For years, I have been collecting a file on this anti-soccer lobby. The person whose material mounts highest in my collection is the wildly popular radio shock jock Jim Rome. Rome arrived on the national scene in the mid-nineties and built an audience based on his self-congratulatory flouting of social norms. Rome has created his own subculture that has enraptured a broad swath of American males. They are united by their own vernacular, a Walter Winchell–like form of slang that Rome calls “smack,” derived in part from the African American street and in part from the fraternity house.
An important part of this subculture entails making fun of the people who aren’t members of it. Rome can be cruelly cutting to callers who don’t pass his muster, who talk the wrong kind of smack or freeze up on air.
These putdowns form a large chunk of his programs.
The topics of his rants include such far-ranging subject matter as the quackery of chiropractors, cheap seafood restaurants, and, above all, soccer.
Where specific events trigger most soccer hating—
a World Cup, news of hooligan catastrophes that arrive over the wires—Rome doesn’t need a proximate cause to break into a tirade. He lets randomly rip with invec-tive. “My son is not playing soccer. I will hand him ice skates and a shimmering sequined blouse before I hand him a soccer ball. Soccer is not a sport, does not need to be on my TV, and my son will not be playing it.” In moments of honesty, he more or less admits his illogic. “If it’s incredibly stupid and soccer is in any way related, then soccer must be the root cause [of the stupidity],” he said in one segment, where he attacked the sporting goods manufacturer Umbro for putting out a line of clothing called Zyklon, the same name as the Auschwitz gas. (Zyklon translates as cyclone. By his logic, the words “concentration” or “camp” should be purged from conversational English for their Holocaust associations.) He often inadvertently endorses some HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS
repulsive arguments. One segment ripped into African soccer teams for deploying witch doctors. “So you can add this to the laundry list of reasons why I hate soccer,” he frothed.
Such obvious flaws make it seem he is proud of his crassness, and that would be entirely in keeping with character. These arguments would be more easily dismissed were they the product of a single demented individual. But far smarter minds have devolved down to Rome’s level. Allen Barra, a sportswriter for the Wall Street Journal, is one of these smarter minds. Usually, Barra distinguishes himself from his colleagues by making especially rarified, sharp arguments that follow clearly from the facts and have evidence backing his provocative claims. But on soccer, he slips from his moorings. He writes, “Yes, OK, soccer is the most ‘popular’ game in the world. And rice is the most ‘popular’
food in the world. So what? Maybe other countries can’t a¤ord football, basketball and baseball leagues: maybe if they could a¤ord these other sports, they’d enjoy them even more.”
Unlike Rome, Barra has some sense of why he flies o¤ the handle on this subject. It has to do with his resentment of the game’s yuppie promoters. He
argues, “Americans are such suckers when it comes to something with a European label that many who have resisted thus far would give in to trendiness and push their kids into youth soccer programs.” And more than that, he worries that the soccer enthusiasts want the U.S. to “get with the rest of the world’s program.”
As Barra makes clear, the anti-soccer lobby really articulates the same fears as Eurico Miranda and Alan Garrison, a phobia of globalization. To understand their fears, it is important to note that both Barra and Rome are proud aficionados of baseball. The United States, with its unashamedly dynamic culture, doesn’t have too many deeply rooted, transgenerational traditions that it can claim as its own. Baseball is one of the few. That’s one reason why the game gets so much nostalgia-drenched celebration in Kevin Costner movies and Stephen Jay Gould books.
But Major League Baseball, let’s face it, has been a loser in globalization. Unlike the NBA or NFL, it hasn’t made the least attempt to market itself to a global audience. And the global audience has shown no hunger for the game. Because baseball has failed to master the global economy, it has been beat back by it. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association of America, the number of teens playing baseball fell 47
percent between 1987 and 2000. During that same period, youth soccer grew exponentially. By 2002, 1.3
million more kids played soccer than Little League.
And the demographic profile of baseball has grown ever more lily white. It has failed to draw African Americans and attracts few Latinos who didn’t grow up playing the game in the Caribbean. The change can also be registered in the ballot box that matters most.
Nielsen ratings show that, in most years, a World Series can no longer draw the same number of viewers as an inconsequential Monday night game in the NFL.
It’s not surprising that Americans should split like this over soccer. Globalization increasingly provides the subtext for the American cultural split. This isn’t to say America violently or even knowingly divides over glob-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE AMERICAN CULTURE WARS
alization. But after September 11 opened new debates over foreign policy, two camps in American politics have clearly emerged. One camp believes in the essential tenets of the globalization religion as preached by European politicians, that national governments should defer to institutions like the UN and WTO. These tend to be people who opposed the war in Iraq. And this opinion reflects a worldview. These Americans share cultural values with Europeans — an aggressive secularism, a more relaxed set of cultural mores that tolerates gays and pot smoking — which isn’t surprising, considering that these Americans have jobs and tourist interests that put them in
