This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

The last month has seen a surplus of media coverage about soccer, from special pullout supplements to cover stories to documentaries and even feature films. It’s bizarro world meets soccer fan heaven, just don’t expect it to last. If we could somehow spread out the love over the course of a year, maybe even four years, soccer might take its place beyond the box score. Just days away from my-cup-over-runneth, I thought I would glance back and look forward. By now, you must know I’m looking for greater meaning than the scores, the line-ups, or most things those front page profiles deliver. As the world turns its attention to a single sporting event, I can’t help but think something big, meaningful, and miraculous could happen, with lasting impact beyond the soccer industrial complex. And I’m not the only one. So here, I’m highlighting a few media pieces past and present that bore similarities, not just to each other, but in one circumstance, to a structural idea I thought I was first to deliver on. That, like everything soccer in America, is now left to question.

Question: What is it about the human psyche that causes the words ‘different’ and ‘bad’ to become synonymous? If you’re a satirist, this unbound and basic fact is fodder in the form of the stereotypes that are built from this affection. If you’re elitist, if gives you something to rail against. If you’re the ruling power of a nation, it gives you reason for political and economic sanctions (and maybe, just maybe military invasion). And if you’re an American soccer fan, it gives you a shadowy cross-hair lurking on your forehead. As we come again to the doorjamb of the future, over which we carry our bride – our own version of the beautiful game –every four years, only to enjoy her before watching the rest of the nation drop her like a Kolkata (that’s in India) customer service call center conversation, it’s a perfect opportunity to talk about the book, How Soccer Explains the World (Franklin Foer, 2005), and Why The World Loves Soccer (National Geographic Magazine, June 2006).

thankfoer

He beat most to the mass marketing of the globalized soccer metaphors, so let us begin with Foer. Like brothers in arms, we all have a similar story of growing up with soccer in a football and baseball world. Foer is no different. My story of verbal and emotional abuse came at Catholic high school, more aptly titled Football High School, and the mouths of several football coaches and P.E. Teachers (thoughts to which always call to mind a quote Woody Allen borrows that I will now swipe: Those who can, do; those who can’t teach; and those who can’t teach, taught at my school).

“Commie sport.” “You’re too big to play soccer. Why don’t you try out for football?” By the age of 13, this was nothing new for me, just the proliferation of what Foer calls a soccer-hating subculture, led by the likes of Jim Rome (he actually names him in the book) and the Wall Street Journal’s Allen Barra, of which “an important part of this subculture entails making fun of the people who aren’t members of it.”

This would all be fine and good if these guys (including Dan Perez, one of the offended and offensive coaches at my school) were high schoolers, but alas, they are grown men. Very immature grown men, and not in a Seinfeld oh-isn’t-he-cute-and-funny kind of immature. No, it is more the arrogant and ignorant kind of immature, and that which the most mindful of us categorize as some of the worst of the human condition (not that I still carry it with me or would take an opportunity to defile them). Foer takes a small if but creative leap from this American soccer dichotomy to the upper echelons of a cultural, economic, and political discussion, bringing his metaphor onto the ever-more popular, loved, and hated theory (or fact if you so choose) of globalization.

For TIAS, I’m sticking to his musings on American soccer, but truly I find the rest of the book more engaging, if only it is more educational to me. The most interesting observations Foer makes relate to the structure of the game and its participants in our country. Around the world, soccer is the game of the masses, the working class, where only recently aristocrats and the like have climbed aboard. In the USA this make-up has flipped, given us the white-bread, suburban soccer moms that have come to define the American game along with their automobile of choice (he does give exceptions to the immigrant populations maintaining their favorite pastime in their new country). He doesn’t outright say it, but for me, this is one huge reason why American soccer is anything but controversial. I mean, who is going to hate on the mom and her children on the mini-field innocently chasing the ball like a swarm of bees. This images, after all, is the most accepted face of U.S. Soccer.

