Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Cigar_Guy]

People put lots of stuff up here on Dave's. People post about how much they hate this country and its people. They post about how they hate their home coutnry, or one right next to their home country. They post about politicians at home and abroad, and some even post Holocaust denials.

However, the responses to these posts will pale in comparison to what I expect to get from posting this piece by John Derbyshire (http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Commentary/Soccer.htm) from July, 2000. I'm posting it because, quite frankly, I can't take it anymore. Don't get me wrong: I wish Korea all the best in the World Cup, but... well, I'll let Derb speak for me:

National Review
July 17th, 2000


The Longest, Awfulest Game
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of my earliest recollections from an English childhood is of sitting with my father as he listened to the Saturday afternoon soccer game on our family radio. The voice of the commentator was clear enough� a man talking� but what was that other sound behind it? Always present, sometimes a mere murmur, rising now to a roar as the commentary became faster and more excited, now subsiding again, it rolled and seethed in a vaguely oceanic way that struck my infant fancy as dark and menacing. I actually had no idea what it was, but I felt sure it was a thing I wanted no part of. The aversion stayed with me, and I spent my formative years avoiding soccer, so far as it can be avoided in a soccer-mad country on the fringes of a soccer-crazed continent. To this day I do not understand the offside rule. Eventually I came to the United States, where� glory, hallelujah!� there is no soccer.

Well, there is some, of course. One of the hardy perennials of American newspaper rooms is the "rebirth of American soccer" story. We had it a year ago, when a U.S. team won the 1999 Women's World Cup� remember that girl in the sports bra with her well-buffed arms raised in triumph? We had it in 1996 with the launch of Major League Soccer, the latest attempt to organize the professional game nationwide here; and we had it in 1975 with the previous attempt, the North American Soccer League, which folded in 1984. No doubt the "rebirth" story was wheeled out in 1925 when a Scottish immigrant named Archie Stark concluded the American Soccer League season with 67 goals for Bethlehem Steel, still the world record for a pro league. Yet soccer has, as its U.S. promoters whine, "never gained public acceptance" here. Various theories are advanced to explain this.

What really needs explaining is not why Americans do not care to watch soccer, but why the rest of the world does. With the probable exception of cricket, it is the most boring game ever devised, and has been trending in the direction of utter eventlessness for several decades. One reason Archie Stark's record is still unbroken is that over the last fifty years soccer defense has developed much more rapidly than offense, so that final scores of 0-0 and "penalty shoot-outs" (where an intractably tied game is settled by having single players kick at a goal defended only by the goalie) are now routine. It is amazing, in such a busy age, that so many people are willing to spend ninety minutes watching a game that frequently has no result.

The very inconclusiveness of soccer is, I suspect, what has made it the pet sport of the repulsive bobos� David Brooks' "bourgeois bohemians". The game is, in their eyes, relatively untainted with that knuckle-dragging, masculine competitiveness that disfigures the more prominent American sports. It lacks the grunted brutalities of football, the chawing and spitting and thrust-jaw confrontations of baseball, or the in-your-face trash talk of basketball. It is, they seem to think, just a more aerobic version of croquet: a non-violent game of skill and strategy. In their soft, money-addled minds, these deluded wretches associate soccer with things "civilized" and European: with French wines and Danish pastries, with tiny, fuel-efficient cars and eighteen different varieties of coffee, with universal health care and the prohibition of handguns. How wrong-headed is all this? One hardly knows where to begin.

In the first place, soccer is a safer game to play than more popular American sports only in the way that modern boxing is safer than bare-knuckle prize-fighting. That is to say, there is less blood and fewer broken bones, but considerably more unseen injury� mosty to the brain. A study by Dutch and American researchers, published in the journal Neurology in 1998, found that professional soccer players score poorly compared with other athletes on tests of memory, planning and visual processing, as a consequence of chronic brain injury from repeatedly "heading" the ball or colliding with other players. Another study written up in Sports Medicine Digest the previous year reported degenerative changes in the cervical spine� that is, the bones and intervertebral tissues of the neck� in 61 per cent of younger soccer players, presumably from the same causes. Those soccer moms would be doing better by their children if they switched them to skydiving programs. Or to rugby, the game of my own schooldays. Rugby players break collar-bones, ribs and noses pretty regularly, but at least they come away with their brains intact. Rugby is also a more "inclusive" sport, in the sense that there is a place on the rugby field for all physiques and all levels of skill above the irredeemably uncoordinated. Old English saying: "Football [i.e. soccer] is a game for gentlemen played by hooligans. Rugby is a game for hooligans played by gentlemen".

