Americans Don’t Really Like Sports
It’s why we don’t know what to make of the World Cup
A five-hour flight delay in O’Hare doesn’t top my list for ideal Sunday evenings, but there I was. Always one to make the best of things, I set about killing time. Dinner was out of the question. The local cuisine consists of hot-dogs and popcorn – as if to say, “Chicago! Where we eat like drunks at a baseball game all the time”. Luckily, there’s a World Cup on, so I wedged myself into something resembling a sports bar and settled in to Cape Verde’s improbable run at the knockout stage.
Then, not two minutes past kickoff, some Midwesterner ambles up to the bar and asks to have the channel changed to golf. The bartender was a sensible man and politely declined. Soon enough though, we were joined by a Floridian, then a Texan, then some guy from Arizona. All of them – resplendent in their nearly uniform baseball caps, striped polos tucked into cargo shorts, and New Balance sneakers – lined up like sparrows on a wire and chirped, “golf! golf! golf!” It started to dawn on me that these people would rather watch golf… golf?!... during the World Cup!
But of course they did, because Americans don’t really like sports. Instead, we are obsessed with argumentative dramatics. We like the sporting equivalents of Real Housewives of Some Stupid Suburb (incessant mind-numbingly dull bickering). Soccer isn’t that. Soccer is a chase scene or a spy thriller. Turn away for one second and you might miss the most impressive feat of athleticism you’ll ever see.
The thing with soccer is that, during a match, you’re really just watching people play sports. That’s all. It’s continuous, so doesn’t lend itself to distraction. You won’t be asked to mull the purchase of a Chevrolet every two and a half minutes, no one comes on playing an organ to lead a song about Cracker Jacks 3/4 of the way through, and there isn’t dead time to fill with backstories about the players’ pet cats, or the coaches’ mistresses, or the announcers’ hilarious themed ties.
Just watching a sport bemuses Americans. Compare the US (English language) World Cup broadcasts to any others. They shoehorn in story time, and snack time, and ad breaks. Why do I know that one of the US goalkeepers used to play baseball as a kid? Well, instead of describing the game, some announcer felt the need to give us pointless background information. He talked over the actual game go give us that tidbit! I like sports, not stories about someone else’s children. If you’re a psycho who gives a damn about the life story of a teenager, you should have to read about it after the match. Even worse, when they run out of stories, they tend to start spewing out useless facts about the teams, as in “winless in the last 19 games when conceding the first goal”.
All of this time killing only makes sense when you have scads of dead air, as in (American) football. Our most popular “sport” is quite possibly the worst game ever invented. Three seconds of action, followed by commercials, followed by official review. Then the referees consult bird omens, the phase of the moon, and a 50,000-page rulebook that changes every third week. Then they ignore the book and just give the ball to whomever they’d like. Finally, before the next play, there’s a bit more standing around so the players can recover from blunt force trauma.
Alternatively, we have baseball, a sport that exists mostly to kill time. Even after adding a pitch clock, games still take longer than the Godfather (which is a movie that required an intermission for you to switch out the VHS tapes1). Or, there’s basketball. Now that actually is an exciting sport, so we do our best to play it in profoundly boring ways. League rules incentivize losing in some cases, which means entire games can be completely pointless.
Mostly we care about how much the players make. Every time I overhear a conversation about football it’s of the, “he gets paid $10MM a year and acts like that?” variety.2 Michael Jordan was, perhaps, the best athlete of all time and, during his career, we sent legions of reporters to figure out how much he bet on his golf games.3
I mostly cope by watching World Cup games on Telemundo, where my hatred of announcers meshes perfectly with the fact I don’t understand a lick of Spanish (though, judging from cadence, the Telemundo announcers do seem like they’re properly describing the game, not launching into tangents on the players’ favorite ice cream flavors). And, American announcing has improved somewhat this time around. They’ve added a British-y guy who mostly talks about soccer, even if he insists on saying things like, “that is a firecracker! From the youngsta”. Though, it’s two steps forward, one step backward: they’re still droning on about the American revolution when talking about the French team, and I’ve picked up gems like, “to continue the boxing reference, it’s like a heavyweight…”
Maybe I’m wrong though? Maybe (American) football is exciting? Maybe baseball is fast paced? Maybe caring about a player’s personal life isn’t weird. Maybe golf… no, golf just sucks. Well, maybe, but I’m still quite sure that American sporting culture is not actually about sports. You’re free to enjoy (American) football; all I ask is that you accept that it means you like arguments more than you like sports. You’re a Real Housewives fan. It’s okay.
I’m very old now, apparently.
We also love to argue about salary caps. For some reason, Americans all feel sorry for the billionaire team owners if they have to pay market salaries. Some players’ salaries are in the millions and we resent that; we also don’t understand that $1B > $1MM (by a factor of 1,000… crazy how decimalization works).
Gambling is very serious, unless, of course, you do it thousands of times. Then it’s fine.