A Letter to Bill Simmons

Bill-

It has happened again. I am an American citizen that continues to fall for soccer when the big tournaments reach our shores. Does this make me a bed-wetting socialist?

I jest … I hope.

I know much valuable American ink has been spilled on the subject of soccer and why it has been so difficult to ‘sell’ here in the former Colonies. (Any enterprise that wants to be taken seriously in the United States must be successfully converted into a commodity around which a profitable commercial transaction can take place… dammit, Bill…see what I feared … I’m actually sounding like a socialist now.)

I’m certain better writers than me have made the following point, but as I fall under the spell of the ‘Beautiful Game’ I needed to repeat it for myself and for you.

The primary reason that soccer continues to have difficulty gaining popularity among average Americans is that as a collective we have little capacity or appreciation for abstract thought. We are a material country, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense. I simply mean that we need tangible things to count. At every level of education in this country, Math and Science are clearly more valued than Art and Philosophy. This manifests itself in the way we approach our sports. We measure and count every aspect of the games we enjoy. It goes beyond tracking in-sport numbers like ERA or yards-after-catch. Even a modest American sports fan becomes engrossed in extraneous data like yearly attendances, Nielsen ratings, player salaries and the like.

Soccer is a sport of nearly pure abstraction. The only thing to count in soccer are the goals… which are celebrated by the players and fans like the fall of a corrupt dictator that delighted in paving the driveways of his villas with the crushed skulls of their relatives and happen about as frequently.

The lifeblood of any sports popularity is the ability of common fans to argue incessantly in public about the merits & liabilities of players and teams. Without anything to count, however, the only weapon the soccer fan has at his disposal is one the red-blooded American Sports Male will avoid like gonorrhea: vocabulary. To argue a point in baseball, football, basketball or NASCAR, the American Sports Male will prepare his numerical evidence as if he had been subpoenaed to appear before a Senate Sub-Committee Hearing. The American Sports Male will present charts, graphs, and statistical trends dating back decades. But heaven help us if we showed up to a sports argument with a dictionary and thesaurus in tow. To use the old cliché, it would like bringing a rock to a knife fight. The American Sports Male even acknowledges his deficiency with a single word when faced with trying to explain an aberration that does not conform to the available data.

That word? May I present the all-purpose: ‘Intangible’

When trying to wrap his head around defining ‘intangibles’, the American Sports Male bobs and flails like a scuba diver that surfaced a mile away from the dive boat, missed his ride and is now being eyeballed by a passing Tiger shark. We have to make up words nonsense words like ‘gamer’or ‘scrapper’ to protect us from using any icky, polysyllabic synonyms for ‘passion’ or ‘desire’ that might make our audience pause and suspect that we go home and crochet in the bathtub when no one is looking.

That soccer is nothing but intangibles may explain why it is arguably more popular and accessible to American women. Our fairer sex is more inclined to abstract thought and as such she can admire the dastardly bend in a David Beckham free kick without having to scramble for measurable tangibles to relate to it. What does it matter how hard it was hit, the percentage of success from 30 meters out or the dollar-to-free kick ratio that he is compensated?

As a collective and as the greatest nation on earth we need to get over our fears of the Intangible and the Abstract because here is the twist: America needs soccer. At no point since the 1960’s has American society been this divided. From our gated communities to our ghettoes, from our luxury boxes to our bleachers, Americans everywhere are drifting further and further away from one another. Sociologist Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, demonstrated the parallel decline in civic engagement in the U.S. and the decline of the American bowling league. We are slowly coming apart at the seams and part of that reason that is that the United States can find no common ground, field, pitch, diamond, court, rink or otherwise on which to stand together as a nation and cheer our democratic-capitalist-liberty-loving souls out.

Every country in the world experiences political divisions, social stratifications, injustice and just plain, old squabbles. Yet every country in the world, but the United States, has one common passion, one common tongue. That common ground is their national soccer squad. For the 90 minutes (plus injury time) differences are put aside, everyone from the Prime Minister to the plumber slides into their jerseys, their scarves, cover their faces in paint, link arms and sing in unison to their nations glory and hopeful victory on the pitch. The result is pure spectacle, pageantry and, for at least the duration of the match, national unity.

If I sound envious and under the spell of the Beautiful Game, it is because I am.

There is only one time in my life that I can recall such a feeling. I was nine-year old kid playing pee-wee hockey in Washington D.C. on February 22, 1980 when an earnest group of scrappers defeated the vaunted Soviet Union 4-3 on a hockey rink in Lake Placid. I stood that night in front of the TV watching the tape delay transfixed until the end, when the entire stadium began chanting - USA! USA! USA! I joined them and when Al asked me if I believed in miracles, I can assure you that I tearfully did and I still do to this day thanks to that moment.

I dare you to name a more powerful moment in American Sports History than that one. It was the power of an entire nation speaking with one cohesive voice. It is not only the most powerful sports memory I have, it is also among the most powerful memories I have as an American. Why have we been waiting thirty years for such another moment to arrive and will we have to wait another thirty?

It doesn’t seem likely that this will occur anytime soon. In case my fellow American sports fans haven’t noticed, not only are we not taking it to the world at their game – soccer – but also over the past few decades we have allowed them to take it to us at our own games. In the 2006 World Baseball Classic, the United States placed a ridiculous 8th… we did not even qualify for the semi-finals. Team USA basketball placed a little better than their baseball counterparts in the 2006 Worlds, yet they still finished third behind Spain and Greece!?

At this international level, the American sporting public is more than happy to issue ‘get-out-of-duty’ passes to our most talented players when they turn their lucratively-sponsored backs on representing their nation. Why play for little compensation or even worse risk injury and forfeit of their contracts and endorsements? Why, indeed? The only costs for these players and coaches in declining to play for their country are Abstract costs. Who needs National Pride and Honor when you can have your seventh shiny Hummer with fitted with flat screen panels in every headrest?

European players enjoy similar unworldly salaries and endorsements yet would set their heads on fire for the honor of wearing their national jersey. For a nation that purports to take pride in its patriotism, it is nothing short of lacking when it comes to supporting our country’s sporting endeavors at an international level and again I attribute that to an general unwillingness to think abstractly.

All is not lost though. I believe there has been a glimmer of hope for an increased awareness in the appreciation of the abstract and it comes from an unlikely source – the fallout surrounding scandals involving Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and the New England Patriots. There is, for the moment, a small window where the American public seems, however begrudgingly, to realize that absolute numbers can take a backseat to abstract concepts like Integrity and Fairness.

This is not as surprising to me as one might think reading the body of this letter. After all, I know every American Fan believes they share their sports DNA with greatest mythological scrapper of all time, Rocky Balboa. In the only movie that counts (the original), the climax leaves Rocky a loser in the Material column with the title, belt and glory going to Apollo Creed. Yet here our American hero emerges the Victor in the Ring of the Abstract, carrying home Love, Courage and Character.

Can America one day learn to love the ‘Beautiful Game?’

Yes. Because we believe in miracles.

USA! USA! USA!