Fans of American televised sports beware and be warned. There is mischief afoot in the hallowed halls of network sports television. The moguls at ABC Sports and ESPN/ESPN2 have conspired to subject your uninitiated and unsuspecting sports sensibilities with (wait for it…….) EVERY SINGLE MATCH OF THE 2006 FIFIA WORLD SOCCER CHAMPIONSHIPS, known everywhere else as The World Cup. Starting on June 9 and culminating on July 9 with the Mother of all Matches, you will not be able to throw a dead cat on the TV page without hitting a cup match time slot. Okay, maybe you won't use a dead cat, but you won't be able to ignore the greatest athletic sporting competition on the planet. And you won't have a clue about why the rest of the world is in such frenzy. Americans still don't get it, despite the fact that we were the host team in the '94 Cup. Hell, there are Americans today who don't even know that it happened. I went to historycentral.com and asked for sports events for 1994 and got the following results:
- NBA: Houston Rockets vs. New York Knicks Series: 4-3
- NCAA Football: Nebraska Record: 13-0-0
- Heisman Trophy: Rashaan Salaam, Colorado, RB points: 17,430
- Stanley Cup: New York Rangers vs. Vancouver Canucks Series: 4-3
- Super Bowl XXVIII: Dallas Cowboys vs.Buffalo Bills Score: 30-13
- World Series: Not Held
For an entire month this country hosted the most prestigious event of the world's most popular sport and as far as the host nation was concerned it was just an opportunity to jack up the hotel and car rental rates, and gave local sports announcers something to snicker about.
Americans have become so enamored of scoring that they have lost sight of the pure joy of witnessing true athleticism. Football is a totally disjointed collection of collisions and short sprints interrupted by whistles, meetings, consultations and occasionally watching the referee stuff his head in one of those girlie peep show hoods. A football broadcast will span an agonizing four hours, while the actual run of play will take up approximately 17 minutes (I actually timed last year's Super Bowl with a stopwatch, so these are scientifically accurate statistics. Sort of). No wonder there is an obesity problem in this country. A viewer has three hours and 43 minutes in which to walk to the refrigerator/pantry to restock the snack tray. And the snack tray could serve as your front door only it has handles. You can cook a thanksgiving feast in that time. Not so in soccer. If you get up to throw that fur-ball hacking waste of cuteness outside for clawing up the dining room chair or assaulting your daughter's bunny slippers, you could miss a brilliant breakaway that may or may not result in a score. A spectacular save is every bit as exciting as a ball in the back of the net. But your average American sports viewer would never grasp the significance. I tried to time a baseball game (identifying "play" as the time when the pitcher or the catcher were not handling the ball), but I kept drifting into a coma and my wife had to use the CPR paddles. What does it say about baseball if their own definition of a "perfect game" is when two people play catch for nine innings? What does it say about me if my wife has a set of CPR paddles handy? How can you possibly maintain any level of excitement or enthusiasm during a game when there is so little going on. Even in the most defensive oriented soccer matches (and trust me, you'll see plenty of these in the World Cup), the stadium will quite literally rock with screaming fans waving huge flags, banging on massive drums, blowing brass instruments of every conceivable shape and size and the brainless few tossing flares and smoke grenades. It's a miniature carnival in all it's Bacchanalian splendor. And all this happy noise will begin before the first touch and will last long after the pitch is cleared. There is a passion here that can never be duplicated with American sport because there is a fluid continuity of momentum in soccer that is missing in baseball and football.
So, my American sports oriented friends, be advised that some of your neighbors, co-workers, friends and yes, even relatives are going to start behaving erratically, and they are going to indulge in very animated conversation where terms like "man-marking", "slotted through-ball", "side volley" and "set piece" will be bandied about like so much techno-babble. You will hear names like Bocanegra, Cherundolo, Ching, Hahnemann, Mastroeni, Onyewu, and Reyna. And you will most likely think that they are discussing some of the foreign players. They're not foreigners. They're ours. These are just some of the 23 members of the American National Men's Soccer team who will represent us in the upcoming FIFA World Cup. They will be a part of a sporting contest that captures the entire world's attention like nothing else. Not even if NASCAR decides to remove the restrictor plates for Talladega, whatever they are.
To put this in a perspective that American sports fans can grasp, being the statistics crazy folks that they are: The largest viewing audience ever to watch a Super Bowl was in 1996 where 139 million viewers tuned in worldwide (source: jsonline.com). The final match of the 2002 World Cup was viewed by 1.1 billion people (source: FIFA.com). If my calculations are correct it would take 7.9 (what the heck, make it 8) Super Bowls to match the viewing audience of one World Cup final.
I'm not attempting to convert any football or baseball fans, and I'm not asking them to give up wearing hats made out of cheese or artificial pigs noses, or to huddle in a bunch and bark like dogs. I'm just saying that their passion for the game is gauged by the quantity of scores, while the soccer fan maintains a consistent level of passion because of the quality of play.
The World Cup is coming. You have been warned.
Note: No animals were injured during the writing of this article.
Editor's Note: Now before anybody gets worked up over this comment about a "brainless few tossing flares and smoke grenades" ;-), I want to make if perfectly clear that I am one of those brainless few who thinks that as long as you don't endanger others, it adds tremendously to the atmosphere of the match. There now I'm happy !
