I decided that I’ll start using Sundays as rant day on this site. You know, for when I have these posts about societal stuff that pisses me off. That way people can easily avoid these posts and move on with their lives. Enjoy? Enjoy.
You can always tell I’ve been on vacation because I’m temporarily up on my sports news. This is because every restaurant and bar plays ESPN on the television, and I end up eating by myself quite a bit at bars and restaurants, and if you’re staring at the TV like you give a shit’s shit about sports, well, it seems just a bit less sad and you can stand sitting alone long enough to finish a basket of fries.
Being World Cup time, I saw quite a bit of coverage. Including the stuff along the lines of “I told you soccer sucks” after the United States lost.
Let me tell you something about soccer sucking. Soccer does suck. As does every other sport.
Whenever people bring up the reasons that soccer sucks, all I can think is, “Yes, and yet you defend other sports that are just as boring, complicated, and plain bizarre.”
Essentially, World Cup time is beautiful for me because it’s one of the few times that some sports people will say they just don’t get it. Which is exactly how I feel about sports in general. Welcome to my world.
I saw this man on TV explaining why he’s ignoring the World Cup and how he feels bullied by fans, or that he’s made to feel like an idiot for not enjoying soccer aka Footie.
Well, let’s just take some of his soccer points and apply them to America’s favorite pasttimes, aka Sportsing.
Soccer doesn’t have much scoring.
The classic problem with soccer. Who wants to watch a sport where a score of three is a blowout? Well, to answer that, tell me, do you know how many different scoring options are available in Football, by which I mean American football, the 1-hour game that takes 6 hours to play?
There’s a touchdown for six. There’s a field goal for three. There’s a two-point conversion, cleverly named to describe the way of scoring that results in two points. There’s an extra point, one. There’s also something called a Safety which is as boring as its name would imply. So we’ve got all those, plus the different options that pair a touchdown and an extra point, or a touchdown and a two-point conversion. So what a sport needs, in order to make it exciting, is about 40 different potential scores from the same motions?
Even as a sports fan, I can understand something very simple. A high-scoring game does not make for excitement. A close game is a better game than a blowout. And how can we call soccer low-scoring when football, for what is essentially one round of scoring, can add 8 points? They could just go ahead and say that each soccer goal is worth 13.
Which is the point. Someone who doesn’t like sports understands how arbitrary the scoring system of everything seems. We just fucking decided. It’s not like it’s a science. You might as well have the teams score and then have a random number generator select the number of points it was worth.
There are not many natural stoppages in play that allow time for conversations, commercials (this is why soccer is tough to televise), or trips to the restroom.
Oh, fuck me. How am I supposed to decide which mid-size pickup to purchase this year? If I can’t watch silver-painted pickups prancing around in tv studio mud every ten minutes, I’ll be completely adrift.
If sports have a uniting factor to the outsider, it’s this: Sports are the most shameless advertising delivery system of all time.
The commercials. The “sponsored by” mini commercials. For fuck’s sake, the WALLS of the stadiums are festooned with ads the way I used to decorate my teenage bedroom with Green Day posters.
It’s garish. And disappointing. People give shit to movies and TV when shameless product placement rears up. Yet, in sports it’s totally cool? Rubbish.
Soccer takes away our hands. This makes the game incredibly skillful and exhausting, but also robs fans of much of the beauty of sport. Hands and opposable thumbs separate us from creatures of the wild.
I guess I forgot about all the pivoting in basketball. Or the dribbling. You know, all those things that make sports into sports. I mean, without that shit, wouldn’t every sport just be taking an object and walking it into a goal?
What about hockey? Jesus christ, you slap around a little rubber disc with a stick? Can you carry it over to the goal and put it in the goalie’s outstretched hand? No.
Soccer lovers tend to be an elitist, intolerant lot. They look down on those who will truly never “get” their game.
This is exactly how every sports fan works. I’ve yet to meet a huge sports fan who says to me, “You know, I really enjoy this sport, but I can understand why you wouldn’t and have no motivation to convince you otherwise.”
No, instead, people assume that you don’t like football because you just don’t get it. You don’t understand the glory.
I understand how football works, believe me. I get hockey. I don’t have fundamental misunderstandings about basketball. And I don’t enjoy watching them. It’s not a fucking painting with context and representations of certain art movements. It’s dudes carrying inflated rubber up and down a stretch.
Here’s why I don’t care about sports. Sports are almost never funny. They very rarely have narrative, and when they do, it often feels like a forced, pro-wrestling sort of thing where this underdog is up against that other, also underdog. Sports commentators are so relentlessly even-handed that it’s no fun at all.
So tell me, what is there to “get” about sports?
And please, no more about how soccer is the Game of the Future, here in the United States. Millions of kids in our country have been playing soccer for more than 40 years. This has not translated into an adult population of folks who’ll pay to watch professional soccer games. Millions of kids also play hopscotch, kickball, and lacrosse. It doesn’t mean those games can become mainstream American professional spectator sports.
If fans make sports, then you have to acknowledge they also ruin sports.
Sports fans are often shitheads. They just are. They love to WOW you with their knowledge of how many hits so-and-so had on whom. They spout off all these numbers and then want to argue about whether or not the numbers were assisted by drugs.
They use words like “we” when talking about their teams, which more often than not consist of players from all over the goddamn U.S., if not all over the world. Is there one hockey player on the Colorado Avalanche who grew up in Colorado? No. In fact, by my count, they’ve got 28 players and only 4 are form the U.S. That’s less than 15%. And those players are all from the East Coast. Yet, somehow we have some sort of pride regarding OUR Colorado Avalanche? Why do the teams even have any sort of geographical sortation?
Why do people buy these sports jerseys? Shouldn’t we, as taxpayers, be issued jerseys? Or shouldn’t we, as citizens who put up with bullshit traffic jams and nonsense, get a free ticket here and there? Be entered into a lottery whenever we pay our state taxes at the very least?
And you all have the emotional connection to be upset when things go wrong or cheer when they go right?
Do you think one of these Canadians, a single one, is following your career or your life? Do you think they care if you get divorced tomorrow? Do they send a text congratulating you on your raise? Do they mention you in a Facebook comment, ever?
Nope.
Frankly, it comes off as a little…pathetic. You come off as the kid following his teenaged brother around, constantly trying to show how cool you are by telling people about stuff your brother did. Yeah, well my brother can beat up your brother.
~
Look, I get it. It’s annoying to hear nothing about soccer, then all of a sudden everyone is into it. But let me set the record straight. That’s how every fucking sport works in America. Live somewhere with a shitty team who has a Super Bowl run every fifteen years. All of a sudden, everyone is a Broncos fan. Living in Colorado, you get to see what happens when you have no baseball team or no hockey team. People don’t give a shit about baseball, then all of a sudden they’re into it. Import some Canadians, and all of a sudden you’re surrounded by hockey fans.
And as much as I get it, I have to laugh. Because for once, for just a goddamn shining moment, YOU know what it’s like to be bored by the pointlessness of sports.