MARTIN O'MALLEY:
Sorry, World Cup fans – soccer will never be No. 1
CBC News Viewpoint | June 9, 2006 | More from Martin O'Malley
At least one generation of Canadians knows the line, "The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation." Pierre Elliott Trudeau made it famous, but the line belongs to Martin O'Malley, who wrote it when he was with The Globe and Mail. He's written eight books, on topics such as the Canadian North, medicine, murder, media literacy and baseball.
The world is going to be soccer-mad for the next four weeks.
Even people who don't know how many players there are on a team will be yelling their faces off for Brazil, Germany, England, Argentina, Portugal or France. Some will even be yelling their faces off for the United States, which will be among the 32 countries competing at the 2006 FIFA World Cup from June 9 to July 9 in Germany.
I will get more grief from my good friend who bet me $50 two years ago that soccer will be the number 1 sport in North America within 10 years. She listed the litany of arguments for soccer's supremacy that I've heard for the past three decades:
- Kids love soccer.
- It's inexpensive, requiring only a round, inflated ball and an empty field.
- It's the most global of all sports.
- It is the "Beautiful Game."
I agree with all the points my friend makes, but – if I'm still around in eight years – I expect to collect my $50 because soccer just won't make it on a grand scale in North America.
In the big, competitive professional leagues in North America soccer will never prevail as an audience-grabber over basketball, football, baseball, auto racing or golf.
Hockey? As a TV attraction in the United States, it ranks with women's high-school basketball, but remains a frenzy in Canada, even for the kids, despite the enormous cost in equipment, arena rentals and gas for the family car.
North America has tried. Remember 1975, when the famous Pele of Brazil signed to play soccer for the New York Cosmos? He was a little beyond his peak at the age of 34, but surely his presence in New York would put soccer on the North American map. It didn't. What about 1994, when soccer's World Cup came to the United States? Surely this would do it. It didn't.
North Americans prefer their scores big, like 118-114 in basketball, or 36-28 in football. Even most baseball fans, despite how they rhapsodize about the cerebral and artistic elements of their game, prefer a slugfest to a pitchers' duel.
Which brings me to a pet peeve – sports snobbery. Why do people belittle sports they don't understand? I have an Irish friend, a bright man – intellectual, author, editor – who always puts down North American football.
He even comes close to calling them cowards because of all the protection they wear.
It matters not when I tell him that without that protection there would be dozens of cracked heads, broken arms and legs and probably two or three deaths a game, even at the high-school level, because of the intense, head-on nature of the game.
Another friend, a Brit, tells of a time when a team of cricketeers played a major-league baseball team and whupped their asses. I do not believe this, and my Brit friend nevers backs up his claim with a place and a time.
I enjoy soccer, but I do not understand it. It may well be the most beautiful game in the world and the most physically demanding. But I do not love it. Not the way I love baseball. Maybe if I had got caught up in the culture of soccer in grade school, maybe if there were genuine hometown soccer heroes – but I didn't and there weren't. We played baseball at recess and street hockey after school.
Baseball takes the most lumps from sports snobs who don't get the game and think it is slow and boring. In this regard, I treasure the likes of big John Kruk, who played first base for the Philadelphia Phillies. A fan once caught him smoking by the dugout during a game and scolded him, saying, "You should be ashamed of yourself, young man, a professional athlete smoking a cigarette."
Kruk replied: "I ain't an athlete, lady, I'm a baseball player."
Macleans magazine once sent me to northern Ontario to write about a world wrist-wrestling championship. I remember in particular a thin young man from Southern California who flew up to Timmins with his dad, who happened also to be his trainer. The kid might have weighed 80 kilograms. He kept winning, with remarkable ease. He won in his class, then took on bigger competitors and beat them too.
Between bouts, he hunkered against a wall eating carrots and oranges – he was a vegetarian – and he explained how he did it. He psyched out his opponents with a stoical, menacing glare. As for training, he used bicycle inner tubes, which he tethered to a post and pulled with his arm in the wrist-wrestling manner, concentrating solely on the muscles that mattered most.
In the final contest, when he was up against a man 15 kilograms heavier, the atmosphere in the arena was so tense not a sound could be heard except the strained grunts of the two competitors. When the kid from California put down the big man there was a nanosecond of astonished silence, then the place erupted like it was midnight on New Year's Eve.
When I accepted the assignment I knew nothing about wrist wrestling as a serious competition, but after a week in Timmins surrounded by bulging biceps and Popeye forearms – and that kid from California – I returned home thrilled by the sport.
LETTERS:
I enjoyed your viewpoint "soccer will never be No. 1" but you left me wondering who you support. Also, I disagree with you.
Americans have a fierce competitive spirit and will step up to the ball. As Major League Soccer grows in the U.S. it will provide a forum for Canadian players to develop (Toronto FC enters the league in 2007). Much as I love hockey, defeating Russia is not as exciting now as it was during the cold war.
While beating Americans in hockey is always sweet, I think Canadians increasingly want to be noticed by the rest of the world. The way to do that in sport is to become contenders in football.
I support England first and the U.S. second.
—Dil Joseph | Edmonton
I beg to differ with Martin O'Malley regarding soccer's limited appeal to North Americans.
True, people in his generation will never really understand the game or grow to love it, but there are millions of young people today who play the game as regularly as hockey, who, coupled with the millions of immigrants and their offspring who love and understand soccer will eventually make soccer a leading sport on this continent.
There is one element that soccer possesses that no other sport does: its total international appeal. It's not a regional game; it's a world game. It's the one game all nations compete in and it excites people on a nationalistic level more so than any other sport.
I disagree that the World Cup in the U.S.A. in 94 did not elevate soccer's stature in North America. Prior to that World Cup, soccer was a non-entity in the U.S.A. Now Americans are true contenders and they even have a fierce rivalry with Mexico.
If the Canadian men's team were ever properly funded and the talent pool in this country exploited, soccer would become increasingly popular across Canada. Also, if Canada ever produced a contender that reached say the quarter finals, that would do more for national unity and our international image than any peace keeping mission ever did!
But until that happens, I will cheer for Greece, the European Champions of 2004.
—John Dimitropoulos | North York, ON
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