I understand that soccer is an acquired taste. It’s extremely low scoring and tens of minutes can go by without even the threat of a goal. But, it’s odd to think that loathing soccer is an essential and important part of what makes America great.
When I was coming of age, soccer was pushed on us, and so was the metric system — and for the same reason: The rest of the world did it; America was stubborn and behind, in its rejection of those things. America held on to this screwy imperial — imperialist! — system: feet and yards, pints and gallons. The rest of the world had this elegant and logical and non-imperialist — non-British! — system. America had its brutish sports: football, in particular. We needed to embrace the real football, soccer, played by thin, small, virtuous Third Worlders, who had no equipment save a ball, and maybe a few sticks for goals. Nets, too, if they were really lucky.
Of course, there’s something truly retarded about referring to soccer as non-British, but that’s almost incidental to the overall moranish aspects to Jay Nordlinger’s post. Nordlinger was born in 1963, making him slightly older than me but still a child of the seventies when soccer and the metric system made their heroic and failed efforts to impress the American mind. I played on a traveling all-star soccer team and even attended Pelé’s soccer camp where I had the good fortune to shake his hand. It never occurred to me that Pelé was a thin, virtuous Third Worlder. I just thought he was a nice man and the best soccer player in the world.
And my experience growing up in the international community of Princeton, New Jersey wasn’t much different from Nordlinger’s, who was also reared in an elite college town.
In the Ann Arbor, Michigan, of my youth, soccer was somewhat ideological, like so much else. It was freighted with politics and attitude. Was this soccer’s fault? Heavens no. And neither was it the fault of the metric system. Those things, as things — as a sport, as a system of measures — are totally innocent. But I have these lingering associations . . . Soccer and the metric system were rebukes to American exceptionalism — American thickheadedness and backwardness.
In my experience, there was absolutely nothing political or ideological about soccer. It wasn’t played to be sophisticated. It was played because it was a healthy and fun thing for kids to do. Of course, they were a few enthusiasts who went so far as to buy magazines about England’s Premier League, but the matches were not broadcast in the United States so people who really liked soccer followed the North American Soccer League. But most kids just played for the exercise.
In no way was soccer seen a rebuke to the United States. The entire concept is ridiculous. Or, as Sadly, No! puts it:
Soccer, a game predominantly played by foreign colored people, is, like the metric system, an intentional kick in the nuts of American exceptionalism. And I, for one, am tired of having two-liter bottles of soft drinks and David Beckham shoved down my throat.
The effort to impose the metric system, on the other hand, more nearly fits Nordlinger’s description. It was taught to us because the rest of the world used it and some do-gooders thought some of us might travel abroad one day and have no idea how to get from the airport to the hotel. And there was some political resistance to the idea of teaching us this French stuff so they stopped trying. Americans have been getting speeding tickets in Canada ever since.
