Soccer May Be Gay, But
At Least It’s Not Canadian

Posted on | June 14, 2010 | 54 Comments

I don’t think Allahpundit is Canadian, but he does have a suspiciously extensive knowledge of Broadway show tunes hockey.

IYKWIMAITYD.

The other day, I put up a mocking headline:

World Cup Overkill: Associated Press
Writes 1,068 Words About 1-1 Tie

And proceeded to mock soccer, generally, which prompted commenter “gg” (whose IP address is in India) to respond:

“Wake up from your ‘me me me USA me me USA i can’t see ya!’ mentality. Not as if the rest of the world gives a damn about a stereotype Stupid American like you anyway.”

Yeah, pal? Well, obviously you give enough of a damn to argue with me, don’t ya?

So anyway, the Nation and NPR today decided to inform us that conservatives hate soccer because we’re racist, citing Glenn Beck and G. Gordon Liddy as examples. In point of fact, I played youth-league soccer when I was 12. I covered prep soccer as a sports writer in Georgia. My future son-in-law plays soccer and, believe it or not, I like soccer.

Shall I sing “Wilkommen” from Cabaret now? Or how about “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story?

But affluent elite American soccer fandom of the type celebrated by the Nation/NPR piece has roughly the same relationship to merely liking soccer that knowing show-tune lyrics has to sodomy  — which is to say, none at all.

When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening’s Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game.

They were, in a phrase, British rednecks.

And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite.

In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. It is a low-brow, blue-collar sport, beloved by rowdy hooligans the way ghetto kids in America love the NBA or hillibillies in east Tennessee love NASCAR.

Out there, in the rest of the world crammed full of foreigners, amongst limeys and wogs, krauts and dagos and chinks — and especially beaners — futbol es muy macho.

By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn’t watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners — God bless ’em — and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs.

Which is to say, conservatives don’t hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

American liberals love soccer not merely because it allows them to engage in displays of their imagined superiority — “Look at me! I’m a sophisticated cosmopolitan!” — but also because it’s usually the only sport they’ve ever actually played.

“Mom Wouldn’t Let Me Play Football” is a convenient shorthand that I’ve used to describe a category of person typified by, inter alia, David Brooks.

Another convenient shorthand: “Never Won a Fistfight.”

They’re pussies, in other words, and they grew up in those vanilla cul-de-sac suburban cocoon communities with “good schools” (hint, hint) where their neurotic mommies and wimpy dads never let them have a moment of leisure that wasn’t safe and supervised and reinforcing to their self-esteem.

Nerf World.

So they grew up sheltered and bookish and prone to whining about their allergies, part of a social group where this kind of childhood seemed perfectly normal, i.e., their fellow wienies with whom they associated in “gifted” classes and band and, above all, youth soccer league.

Soccer is a great sport for sheltered wienie kids, so long as they are in a league where all the other kids are sheltered wienies, too — as is the case in the vanilla cul-de-sac suburban cocoon community where these kids grow up. Why? Because youth soccer requires no athletic ability.

Neither size nor speed, neither strength nor agility — and certainly not eye-hand coordination —  is necessary to participate in the kind of soccer played by elementary-school kids in suburban U.S.A. All the really athletic kids are playing football, baseball or basketball.

Suburban youth soccer is a game for neurasthenic dorks.

Go watch 7- or 8-year-olds play youth-league soccer somewhere in an upscale American suburb and what do you see? Twenty dorky white kids running around willy-nilly while the two kids with anything approaching genuine athletic aptitude score all the goals.

In America, if you’re too clumsy for baseball, too short for basketball and too weak for football, soccer is your game.

Like I said, I spent one spring/summer playing in a YMCA soccer league when I was 12. The explanation is this: Robbie Brown played linebacker on my youth football team, the Sweetwater Valley Red Raiders, for which Robbie’s dad was an assistant coach. Robbie’s dad got the idea that soccer would be good conditioning for football — lots more running than baseball — and so Robbie was going to be on this team, and the word went around to the other parents of the Red Raiders: Hey, if your kid isn’t playing baseball this year, put ’em on this soccer team.

So there were about four of five of us football kids who played on this team in the Marietta YMCA league, and our coach was a German guy named Hans or Karl or something like that.

We sucked.

The coach’s kid was the only member of the team who had ever played soccer before. Me and my handful of football buddies began the season clueless and ended it only slightly less so, while the rest of the kids on the team were of the “Mom Wouldn’t Let Me Play Football” variety.

I can’t remember if we lost every game, but we sure didn’t win more than one or two. We sucked bad.

We did run a lot that summer, though. We ran and ran and ran some more. Hans or Karl was a firm believer in running and so, after soccer ended in July, those of us who played football were in fine condition when the Red Raiders started practice in August. That having been the real purpose of our soccer season, it was a success.

Playing YMCA soccer against those Marietta kids could never be mistaken for the kind of futbol es muy macho experience that produces World Cup champions. While I am unfamiliar with the U.S. team roster, I would hazard a blind guess that a majority of them are immigrants or the sons of immigrants, and not the products of suburban Everybody-Gets-A-Trophy youth-league soccer.

So that’s my soccer story. I’ve got one good friend, the son of Scottish immigrants, who loves soccer in a Regular Joe kind of way. And my daughter’s fiancé — the Romeo of the Pampas, the Latin Lothario — is all ¡Va La Argentina! about the World Cup.

That kind of sincere fandom is one thing. But the affectations of pretentious liberals . . . well, let’s let Ace of Spades explain:

I think I know the reason, and this is the political reason — the real political reason — the right rejects soccer. . . .
Because many conservatives suspect that progressives elevate soccer above other sports for culture war-type reasons, we dig in our heels and say silly things about soccer just to repudiate the left’s own attempt to fight the culture war via a silly pastime.

Read the whole thing.

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