Nobody said life is fair. While waiting for America’s next World Cup goal, we instead must return to reality, which means waiting for the day Sammy Sosa hits the cutoff man. No telling which phenomenon will come first.
Soccer fever was fun, but any notion of it reaching epidemic proportions probably was arrested with that narrowest of defeats to Brazil 1-0 on the 4th of July.
There will be no criticism here of routinely low scores in the planet’s most popular sport, because if our almighty NFL awarded one point for a touchdown instead of six, the Bears would have posted 1/2 in losing to Green Bay and 1/2 in losing to Detroit last season. And the Bears can use their hands, not that it helps.
Still, it does seem a bit much when U.S. coach Bora Milutinovic labels his team’s endeavor as “truly spectacular,” on top of poohbah Alan Rothenberg’s description of the past couple of weeks as “phenomenal.” How these windbags avoid rotator cuff injury after patting themselves on the back so often is a miracle of modern science.
The American booters won one of four games and managed but four shots in their finale. That kind of production might be enough to qualify for the NHL playoffs, but whether it will secure a place for soccer in this nation’s hearts is debatable. Nor, if Brazil had really turned it on and won 2-0, would soccer necessarily be dead in the water.
The question is, after July 17, where do Americans go with all this alleged new knowledge and enthusiasm? Yet another league is pending, but we are reminded of Lee Stern’s wishful thinking when he owned the Chicago Sting. Soccer would be the sport of the ’70s or ’80s, Stern predicted, based on a premise that all those youngsters taking corner kicks would soon be old enough to take dad’s car keys.
Alas, time passed, and there stood Stern, watching that next generation of fans drive by Sting games toward alternative forms of leisure. Shades of Jack Kent Cooke, who saw all those empty seats while his Los Angeles Kings performed and sighed, “there are 800,000 transplanted Canadians in Southern California and now I know why. They hate hockey.”
There are 12 million Americans under age 18 playing soccer, but the sport’s uncertain future doesn’t hinge on whether they will buy into an inferior version of World Cup. Dilution of talent rarely translates into dimunition of interest. There were 37,167 fans at Wrigley Field Monday to watch a substandard product.
No, soccer’s problem with the United States is merely there’s too much to do here and not enough time to do it. The World Cup visited, we have been entertained royally, and by all indications, Americans responded as they usually do to a happening. We put on our smiles and party hats and learned how to cook strange dishes better than we learned how to allocate tickets at face value.
Soccer geeks, some paid to be objective, felt compelled to overkill and overheat. It can get to a point where, if we don’t slobber over soccer and drop everything else, we are branded as either culturally imbalanced or hopelessly insulated. Talk about arrogance and tunnel vision.
As with the Olympics, we provided a stage, but it’s the public’s call on attention span, and no number of instructive editorials will change that. If you don’t remember much about the Summer Games of 1984, consider yourself perfectly sane. And please, none of this claptrap about international athletics promoting peace and harmony.
Look at Sarajevo 10 years later. Look at Los Angeles 10 years later. Look at Colombia today.
The World Cup is a fine experience, its only mistake in barnstorming before the baseball strike instead of during. And with the U.S. team eliminated, the rest of America can know how Chicago feels about every World Series.
The local team isn’t in it, but you keep an eye peeled for scores and highlights.