Talk of hooligans leads us to another reason why soccer should be banned from these United States by constitutional amendment. In those countries where it is the lead sport, it seems to attract into its following an element of the population glimpsed here only on the Jerry Springer show, or doing weed-whacker duty under armed supervision on upstate roadsides. My loathing of soccer� and indeed of hooliganism� notwithstanding, I cannot repress a shiver of national pride here, for the world leaders in soccer hooliganism are the English. The prowess of our lads was on display last month at the Euro 2000 championships in Belgium. On June 17th England beat Germany for the first time since the finals of the 1966 World Cup. (The chant of England supporters when their team plays Germany is: "Two world wars and one world cup, doo-dah, doo-dah", to the tune of "Camptown Races".) In the streets of the small Belgian town of Charleroi, where the match was played, hundreds of English fans fought pitched battles with their German counterparts. Order was only restored by means of water cannon and mounted police charges. Scores of deported English fans were flown home in a Belgian military aircraft, handcuffed and heavily guarded. Whether Engish pre-eminence in this field is the last dying flicker of our national vitality, or the presage of some new phase of world-kicking English bumptiousness, I shall not venture to speculate.

(There is a case to be made that English soccer hooligans represent the true soul of our people� that, in fact, England is a nation of hooligans. Many of our national heroes have about them a somewhat questionable quality: Clive of India, Cecil Rhodes, Stamford Raffles. The 16th-century adventurer Sir Francis Drake is regarded as a great patriot and exemplar by all red-blooded Englishmen. Sir Henry Newbolt wrote a fine sentimental poem about him, that used to be memorized by English schoolchildren, and that was set to music by Sir Charles Stanford� the sheer quantity of Sirs here shows you how respectable this man's memory is. Those at the receiving end of his "adventures", however, considered him a lawless pirate, and on the actual historical evidence it is hard to argue that they were wrong.)

American soccer fans have not yet been infected by the spirit of hooliganism. For one thing they are middle-class, the offspring of those suburban soccer moms; for another, there are not enough of them to spawn the required subgroups of ferocious drunks. (I'll admit, very grudgingly, that most soccer fans, even in England, are law-abiding.) If the game ever does take off here, though� if it seeps down into the great American underclass� be prepared for scenes that will make the disturbances following the L.A. Lakers game last month look like schoolyard scuffles. There is something about the game that makes this inevitable. Perhaps it is soccer's remarkable ability to go on for ninety minutes with nothing at all happening that causes fans to lose their reason. Or possibly� this is my private opinion� the game was brought into the world by Satan to drive the human race mad. There was actually a war fought over a soccer game once: El Salvador vs. Honduras, 1969, two thousand dead (I do not know the game score). Now I hear again that sinister seething murmur from Dad's radio set. America: be warned!

[robot]

not a bad soccer diss. check out this recent one from dave eggers, though -- an absolute gem.

ROBT.

- - - - - - - - - -
The True Story of American Soccer
From The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.
By Dave Eggers
http://www.slate.com/id/2142554/?nav=mpp

A German goal at the World Cup

When children in the United States are very young, they believe that soccer is the most popular sport in the world. They believe this because every single child in America plays soccer. It is a rule that they play, a rule set forth in the same hoary document, displayed in every state capital, that insists that 6-year-olds also pledge allegiance to the flag�a practice which is terrifying to watch, by the way, good lord�and that once a year, they dress as tiny pilgrims with beards fashioned from cotton.

On Saturdays, every flat green space in the continental United States is covered with tiny people in shiny uniforms, chasing the patchwork ball up and down the field, to the delight and consternation of their parents, most of whom have no idea what is happening. The primary force behind all of this is the American Youth Soccer Organization, or AYSO. In the 1970s, AYSO was formed to popularize soccer among the youth of America, and they did this with startling efficiency. Within a few years, soccer was the sport of choice for parents everywhere, particularly those who harbored suspicions that their children had no athletic ability whatsoever.