All of this allows Foer to very easily (and in simple, well written prose – if you don’t know the Foer brothers are taking the intellectual media mainframe by storm and elicit their own elitist arguments) make his comparison from soccerphobes to those working to thwart globalization… which is when I take it a step farther and wider to drape over all those who somewhere, somehow, vindictively, unconsciously or even with the best intentions, come to view and then perpetuate the idea that anything that is different is bad. There is something to be said for protecting and wanting to protect one’s culture, this stretches from indigenous people wanting to preserve languages and lifestyles to soccer fans who are all too happy to have their own little world to exist in and define themselves by this “difference,” but it can be a dangerous position where instead of seeking compromise and living in peace, the war and dividing lines propagate.

Welcome to American hegemony. We could argue for years over which country, culture, or person (Jim Rome) is best (or worst) at this. The U.S. for its part is neck and neck in this race with other nations, never far from the lead (when we don’t have it). Remember my comments about adolescence? Well, here we go again. A young nation, America is the rude teenager, too often forgetting its manners in public and making fun of the people who aren’t members in its Constitution. Frankly, it makes me sick, but it does not make me love my country any less. My patriotism is not at risk, only the opinions I hold for those who have power, run our country, and open their mouths without thinking (or those who genuinely think they are right).

At some point in all of our lives we are the victim and the crime. My parents used to deconstruct my adolescent tongue with the phrase, “think before you speak.” Foer talks about the Yuppie parents (my parents), raised on the 60’s, co-opting soccer and making it their own and their children’s (that’s me). But as with globalization, soccer is becoming, locally through amateurs, if not just yet nationally by professionals, a force to be reckoned with because this whitewashed moniker is darkening as the minority populations rise.

As Foer also notes, the detractors come forward just as the sport does, especially, oh, every four years or so. I want to make published note of this now. Mark it and watch what happens in the coming days, months, and years. Let’s hope, as with Strom Thurmond, the detractors die off, leaving our cultural gene pool just a little bit better off, a little bit more accepting.

always on point, if a bit slow to catch up

photograph by Gideon Mendel for National Geographic

Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all. You know the cliché, and I lived it at National Geographic. I grew up wanting nothing more to grow up and write or photograph or collect the mail at National Geographic. It was the best textbook I ever picked up. National Geographic, under its ideals, has always been out to educate and help the growth of this acceptance that soccer can identify with. Some would argue their mission back fires, but not me. Besides being a former employee, I was raised on National Geographic more than any other educational aid, and I believe my life is richer and more accepting for it. So with a quick flip through their June cover story and supplement, I started blushing to find they felt the same way about me – there is no other explanation for them following my ideas (HA - I should be so lucky). While production schedules likely had this project in the works for upwards of a year, possibly giving it the scoop, I’d be remiss if I didn’t find the acute similarities between my Diary Project and NGM’s choice of sending different writers to different countries to document this moment in soccer history. (By the way, I still want your stories for my Diary Project).

Of course, theirs is unequivocally stronger, with stories from famous writers dispatched around the world. The immensely positive is sidled up to that which infiltrates anything where money becomes involved, furthering the Foer-esque notion of soccer as the microcosm of the political, cultural, and social divides. Among the pieces from Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Croatia, Spain, and England, two reports from Africa strike me as most important. There is a touching and troubling piece by Paul Laity about the war-torn Ivory Coast where soccer unifies the disparate groups otherwise at each other’s throats and at times presses the blade tighter to the enemy’s flesh. In the temperamental former French colony that is yet to forget or forgive its past, including its witch doctor superstitions, not even soccer is simple.

While the strongest piece is by Robert Coover, who creates his soccer metaphor (from the unlimited possibilities) around theater on the stage and on the battlefield of war from Spain, the best line of the entire section falls from the pen of Henning Mankell, the author of some 40 novels, who writes about Angola. Qualifying for the finals with a header past a Rwanda keeper, Mankell writes this sentence of the Angolan victory: “A person would have to live for a long time in Africa to understand what this victory means.”

You won’t find that in any “american” sports. Atlanta versus New York is never going to mean a thing, not even a subway series or a Miracle On Ice can bleed the history and soothe the wounds that persist in national soccer throughout the world. For this reason only, we Americans are missing out in memories if not something much greater. We, a World Power, are anything but on the soccer stage, no matter how good our team is. And I for one, if we should ever win a cup, will share my tears of joy with those of guilt and shame, because I know that it would mean so much more elsewhere and should mean that much to us.

Photograph by Ricardo Alfieri for National Geographic