Post by Scott on Jun 6, 2006 17:45:59 GMT
From The Guardian:
America is agog with World Cup fever. OK, let me refine that slightly. The vibrant slice of America that spends every weekend coaching or "scrimmaging" or glued to the Fox Soccer Channel or GolTV is agog with World Cup fever. The rest of the nation is dimly aware that something slightly bigger (but no less alien) than the Eurovision Song Contest is on the way.
Meanwhile, respected US sports journalists - having ignored the sport for the past four years - will Google like fury and emerge as venerable soccer experts, shoving aside those junior hacks who spend their entire working lives trying to squeeze a mention of the game into a monolithically monocultural sports press.
Long-time soccer bashers like Frank DeFord will dust off their tired complaints about how their beloved "American" sports fail to generate one tenth of the passion of international soccer. They might point to this year's hilariously spatchcocked International Baseball Competition and the sad fact that - as the US's Olympic basketball tournament proved - American sports have become so insular that US national teams can't even dominate those games that they (more or less) invented and which no other bugger really plays.
Meanwhile America's soccer partisans - like my team-mate who visited Highbury on vacation and now turns up to play every Saturday in a pristine Arsenal kit - will engage me in earnest debate about the merits of Theo Walcott, but I will have more conversations with my neighbours along the lines of: "Wait, so these teams are made up of people born in a country? So what are Liverpool then?"
The big US sports story this week isn't Wayne Rooney's metatarsal. It's not even alleged steroid user Barry Bonds passing Babe Ruth's 714 home runs. It's a horse, actually a super-horse - Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro - which broke a leg and (if you believe the TV news) in doing so won the heart of the entire nation. This is, of course, hype. The tons of Diana-style polythened flora dumped outside the horse hospital come almost exclusively from America's horsey set - one tiny piece of America's sporting jigsaw. But the reason it makes the national TV news night after night is that Barbaro the wonder-horse was a bore. But Barbaro the underdog - now that's a story. And that really tells us something about America and about America's World Cup.
We US soccer-bubbleheads are currently awash in Nike's Fatty Cantona-fronted "Joga Bonito" TV ads - and frankly, we're disappointed. And so we should be. Nike's previous US campaign was simply stunning.
It consisted of a TV ad where a droning anti-soccer radio shock-jock was drowned out by a go-go anthem called Tell It To The World and the screen rejoiced in shots of street kids and meat-packers and spindle-legged teens doing amazing things with soccer balls on basketball courts, tennis courts and baseball fields. It closed with the shot of the US team smashing home a goal against England in Chicago. And it felt good, dammit, it felt evangelical.
But there was more - a print ad that bordered on genius. Using the angry, relentless and irresistible diction of Thomas Paine's war-winning pamphlets and invoking the revolutionary image of the spitting rattlesnake with the 'Don't Tread On Me' logo, Nike's 'So Says This AMERICAN Game' manifesto pitted players plucked from "Texas trailer parks" and "Florida projects" against the snobby French, supercilious Brazilians and arrogant English.
Every time I saw these ads my jaded British heart pounded with pride. Why? Because some bright spark in Nike marketing had managed to hit an Anglo-American emotional nail smack on the head. Both cultures revel in inverse snobbery. We like underdogs. Give us a super-horse and we'll cheer. Cripple the bugger and we'll cry 'till Christmas. Invincible super-cyclist Lance Armstrong was a bit of yawn until he got cancer. America's endless legions of hypertrained Kryptonian super-sprinters and swimmers are forgotten almost as soon as they leave the winner's podium, but the 1980 'Miracle on Ice' - when a rag-bag US ice hockey team scored a Rocky-style famous victory over the allegedly invincible USSR - still brings a tear to American eyes.
More importantly, despite the fact that we've taken turns to run the world via vastly superior firepower, both Brits and Yanks desperately need to portray themselves as outnumbered and outgunned. We've got Rorke's Drift, Dunkirk and Arnhem. They've got the Alamo, Guadalcanal and dogfaces firing rifles at Tiger tanks during the Battle of the Bulge. Given the chance to be neutral in any sporting event, septics and limeys alike automatically try to sniff out the underdog. Which made the US v Mexico game (in which the US qualified for the World Cup) somewhat confusing for this citizen of the so-called anglosphere.