The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four coordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple of times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.

Because they all play, most of America's children assume that soccer will always be a part of their lives. When I was 8, playing center midfielder for the undefeated Strikers (coached by the unparalleled Mr. Cooper), I harbored no life expectations other than that I would continue playing center midfielder until such time as I died. It never occurred to me that any of this would change.

But at about age 10, something happens to the children of the United States. Soccer is dropped, quickly and unceremoniously, by approximately 88 percent of all young people. The same kids who played at 5, 6, 7, move on to baseball, football, basketball, hockey, field hockey, and, sadly, golf. Shortly thereafter, they stop playing these sports, too, and begin watching these sports on television, including, sadly, golf.

The abandonment of soccer is attributable, in part, to the fact that people of influence in America long believed that soccer was the chosen sport of Communists. When I was 13�this was 1983, long before glasnost, let alone the fall of the wall�I had a gym teacher, who for now we'll call Moron McCheeby, who made a very compelling link between soccer and the architects of the Iron Curtain. I remember once asking him why there were no days of soccer in his gym units. His face darkened. He took me aside. He explained with quivering, barely mastered rage, that he preferred decent, honest American sports where you used your hands. Sports where one's hands were not used, he said, were commie sports played by Russians, Poles, Germans, and other commies. To use one's hands in sports was American, to use one's feet was the purview of the followers of Marx and Lenin. I believe McCheeby went on to lecture widely on the subject.

It was, by most accounts, 1986 when the residents of the United States became aware of the thing called the World Cup. Isolated reports came from foreign correspondents, and we were frightened by these reports, worried about domino effects, and wondered aloud if the trend was something we could stop by placing a certain number of military advisers in Cologne or Marseilles. Then, in 1990, we realized that the World Cup might happen every four years, with or without us.

At the same time, high-school soccer was booming in the suburbs of Chicago, due in large part to an influx of foreign exchange students.

My own high-school team was ridiculously good by the standards of the day, stacked as it was with extraordinary players from other places. I can still remember the name of the forward who came from, I think, Rome: Alessandro Dazza. He was the best on the team, just ahead of Carlos Gutierrez (not his real name), who hailed from Spain and played midfield. Our best defender was a Vietnamese-American student named Tuan, and there was also Paul Beaupre, who was actually from our own WASP-filled town, but whose name sounded French. We were expected to win State, but we did not come very close. Homewood-Flossmoor, we heard, had a pair of twins from Brazil.

A short time later, after the growth of professional indoor soccer and then some vague stabs at outdoor leagues, we proved to the world that the United States was serious, or relatively serious, about soccer, and the World Cup came to America in 1994. At least 4 to 5 percent of the country heard about this, and some commensurate percentage of them went to the games. This was enough to fill stadiums, and the experiment was considered a success. In the wake of the Cup in America, other outdoor leagues have struggled to gain footing, and the current league seems more or less viable, though newspaper coverage of the games usually is found in the nether regions of the sports section, near the car ads and the biathlon roundups.

Our continued indifference to the sport worshiped around the world can be easily explained in two parts. First, as a nation of loony but determined inventors, we prefer things we thought of ourselves. The most popular sports in America are those we conceived and developed on our own: football, baseball, basketball. If we can claim at least part of the credit for something, as with tennis or the radio, we are willing to be passively interested. But we did not invent soccer, and so we are suspicious of it.

The second and greatest, by far, obstacle to the popularity of the World Cup, and of professional soccer in general, is the element of flopping. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I � stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers. There are few examples of American sports where flopping is part of the game, much less accepted as such. Things are too complicated and dangerous in football to do much faking. Baseball? It's not possible, really�you can't fake getting hit by a baseball, and it's impossible to fake catching one. The only one of the big three sports that has a flop factor is basketball, where players can and do occasionally exaggerate a foul against them, but get this: The biggest flopper in the NBA is not an American at all. He's Argentinian! (Manu Ginobili, a phony to end all phonies, but otherwise a very good player.)

