Americans ARE Passionate About Sports - We Just Express It Differently

Okay, I'm not going to get into it with any of your Chinese Communists or Peruvian leftist guerrillas about whether Americans just don't "get" soccer because we're stupid, shallow and decadent. I've addressed that already in an earlier blog - "How Soccer Teaches Us That The Whole World is Nicer, Smarter and in All Ways Better Than We Are".

So as of this morning, the death toll in Egypt is 74 after an incident at the most civilized of all sporting events. Apparently fans of the two teams stormed the field afterwards and commenced beating each other senseless. Then the local cops and military joined in the fun and shot a few of the more excitable fans.

You know how much I hate pointing out flaws in the logic of others, but soccer doesn't seem to me to be a very civilized sport. As to the civility of its fans, that is even less demonstrable.

Americans are not one whit less passionate about football or baseball or basketball than their stampeding soccer brethren around the world. We just simply don't feel a compelling need to trample each other to death at sporting events.  The occasional redneck mother may have to cool off in the local jailhouse after a particularly exciting high school football game, but we don't get a lot of mass violence. Here's why:

1. Our entire identity does not get wrapped up in a single sport. If our guys lose the football championship, there's always basketball, then baseball or hockey and even soccer for the truly desperate for something to do. If your guys lose in one sport, they may win in another so it's not that big a deal.  Nobody in America expects their team to win every year and most of the leagues are small enough that your team will eventually find it's way to the World Series, Superbowl, The Final Four or the Rose Bowl. In soccer, your team has a much slimmer chance of making it to a World Cup.  In addition, most countries seriously trying for a World Cup Championship are poor countries. The only way they have a chance to stick it to the rich countries is by kicking their butt in the World Cup. They really NEED to kick some rich country butt, so the fans come to these games already primed for trouble.
2. Sports events are social gatherings in the United States. It's all about stuffing your face with food and hanging with four friends who are major B.S. artists. We're not likely to stampede after we've eaten 10 pounds of hot dogs, a trash can full of nachos and enough beer to dull the senses of a hippopotamus. When the game is over, we may be barely aware of it.
3. Most popular American sports allow for plenty of scoring. And isn't that what you come to a game to see - scoring!  In a soccer game you can easily sit through an hour and a half watching the ball roll up and down the field without ever going into the net, then run down to the concession stand for a taco a falafal or kolaches and miss the only score of the game. American sports tend to be a series of discreet contests with a climax and score at the end. Each down in footballs is a miniature contest. In every game your team wins some of these contests and loses some, but most of the time they manage to score. Same with baseball which is a series of discreet duels between the pitcher and batter supported by their teams. In basketball, someone slam dunks one every couple of minutes to help bleed off the blood lust of the fans. Even in hockey, the players oblige us with a little exchange of sticks and a trip to the penalty box to help hold our attention. My theory is that a low-scoring soccer game causes an elevation in blood pressure and increase in heart palpitation among fans and mimics the fight or flight response. Soccer fans are always running out onto the field and starting fights with one another. There's nothing to bleed off the rampant emotional energy of the fans. There's little or no communal satisfaction from scoring  or successful plays at regular intervals. The only thing that stops the game for a breather are penalties and who really understands those? Everybody, as a result gets mad at the refs for one reason or another. What else is there to do? No wonder that by the end of the game the fans are ready to poke each others' eyes out.
4. Most Americans don't have the attention span for soccer or for sustained carnage for that matter.. We also don't have the attention spans to plan and maintain any real level of violence over a game where the final score was 1 to 2. Such a pitifully low score seems hardly worth the effort.  I was going to study to be a soccer ref one time, but decided that it wasn't worth studying that hard to ref a sport that hates it's officials so much and that I don't really like anyway. All this might change with the increasing popularity of soccer these days (I have a theory that it's the cost of equipment that may account for it. Have you priced a baseball glove lately?) Do you realize that thanks to a poor economy, we may be raising a boomer generation of kids who understand the offside rule in soccer and actually care about whether or not anybody obeys it? The next thing you know we'll have fans flinging Starbucks latte's at one another at a Seattle Sounders game.
5. Most Americans don't find sporting events worth dying for. That's why we buy big screen TVs 50 pounds of chips and a gallon of onion dip and barbecue 3 or 4 buckets of chicken in preparation for watching the big game at home. We like watching sports in small groups, surrounded by people we love, but who are unlikely to trample us to death or strike us with anything more deadly than a bag of Doritos. We may die young, but it'll likely be from a heart attack rather than a sound trampling.

I don't know about you, but if I'm ever killed as the result of a sport, it'll be me sporting with my Sweet Baboo and we'll be making an attempt on a Kama Sutra position that neither of us have any business trying at our ages.

 

                                               

Title IX's Impact on Women's Sports - Viva la' Spandex!

