Even when you're serenely buzzed after a raucous and joyful wedding reception, it's awkward trying to fall asleep (on the floor, no less) when two people are undressing each other with erotic stealth on a nearby bed. I am 75% my friend Max did not have a one-night stand on this night. Lord knows I didn't. I am not certain if consensual finger-banging can be placed in the one-night stand category. I don't think so, but maybe it qualifies. Hopefully someday a footnote will clear this up for me.*
The girl Max fooled around with, Cathy, lives in Milwaukee. Max lives in Fond du Lac. These two cities are separated by roughly 80 minutes of driving time, and so it is unlikely the isolated lust will blossom into a longterm relationship. This suits me just fine. I'm glad, even though I really should feel indifferent. Cathy and I would not coexist peacefully, and if things got serious between those two frisky hotel room fornicators, I would probably start to avoid Max. In all likelihood, Cathy doesn't remember my name, but I know she dislikes me. She doesn't necessarily hate me, but she hates my opinion on the topic of this essay. And I in turn hate her opinion of what I'm about to write. Before she got wink-winked that night, Cathy and I argued about soccer.
It's no coincidence that this argument occurred while the 2010 FIFA World Cup was in progress. The call for patriotism generally happens in four year cycles; this is evidenced by the presidential election, the winter and summer Olympics, and the fleeting popularity of soccer in America. Had the wedding Cathy and I attended taken place during the summer of 2011, there is little chance the topic of soccer would have been raised. The average American sports fan slumbers through soccer's existence for three years and nine months at a time, getting roused from their torpor by the fickle beckoning of patriotism—not a genuine fondness for the game of soccer. Soccer in America is reliant on patriotism as a marketing gimmick. Consequently, a great many Americans watched our boys lose to Ghana, but 1% of the population can name the team who won last year's Major League Soccer championship. A supposedly important match between two American soccer teams generates as much interest as the latest Coolio album in the state of Wyoming. The MLS championship has got to be like watching a Civil War reenactment in which one soldier gets “shot” in 90 minutes of “action” to determine the winner of the “battle.”
It may seem contradictory to assert that soccer is aided by sporadic patriotism in light of the fact that the sport is distinctly un-American. But it's the truth. The difference between soccer and football, baseball, and basketball in America is that the latter three sports are autonomous, financially viable entities that don't depend on the patriotism bailout once every four years. One of the reasons why so many Americans resent soccer is because the game subconsciously reminds us of a needy corporation like Chrysler. Soccer is incompatible with the ideals of capitalism. For decades, professional soccer players in this country have been trying to pull themselves up by the shoestrings of their Pumas with total futility.
Football is the most popular sport in this country. It is also egregiously misnamed. It can't be disputed that feet are required to play football; however, the same could be said for every other body-intensive sport (with the exception of wheelchair rugby). What's telling is that kickers and punters, the two least respected positions on every NFL roster, are the only players who routinely use their feet to kick the pigskin. Consequently, thinly veiled anti-soccer sentiments are apparent in football. David Beckham may be a suave international heartthrob, but unless the bloke can throw a shockingly spot-on deep ball, if he made the transition to football, he would rank as the 52nd coolest dude on any NFL team. His coach would refer to Beckham as US Weekly, having completely forgotten the man's real name.
There are many alternatives in nomenclature to the game made famous by the likes of Tom Landry, Jim Brown, and #4 for the Green Bay Packers—Mr. Chuck Fusina. My friends and I compiled a list that includes: Yard Ball, Four Down Ball, Collision Ball, Tackle Ball, and Touchdown Ball. These names offer a more apt relation to the game itself, but they all lack in the all-important aspect of giving European football a big “fuck you.” Ultimately, it doesn't matter that football is misnamed stateside. What matters is that we stole the distinction of the rest of the world's most popular and lamest game and applied it (with bold ignorance) to a sport invented by Americans that is in all ways superior. Imagine if tomorrow our country stopped referring to inches and feet and miles as being part of the standard system of measurement and adopted the designation of metric in its place. Nothing would change in the way we measure distances or quantities, we still wouldn't know a centimeter from a centipede, but we started calling our system of measurement metric (even though it really isn't). This is pretty much what our football has done by co-opting the rest of the world's football. As far as global actions go, this one is awesome, brazen, and least importantly, utterly stupid.
And this, I suppose, is the kind of patriotism I can tolerate: that is, the kind of patriotism that keeps soccer largely unpopular in the U.S.
It's half-time. Hydrate yourself by chugging copious amounts of mineral water, replenish your vitamins with some orange slices, and review the highlight reel from the first 1,000 words of this essay.
The most repellent aspect of soccer has got to be the scoreless tie. My grudge against scoreless ties runs deeper than the fact that they are immensely boring; scoreless ties offer proof that the game of soccer is inherently flawed. The driving force behind soccer, the object of the game, is to score goals. Each team is given 90 minutes to accomplish this task as frequently as possible to ensure victory. A friend of mine who adores soccer estimated that scoreless ties happen 20% of the time, which exceeded my unsure estimate of 10%. If we split the difference between the two figures, this means that soccer matches 1.) defy the very essence of the game itself about 15% of the time and 2.) are even duller than I had originally thought.
