June 12, 2010
SO EASY ANYONE CAN DO IT:
The World Takes the Field: As the U.S. faces the U.K. at the World Cup, audiences will tune in to watch a sport that levels superpowers and lifts up the Third World. Tunku Varadarajan on our only truly global game (Tunku Varadarajan, 6/12/10, Daily Beast)
Of all the team games that are played in the world, only one—soccer—is irrefutably universal (and yes, that includes Arizona, where Hispanics, legal or otherwise, are known to play something they call “futbol”). Every other team game—the noble cricket, the actuarial baseball, the brutal rugby, the cartoon-costumed American football, the primitive ice hockey, the invigorating field hockey, the carcass-strewn buzkashi, the absurd kabaddi, the pseudo-aristocratic polo—is peculiar to a country, a region, a language group, or an ex-colonial context. Every other team game, however spellbinding or brutal, graceful or epic, rule-bound or free-for-all, lacks that transcendental ingredient of symphonic, globally comprehensible, non-pedantic vigor that soccer possesses. This factor, I wager, entitles soccer to be ranked among the 10 greatest inventions in human history, alongside (in no particular order) fire, money, electricity, the wheel, wine, the flush toilet, bikinis, democracy, and the Internet. It is certainly (along with the sedentary chess) the foremost ludic—or play-themed—invention of mankind. (I am, here, treating sex not as an invention but as the acting out of an instinct.) So as soccer unfurls on our televisions—whether on Univision, with its operatic, deep-lunged, fast-talking, unembarrassable commentators who live for the moment when they can scream “gooooooooooool,” or on ESPN, with its coolly English and Scottish bank of commentators (the inept American commentators having been cut from the cast, gracias a Dios!)—it behooves Americans to take a modest, humble backseat, and spend a whole month learning about the arts and methods of a glorious game, and of the countries that play it.
It's a peculiar sort of genius, but by removing hands from the game you nullify co-ordination as a factor and elite skills as a factor and make it accessible to everyone. And since the basic equipment is so cheap you at least nullify wealth if not actually favoring the poor, who would play a better game if they could afford to.
But even at that America has a series of advantages that are making us a world power in the game: (1) the size and speed of even our third rate athletes, given the pool we have to draw from; (2) a deep understanding of games like baseball, football, basketball, and hockey all of which utilize space, positioning, and strategy better and the mathematics and technological prowess to analyze what happens on the field; (3) our famous tendency towards local organization which has grown the game at the youth level with unmatched speed; and (4) in a game where players are notoriously fragile psychologically and tend to crumble under enormous national pressure, a sustained lack of passion about the sport which leaves our players with little to lose.