But flopping in soccer is a problem. Flopping is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating, and these four behaviors make for an unappealing mix. The sheer theatricality of flopping is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds. First there will be some incidental contact, and then there will be a long moment�enough to allow you to go and wash the car and return�after the contact and before the flopper decides to flop. When you've returned from washing the car and around the time you're making yourself a mini-bagel grilled cheese, the flopper will be leaping forward, his mouth Munch-wide and oval, bracing himself for contact with the earth beneath him. But this is just the beginning. Go and do the grocery shopping and perhaps open a new money-market account at the bank, and when you return, our flopper will still be on the ground, holding his shin, his head thrown back in mock-agony. It's disgusting, all of it, particularly because, just as all of this fakery takes a good deal of time and melodrama to put over, the next step is so fast that special cameras are needed to capture it. Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacularly uninjured�excelsior!�and will kick the ball over to his teammate and move on.

American sports are, for better or worse, built upon transparency, or the appearance of transparency, and on the grind-it-out work ethic. This is why the most popular soccer player in American history is Sylvester Stallone. In fact, the two greatest moments in American soccer both involved Sylvester Stallone. The first came with Victory, the classic film about Allied soccer-playing POWs, and the all-star game they play against the Nazis. In that film, Stallone plays an American soldier who must, for some reason�no one can be expected to remember these things�replace the goalie on the POW team. Of course, Stallone knows nothing about soccer, so he must learn to play goalie (somewhere, Moron McCheeby grins triumphantly). Stallone does this admirably, the Allies win (I think), and as the crowd surrounds them, they are hidden under coats and fans and sneak away to freedom.

The second most significant moment came when the World Cup came to the United States, in 1994. It is reported that Stallone attended one of the games and seemed to enjoy it.

It's inevitable, given the way the U.S. teams are improving every year, that eventually we will make it to the semifinals of the World Cup, and it's likely, one would think, that the United States will win it all in the near future. This is a country of limitless wealth and 300 million people, after all, and when we dedicate the proper resources to a project, we get the job done (see Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq). But until we do win the Cup�and we have no chance this particular time around, being tossed into the Group of Death, which will consume us quickly and utterly�soccer will receive only the grudging acknowledgement of the general populace. Then again, do we really want�or can we even conceive of�an America where soccer enjoys wide popularity or even respect? If you were soccer, the sport of kings, would you want the adulation of a people who elected Bush and Cheney, not once but twice? You would not. You would rather return to your roots, Communist or otherwise, and fight fascism with your feet.

[anyway]

OP, What's your point? Americans don't like soccer?

And why would you want to let the pommy poofter make it for you?

[bigverne]

Haven't we been through this already?

[patchy1]

[capebretoncanadian]

Who gives a rats ass what Americans think on this subject? Why is there so many articles about it?

[Bronski]

Ugh.

So if people enjoy the game they must have some deficiency? Obviously, some people are jealous that soccer is so popular outside of the U.S. You don't see many South Americans going on and on about how lame Hockey is, for example.

You know, it's okay to enjoy soccer. It doesn't make you a traitor to your country.

Edit: After skimming through the posted article, I realize that what I said above may completely miss the point.

[Satori]

[blaseblasphemener]

Thanks for the laugh, I needed that.

So true about 7 year-olds running around, picking flowers, picking their noses, anything to avoid running. Reminds me of teaching in middle school in Korea. I would look out the window during break time and watch the "PE" class. 40-50 kids playing a game of soccer. I've never seen so much standing around in a sport. Where's the efficiency of playing a game where 5% of the kids have the ball 75-90% of the time, while the rest stand around picking their arses? That's quite a workout.

When my brother and I were 8 (twins), our dad wouldn't let us play soccer. He said it was a girl sport. On the eve of father's day, I guess I should take this opportunity to say, thanks Dad.

[JLarter]

[Satori]

I certainly hope to christ americans don't get good at football. They will comercialise the life out of it like they do to all thier sports...

[blaseblasphemener]

[Bronski]

[Satori]

[blaseblasphemener]

Sports fell a few notches in N. America with free agency and guaranteed contracts.

Almost no players anymore are associated with one team for most of their careers. They make sick money, and at way too early of an age.

The commercialism is the way the owners can keep making money. They
can't make it at the gate anymore. And only companies and millionaires
can afford to go to hockey or basketball games. NFL makes it's money from it's tv deal, and the broadcasters make money from endless
commercials. It all adds up to piss-poor version of sports compared to the
say in the 1980's.

I'm sounding like grumpy old man now. In my day!....