The debate between Cathy and I was especially contentious because she despises baseball and loves soccer whereas I despise soccer and love baseball. The nasty ordeal suggested what it must be like to argue with yourself with infinite vitriol in Bizarro World. Cathy couldn't believe a baseball fan had the gall to condemn another sport for its blandness. She also stated that soccer players are more athletic than their bat-and-glove-wielding counterparts, that a fatso couldn't possibly keep up with the nonstop, frenetic pace of a soccer match. Her final point was that soccer players are unequivocally the sexiest professional athletes.
My response is that a typical baseball score is 5-3, while a typical soccer score is 2-1. Per hour of game-play, runs occur with much greater regularity than goals, and runs and goals are the true exclamation marks of the respective sports. More exclamation marks = more excitement and less tedium. Hitting a modestly-sized sphere that travels at 95 miles per hour (or suddenly curves, plummets, or slides just before it reaches the batter) is far more difficult than kicking a much larger ball past defenders and a goalie into an expansive net. It's more challenging to hit a home-run than it is to kick a ball into a net under heavy duress. And in spite of this handicap, baseball players nonetheless deliver a higher volume of entertainment than the likes of Ronaldo, David Villa, and the guy whose name I never bothered to remember. Baseball also boasts many emphatic moments that don't necessarily result in a run plated--such as doubles off the wall, triples into the gap, diving stops and snags, backhanded stabs, deftly turned double-plays, stolen bases, strikeouts, leaping grabs, home-plate collisions, the tirades of former Cubs' skipper Lou Piniella, attempted suicide squeezes, and strictly for the purists: sacrifice bunts. With soccer, here is a complete list of emphatic moments that don't translate into a goal: Saves by the goalie. Everything else is a protracted stalemate masquerading as action. In soccer, the burden of waiting overwhelms the productivity of the game itself.
As for the second part of Cathy's argument, I cannot deny that soccer players are exceptionally conditioned athletes, and that many husky sluggers who may or may not play for the Milwaukee Brewers would not fair well running back and forth across a field again and again. Make no mistake, soccer players work extremely hard to ensure that the game stays boring. The problem is that exceptionally conditioned athletes don't always deliver an entertaining product. To my mind, the remarkable endurance of soccer players would be better suited for marathon-running and decathlons, pursuits that don't enthrall me, either, but are more rational than running roughly 700 yards to-and-fro in order to get something accomplished once in a great while.
Finally, soccer players are indeed an exotic and good-looking breed. It's a shame that so many good-looking men devote their lives to meaningless professions: Modeling Abercrombie and Fitch, writing essays about dull sports, and playing soccer. Providing eye-candy for horny women and gay men is not without its merit, but that merit is superficial. It's easier for men to separate sports from sex appeal. In the bedroom, a lot of men think about sports when they want to slow down, whereas a lot of women think about handsome athletes when they want to speed up. Both instincts are valid. Both instincts explain a lot. I can't deny Cathy's final point, but I don't relate to it, either.
Dang. That last paragraph ended in a scoreless fucking tie.
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The one redeeming quality of watching golf on TV is that it provides the perfect ambiance for taking a nap. Soccer is different, though; it's a tedious sport that doesn't even permit its watcher a nap-friendly atmosphere. This is because of the prominence of those obnoxious, relentless plastic horns: Vuvuzelas. The vuvuzela craze offers proof that soccer lovers are actively trying to make their sport more unbearable to its detractors. Blown vuvuzelas create the horrid din of a horde of nauseated and surly hornets. Vuvuzelas are going to sound to kick off the Apocalypse. The one thing I like about those plastic racket-makers is that they make it so much easier to state that listening to soccer might even be worse than watching soccer.
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A few days before my debate with Cathy, I had a casual conversation about soccer with a die-hard fan of the sport. I subdued my ranker while talking to him. He informed me that the United States has never won the World Cup, a fact that I did not realize. He is also a baseball fan, and so I asked him what he thought was more likely to happen first: The U.S. winning the World Cup, or the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.
His answer was immediate and disgruntled. He predicted with confidence that the Cubs would become World Series champions long before America brings home the Cup.
A more trenchant question, which I would have asked if I had a six-pack of Budweiser languishing in my belly, is: Will the Cubs win the World Series before Americans truly care about soccer? The answer, again, would be yes.
And ever since that night, I try to put sports in perspective and I became slightly more upbeat about the plight of the Chicago Cubs.
How about that? Maybe soccer is good for something, after all.
*Getting to third base with a woman does not constitute a one-night stand. **
**Thanks for confirming my hunch, footnote.***
***Anytime, Nick. I'm here to help.
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