A Brain Drops special edition
Since I’ve been traveling, I’ve finally learned to appreciate soccer. Or, as the rest of the world calls it – football. Knowing a bit about the sport is critical if you want to be social in countries outside of the U.S. I’ve actually started to enjoy it, so I had to wonder “why do Americans hate it so much?”
I’m going to skip over a couple of the basics, like the fact that we’re not that good at it. And I won’t even mention the ill-fated promotional tour to Arizona that cost us half our best players.
Let’s dig a bit deeper than that:
- You can’t use your hands. Why would you deliberately disallow the use of your primary appendage? Would you pay to watch Nascar drivers who’ve removed their tires? Of course not – the crashes wouldn’t look nearly as cool and splodey.
- The games have low scores. “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” – U.S. sports fans don’t buy that line of shit. We need constant stimulation and fireworks. We thrive on the long touchdown pass in American football, the grand slam homerun of baseball or the “we score every 23 seconds” of basketball.
- The sponsor logos are right on the jerseys. Sorry, we refuse to be that blatantly open about the fact that our corporate overlords control every aspect of our lives. It makes it easier for us to cope when we want to pretend we have a “free market system.”
- There are just too many leagues. It’s impossible to keep them all straight – there needs to be a major merger of all the various leagues ASAP. The United States loves a good monopoly – whether it’s throwing hotels down on Boardwalk and Park Place or kicking down “incentives” to entice the telecom industry to have their annual “price increase festival” in your city next year.
- The yellow card penalty pretty much means there’s no immediate punishment. In a country with a history steeped in vigilante justice, we just don’t believe in delayed castigation.
- The clock doesn’t stop. This is a double whammy. No commercial time during a sporting event means no million dollar a minute ad rates. Then on top of that, you eliminate the breaks people use to grab a Coors Light and some Doritos, decimating the consumption of the sponsor’s products.
- Players have a tendency to take their shirts off. Americans may feign outrage when they see a topless woman, but it’s shirtless men that really make middle America uncomfortable.
- Many games don’t have a winner. The thought of not being able to win is anathema to most of us. There’s no adage that says “you win some, you lose some, but most of the time you’re the same” in the American vernacular. We really don’t believe in win-win, unless we win both times.
That’s my take on it. Am I missing something?
