ROUND OF 16: USA REACTION:'USA!" the Tony-nominated New York actor Danny Burstein proclaimed in a Facebook message minutes later. "That damn World Cup is exciting!" Hey, just keep handing up those butter-fingered 'keepers and there's no telling how far we can go.
Despite having reached the World Cup’s knockout stage twice previously in the past 16 years, America had until quite recently retained a firm grasp on its title as the leader among the anti-soccer nations of the world. Which is not to say that as a nation we actively disliked the sport embraced by the rest of the world. Most of us simply didn’t care.
But that was then and this is now. That a change might be in the air has been evident over the past couple of weeks, and in recent days a man would be hard-pressed to walk past a Manhattan pub that wasn’t showing one of the matches from South Africa.
And we’re not talking about just the “soccer pubs” catering to the immigrant trade here. The patrons of a chic café on the Upper West Side and those of some shot-and-a-beer bucket-of-blood in Hells Kitchen will be watching the same telecast this afternoon when Team USA goes up against Ghana in the first knockout round.
Fifty-one weeks out of the year Canastota is a sleepy little village in upstate New York. On the 52nd week it becomes the boxing capital of the universe, when fistic luminaries from around the world flock there for the annual induction weekend at the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
On Saturday, June 12th, less than 24 hours before the Class of 2010 would be installed, a local saloon called Graziano’s, located but a stone’s throw from the Boxing Museum, was jam-packed with a clientele that included half a dozen former world champion pugilists, but for two hours that day nobody was talking boxing. They were all busy watching ABC’s telecast of the US-England match, from which the Americans emerged victorious by a score of 1-1.
In that first week and a half of the tournament in South Africa viewership numbers were comparable with those of the ongoing basketball championship series between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics. In many precincts, including some in Southern California, the World Cup actually outdrew the NBA finals.
In 1994 the World Cup was contested for the first time on America soil, and the US got to the final 16 for the first time in history. That, and the inauguration of Major League Soccer two years later, were supposed to kick-start a soccer boom in which the sport would be elevated to the status it enjoys elsewhere around the globe. What we’re witnessing this summer may be the delayed pay-off, but one suspects it is slightly more complex than that.
Sixteen years ago – or 10 years ago, and maybe even five years ago – the hard-core television audience consisted almost entirely of three groups: (a) immigrants who had spent their formative years in soccer-worshiping countries, and their second-generation offspring (b) the parents of the millions of soccer-playing boys and girls, most of whom could be counted upon to give up the sport once they reached puberty, and (c) the hard-core couch-potato who could be relied upon to watch anything that popped up on his television screen as long as it was presented in the guise of sport, be it Aussie Rules, dwarf-tossing, or a soccer match from Lower Slobovia.
There has always been a certain xenophobic aspect to Americans’ sceptical view of soccer. Not only was soccer not part of our culture, but even when things were going well for Team USA, Middle America found it difficult to embrace a game in which our international goals were being scored by guys named Marcelo and Claudio and Alexi. This philosophy was not only abetted but encouraged in a country whose foreign policy consisted for the most part of showing the middle finger to the rest of the world.
To be sure, the cultural divide is still there, and perhaps more pronounced than ever. In the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, in fact, the most vocal anti-soccer rabble-rousing was promulgated by right-wing radio and television pundits.
Before the first ball had been kicked in South Africa, the FOX network’s Glenn Beck was already bellowing “We don’t want the World Cup, we don’t like the World Cup, we don’t like soccer, we want nothing to do with it.”
And Beck’s counterpart among radio talk-show hosts, the convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, moaned aloud: “Whatever happened to American exceptionalism?” Liddy went on to claim, inaccurately and somewhat absurdly, that “this game originated with the South American Indians and instead of a ball, they used to use the decapitated head of an enemy warrior.” At least Beck was forthright enough to admit, “I hate it so much, probably because the rest of the world likes it so much. They riot over it. They continually try to ram it down our throat.”
That this sort of tripe is being espoused by neo-Nazi nut jobs who spend most of their time whipping up anti-immigrant hysteria might in part explain the upturn in the sport’s popularity. If the likes of Beck and Liddy hate it this much, a sensible person might well conclude, soccer can’t be that bad.
The inclusive philosophy represented by the Obama administration probably has something to do with it as well. That Americans have been encouraged, possibly for the first time in a generation, to think of themselves as citizens of the world has produced an atmosphere conducive to tolerance, curiosity, and acceptance.
The notion that youth soccer and MLS would play a major role in spreading the sport’s gospel until very recently seemed a far-fetched, pie-in-the-sky proposition, but right now it can’t be easily dismissed. Every one of the four goals scored so far by the USA came from a trio of home-grown, American-born players (Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, and Michael Bradley) who cut their professional teeth in MLS play.
While America seems to have been suddenly seized by soccer mania, there should be a note of caution here. While South Africa 2010 has produced some of the highest ratings ever, none of them has come close to matching the record audience for the most-watched soccer game in American television history: That would have been the 1998 US-China final of the Women’s World Cup.