After the game the US players, the crowd and the commentators quite rightly went jingo-mental. And my stomach turned. I had really wanted the US to qualify - I intensely and passionately want this underdog sport to eclipse its lumbering, overblown and increasingly unwatchable inbred 'native' rivals.
But then came the sight of the slightly balding US player Landon Donovan effetely punching the air à la Tim Henman. Ticker-tape rained down and the air filled with that horribly familiar shrill American patriotism that makes us Europeans squirm so. And suddenly this seemed to be more about the US team's desperate search for a stadium where the gringos outnumber the Latinos; and the sight of armed vigilante "minutemen" patrolling the US-Mexican border. Through the grunting and the chants of "USA! USA!" I found myself humming Woodie Guthrie's Which Side Are You On? (the Billy Bragg version, naturally).
Sooner or later the US will get spanked in this World Cup. But we are not talking here about New Zealand or Australia. Or even Cameroon or Nigeria. The US men's team is an overdog in embryo. A glance at the stats (pro-soccer in the US is already better attended than in most European countries while the grassroots game continues to explode) tells you that the US will soon be a soccer superpower.
And when that happens this intensely patriotic country will - for the first time ever - have a men's sports team that can consistently kick international ass (the US women's soccer team has been doing it for years). And that's not going to be pretty. There'll be nothing 'plucky' about it. Just the brutal application of raw demographic power.
In the 1760s Britain emerged atop the imperial dogpile as the world's undisputed heavyweight champion. And it felt kinda odd. The seeds of arrogant, triumphalist jingoism existed alongside a gnawing nostalgia (among intellectuals and writers at least) for the cocky, outgunned but ingenious little England of Drake and Raleigh. Of course this reverie was rudely interrupted shortly after when the cocky, outgunned but ingenious citizens of a new country called the United States of America pluckily kicked Britain's enormous new imperial nadgers clean off - but for a while the sudden loss of underdog status caused real pain.
I suggest US soccer fans enjoy being underestimated, derided, mocked and written off while they still can. It won't get any better than this.
America is agog with World Cup fever. OK, let me refine that slightly. The vibrant slice of America that spends every weekend coaching or "scrimmaging" or glued to the Fox Soccer Channel or GolTV is agog with World Cup fever. The rest of the nation is dimly aware that something slightly bigger (but no less alien) than the Eurovision Song Contest is on the way.
Meanwhile, respected US sports journalists - having ignored the sport for the past four years - will Google like fury and emerge as venerable soccer experts, shoving aside those junior hacks who spend their entire working lives trying to squeeze a mention of the game into a monolithically monocultural sports press.
Long-time soccer bashers like Frank DeFord will dust off their tired complaints about how their beloved "American" sports fail to generate one tenth of the passion of international soccer. They might point to this year's hilariously spatchcocked International Baseball Competition and the sad fact that - as the US's Olympic basketball tournament proved - American sports have become so insular that US national teams can't even dominate those games that they (more or less) invented and which no other bugger really plays.
Meanwhile America's soccer partisans - like my team-mate who visited Highbury on vacation and now turns up to play every Saturday in a pristine Arsenal kit - will engage me in earnest debate about the merits of Theo Walcott, but I will have more conversations with my neighbours along the lines of: "Wait, so these teams are made up of people born in a country? So what are Liverpool then?"
The big US sports story this week isn't Wayne Rooney's metatarsal. It's not even alleged steroid user Barry Bonds passing Babe Ruth's 714 home runs. It's a horse, actually a super-horse - Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro - which broke a leg and (if you believe the TV news) in doing so won the heart of the entire nation. This is, of course, hype. The tons of Diana-style polythened flora dumped outside the horse hospital come almost exclusively from America's horsey set - one tiny piece of America's sporting jigsaw. But the reason it makes the national TV news night after night is that Barbaro the wonder-horse was a bore. But Barbaro the underdog - now that's a story. And that really tells us something about America and about America's World Cup.
We US soccer-bubbleheads are currently awash in Nike's Fatty Cantona-fronted "Joga Bonito" TV ads - and frankly, we're disappointed. And so we should be. Nike's previous US campaign was simply stunning.