Yesterday, a struggling Phys. Ed student e-mailed a sports discussion group I’m on, asking our opinion about the pros and cons of Title IX. He was obviously trying to whip together a last minute term paper, but he started me thinking. Title IX is a federal mandate that has attempted to level the playing field for women in college athletics by making colleges spend equal amounts of money on women’s and mens athletic programs. It’s a noble idea. Women deserve to have an equal shot at permanently maiming themselves while receiving a college education. In my opinion, without Title IX, women’s athletics would never have made the tiny gains it has made over the past decade.

Let’s face it, colleges have been stuck in a rut where athletics is concerned. They’ve learned over the past 100 years that they can make money on football and basketball games, so they fund these cash cows heavily. Alumni love this stuff and give big wads of cash to schools that have good teams, expensive coaches and the best athletes money can by. So colleges pay heavily for them. Nobody in college athletics has ever been motivated to spend a lot on women’s athletics. Women’s sports has never been able to draw crowds, so they don’t make a lot of money. Without pressure from Title IX legislation, women’s athletics would still be languishing in relative obscurity.

But, I think the colleges have missed something here. I think some of the great spectator sports of the future are being pioneered because of Title IX’s requirements that women’s sports be funded equally by colleges. Even though they have managed to weasel out on that "equal" business, they have had to sink money into women’s sports that they never would have before. As a result, we’re seeing what may become the pro sports of the future generating enthusiastic new support at the college level.

Case in point: Women's volleyball

Here's a sport that's changing toward the future. I remember when women's V-ball drew a mere handful of spectators down at the community college. Nobody seemed to want to show up to watch a bunch of frumpy looking girls swat a ball back and forth over the net. Now, thanks to the incentive (read "threat" here) of reduced funding under Title IX, women's volleyball has changed. Unable to find frivolous things like scholarships and facilities to spend the extra money on, women’s college volleyball programs have invested in substantive, fundamental change in how the game is played. Well, actually what they did was dump the baggy shorts and t-shirts and bought the girls uniforms made of SPANDEX!

Wow! The gymnasium is now jammed for games (mostly with desperate looking geeks and predatory males to be sure, but.....it’s a start). The girls, freed from the constriction of their formerly frumpy uniforms are diving, stretching and (bless 'em) jumping higher than ever before. When the marketing guys catch on, I predict you're going to see a real women's professional volleyball league organized. We've already got semi-pro beach volleyball leagues going right now and they are drawing real crowds and TV contracts. I look for pro teams to follow soon once they realize what money there is to be made in the sport.
Actually, beach style volleyball may be the way pro volleyball goes. For one thing, the beach volleyball "uniforms" for women players are guaranteed to create awesome TV ratings. Soon beach leagues will be running college drafts (if they don't already). Soon college and professional women v-baller's will be compromising their amateur standing, hiring agents, endorsing products and practicing double and even triple "bounce shots" just like their mail counterparts. Just as would-be NBA players practice spectacular "dunk" shots or future NFL tight ends practice end zone dances that skirt the edge of the rules, the women will be creating signature moves, endorsing "designer" spandex fashions and posing for cheesy posters.
Women’s soccer has already found new viewers thanks to the infamous "jerk off your shirt when you win" incident. Guys everywhere are now sitting through hours of international women’s soccer tedium on the outside chance it might happen again.

When you see personal style achieving greater importance than teamwork, when cat fights and temper tantrums are an accepted part of the college game, when we see silicon implants becoming a ticket to professional athletic stardom; then we'll know that Title IX has accomplished its purpose. Women's college athletics will have become as corrupt as men's athletics. Honor, integrity, fair play and sportsmanship will be as obsolete an educational goal in women's amateur PE curriculums as it is now in men's college sports like football, basketball and hockey.

Hey, maybe some of the smaller colleges could start women's wrestling programs. That could be a real crowd pleaser! I can see it now....

"This is Frank Gifford..."

"..and John Madden"

"Reporting live from the 2002 WWF college draft!"

"Well, Frank, were you surprised that 'Sheena the Destructor' went so high in the first round?"
"Not, really John. This girl really stole the show at the NCAA steel cage finals last spring with that signature "double bounce" pile driver from the turnbuckle that she used to beat 'Amazon Queen'."

"I remember that well, Frank. She barely managed to keep that brass brassier on and avoid disqualification..."

"Yeah, but how she ever managed to make that thing jump exactly back into place after she hooked it under Amazon's chin I'll never know..."

"You can bet that one’s gonna be on everyone’s highlight film this year, Frank."
"What an athlete, John! Team Austin has high hopes for this young lady at next year's Thanksgiving Mud Pit of Death Extravaganza!

"We're gonna have to put another dozen legs on our turkey for that one Frank..."

"I hear you talkin'...."

Anybody remember when professional meant something else.

Just one man’s opinion....

(c) 2005

Tom King