic, was not played only by beady-eyed Communist atheists with hairy legs and could be appreciated by the average American sports fan as at least an occasional diversion, the way hockey used to be, back when we had hockey.
Soccer is our friend.
Soccer can be trusted.
“Soccer Can’t Make It Here” brayed the headline atop a 50-odd-inch screed that appeared in these pages recently, which attempted to shoot down the embryonic MLS before it drafted its first player, dusting off the age-old charges and inventing a few new ones.
You know: Soccer is a cute kids game but it bores us sophisticated grown-ups. . . . Not enough scoring. . . . What’s the deal with the feet? . . . We didn’t invent it, so it can’t be any good, etc., etc.
Essayist’s solution, short of banning the sport altogether: Eliminate the goalkeeper, since “you don’t reach out to America with a defensive game that stars goalkeepers,” and maybe install a small box on a post that would ring a chime whenever the ball is kicked into it.
Hmmmmm.
Americans can’t relate to games played with goalies? Someone needs to alert the ticket takers at Mighty Duck and New York Ranger home games.
Shoot the ball into a box hanging from a post? This has been tried before. It is called “basketball.”
Chimes?
Well, that’s all the time we have now, thank you, good night.
Soccer fans are the most passionate on the planet, and, as the laws of physics might suggest, so are its detractors. How is it that the mainstream American media tolerate rhythmic gymnastics and the biathlon every four years--warm up to the luge, even--yet 90 minutes of soccer can send a sportswriter itching and scratching and steaming toward the keyboard, diatribe ready to upload?
Hell hath no fury like a baseball beat writer assigned to a USA-England friendly.
I admit, I used to be a skeptic. My interest in soccer was Olympic-sized--once every quadrennial was fine. I’d pay loose attention to World Cup results, watch the highlights, try not to sneeze before the United States was eliminated, read up on English hooligan developments and that was about it.
I’d been to see the Surf and the Salsa and it didn’t translate. Everything about those games seemed minor league and we are, after all, living in Big Time Sports Land. Last year, I described a APSL championship match between the Salsa and the Colorado Foxes as “trash sports.” I received letters, labeling me as just one more arrogant American soccer basher.
Everything changed with the 1994 World Cup, as friends keep reminding me when I ask if they caught that tape-delay of Liverpool-Newcastle on Prime Ticket. I spent two full months with the sport this summer, covered 11 games, watched dozens more on television and am now seriously afflicted.
Gheorghe Hagi hooked me. This is more than I’d prefer to announce in public, but what can I say? Hagi, a stocky, rather swarthy, midfielder from Romania, did things with a soccer ball I never imagined possible. Whipping it to his teammates like some no-hands Magic Johnson, booming 35-yard sliders that bend left, swerve right and then tuck themselves into the top far corner of the net.
Where had this game been all my life, and where could I get more?
“I fell in love with (soccer) as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it,” Nick Hornby writes in “Fever Pitch,” an hilarious account of life as a fan of the English club team Arsenal, and one of the best sports books I have ever read.
I laughed when I first read that passage. Now, as the soccer magazines jam our mail slot and the videocassettes of English and Dutch league games pile up next to the TV, I can commiserate. Played at its highest level, the game is as addictive as caffeine. Corner kicks that land on a dime, flying headers, scrambles in front of the goalmouth, Baggio dribbling through a picket line of startled defenders--sure beats watching Gary Bettman’s and Bob Goodenow’s talking heads on the 11 o’clock news.
If the MLS has blown it anywhere, it’s here, in the no-baseball, no-hockey zone of early October. America’s new professional soccer league should have been ready to go when the European leagues kick off--late August--ready to climb into the gap.
Instead, Alan Rothenberg spends his time sweating out an April start-up date with only seven unnamed franchises on the docket, begging the rival APSL to bail him out and make it an even dozen.
Soccer can make it here if it gets the right players (some marquee internationals, the best Americans), promotes them as major league (no handbills, please), opens with reasonable expectations (play the games at Titan Stadium, not the Coliseum) and sells the sport instead of the agenda of a few attention-hungry stuffed shirts.
As for the not-enough-scoring charge, how about that Ram game last Sunday? Two-nothing at halftime, 5-0 in the fourth quarter, 8-5 on the final scoreboard--and not a goalkeeper in sight.
You know, if they just eliminated the defenses, pro football might make it here.