It consisted of a TV ad where a droning anti-soccer radio shock-jock was drowned out by a go-go anthem called Tell It To The World and the screen rejoiced in shots of street kids and meat-packers and spindle-legged teens doing amazing things with soccer balls on basketball courts, tennis courts and baseball fields. It closed with the shot of the US team smashing home a goal against England in Chicago. And it felt good, dammit, it felt evangelical.
But there was more - a print ad that bordered on genius. Using the angry, relentless and irresistible diction of Thomas Paine's war-winning pamphlets and invoking the revolutionary image of the spitting rattlesnake with the 'Don't Tread On Me' logo, Nike's 'So Says This AMERICAN Game' manifesto pitted players plucked from "Texas trailer parks" and "Florida projects" against the snobby French, supercilious Brazilians and arrogant English.
Every time I saw these ads my jaded British heart pounded with pride. Why? Because some bright spark in Nike marketing had managed to hit an Anglo-American emotional nail smack on the head. Both cultures revel in inverse snobbery. We like underdogs. Give us a super-horse and we'll cheer. Cripple the bugger and we'll cry 'till Christmas. Invincible super-cyclist Lance Armstrong was a bit of yawn until he got cancer. America's endless legions of hypertrained Kryptonian super-sprinters and swimmers are forgotten almost as soon as they leave the winner's podium, but the 1980 'Miracle on Ice' - when a rag-bag US ice hockey team scored a Rocky-style famous victory over the allegedly invincible USSR - still brings a tear to American eyes.
More importantly, despite the fact that we've taken turns to run the world via vastly superior firepower, both Brits and Yanks desperately need to portray themselves as outnumbered and outgunned. We've got Rorke's Drift, Dunkirk and Arnhem. They've got the Alamo, Guadalcanal and dogfaces firing rifles at Tiger tanks during the Battle of the Bulge. Given the chance to be neutral in any sporting event, septics and limeys alike automatically try to sniff out the underdog. Which made the US v Mexico game (in which the US qualified for the World Cup) somewhat confusing for this citizen of the so-called anglosphere.
After the game the US players, the crowd and the commentators quite rightly went jingo-mental. And my stomach turned. I had really wanted the US to qualify - I intensely and passionately want this underdog sport to eclipse its lumbering, overblown and increasingly unwatchable inbred 'native' rivals.
But then came the sight of the slightly balding US player Landon Donovan effetely punching the air à la Tim Henman. Ticker-tape rained down and the air filled with that horribly familiar shrill American patriotism that makes us Europeans squirm so. And suddenly this seemed to be more about the US team's desperate search for a stadium where the gringos outnumber the Latinos; and the sight of armed vigilante "minutemen" patrolling the US-Mexican border. Through the grunting and the chants of "USA! USA!" I found myself humming Woodie Guthrie's Which Side Are You On? (the Billy Bragg version, naturally).
Sooner or later the US will get spanked in this World Cup. But we are not talking here about New Zealand or Australia. Or even Cameroon or Nigeria. The US men's team is an overdog in embryo. A glance at the stats (pro-soccer in the US is already better attended than in most European countries while the grassroots game continues to explode) tells you that the US will soon be a soccer superpower.
And when that happens this intensely patriotic country will - for the first time ever - have a men's sports team that can consistently kick international ass (the US women's soccer team has been doing it for years). And that's not going to be pretty. There'll be nothing 'plucky' about it. Just the brutal application of raw demographic power.
In the 1760s Britain emerged atop the imperial dogpile as the world's undisputed heavyweight champion. And it felt kinda odd. The seeds of arrogant, triumphalist jingoism existed alongside a gnawing nostalgia (among intellectuals and writers at least) for the cocky, outgunned but ingenious little England of Drake and Raleigh. Of course this reverie was rudely interrupted shortly after when the cocky, outgunned but ingenious citizens of a new country called the United States of America pluckily kicked Britain's enormous new imperial nadgers clean off - but for a while the sudden loss of underdog status caused real pain.
I suggest US soccer fans enjoy being underestimated, derided, mocked and written off while they still can. It won't get any better than this.
