Not Our Cup of Tea, by Arthur Tebbel – Pop Art #81
June 21, 2010 Arthur Tebbel 4 Comments
Dear Art,
I trust you are watching the fine soccer being played by our Men’s National Tean at the World Cup this year. After 20 years of building the modern soccer movement in this country it appears we are finally poised to make some noise this year. The problem we’re having is with some of the officiating. We had a potential game-winning goal called off in our match against Slovenia. Video replay has pretty much completely vindicated our team of any wrongdoing during that play. Don’t we have enough to worry about being taken seriously on an international level without playing against the referees as well? What can we do about this?
Sunil Gulati, President, United States Soccer Federation
Sunil,
Koman Couibaly, the referee who made the call is from Mali. I don’t know how much influence you have in these matters but the US should probably go to war with Mali. As a product of American schools I know absolutely nothing about African nations in general and certainly nothing about Mali (I had to use Wikipedia to confirm that Mali was not a country in south Asia). I now know that it’s a landlocked nation in northwest Africa. Sorry, a landlocked nation in northwest Africa that totally fucked us. It seems we have more justification for attacking them than we did to attack Iraq. I think it would even have a preemptive effect on other sporting events. Not to make any guarantees but if we fuck up Mali badly enough we should start making room for a lot more figure skating and gymnastics awards.
Your real problem though is that soccer will never catch on in the US as long as fans in this country are such fucking babies about everything. As near as I can tell all international sports are about getting hosed out of winning about 80% of the time. Other countries seem to have two responses to this, either they get over it and get back to their regular lives or they murder one of their own players and then get over it. The point is they get over it. Our national identity is entirely too focused on being the best at absolutely everything. Either we like this sport or we don’t but it shouldn’t be based on how good we are at winning.
More importantly you’ll never win. American tastes seem to have spoken on the matter. In 1999 the US Women’s National team won the World Cup after an exciting and dramatic shootout. 11 years later no one I know is still watching women’s soccer. We just don’t seem to have the stomach for it. Hell, in the culture-war-driven society we have today I would imagine a surge in popularity of soccer (to the level of baseball and football) would be me with cries of protest. The kind of people that are good at soccer are dirty socialists. Except for the North Koreans. They got creamed 7-0 by Portugal yesterday.
John Tebbel
June 22, 2010 - 9:29 am
The Road to Mali, Paramount Prodn. #39-1208–Faulkner (Revised)
Hope and Crosby are soccer bloggers who stow away in the undercarriage of the plane taking America’s team home from the World Cup. They fall out over Mali and are saved by the awning of a jungle tiki bar run by Dorothy Lamour. They help Sterling Holloway dig the Mali Canal that he’s designed to bring the ocean going trade to landlocked Mali. The boys compete for Lamour (Crosby gets her) while Holloway’s daughter carries a torch for Hope (there’s no electricity).
Songs include, “Road to Mali (The Vuvuzela Song),” “Gee, Doesn’t it Take a While to Plummet 40,000 Feet,” “Aren’t Tiki’s Polynesian?” and “You May be a Ditch-digger’s Daughter, but You Sure Can Plan a Man’s Canal.”
MOTU
June 22, 2010 - 10:49 pm
Soccer is truly the sport of the Thug Nation. You can be KILLED over a call like that in certain countries.
There are some things I’m willing to die for but a fucking ball game is not on my list.
John Tebbel
June 23, 2010 - 7:33 am
All televised sports should have unlimited, replay assisted appeals of calls made by officials. It’s actually a new profit-center, like closed-captions and named stadiums.
Vinnie Bartilucci
June 25, 2010 - 1:56 pm
Heck, let people decide the outcomes via text message voting. Give the mob something to do with their hands.
Here’s the deal – we already have lots of sports that we invented here, or changed sufficiently from other countries’ sports as to render then unrecognizable from the original. We don’t need some nasty foreign muck coming in and try to grab valuable TV time.
The World Cup is of interest to people because we (defined as “Our national team which we didn’t even know we had”) are doing well. Once they are eliminated, you will be able to stick your head out the window and actually hear the sound of America changing the channel, and actually feel the bandwidth on Twitter improve. If you were a paranoid individual, you’d swear the squeakers the USA team were having were carefully crafted to generate excitement.
But here’s the deal – if the US team wins, there will be about one day of “that’s cool” followed by deafening apathy. No one will be able to decide which city to have the celebratory parade in, because none will volunteer. President Obama will have a ceremony congratulating the team, and he will be chastised in the media for wasting time when there are so many other problems.
Of course, they do that when he spends to much time enjoying his lunch, so that’s not directly connected to the overwhelming disinterest with a sport that can’t even be bothered to change its name after we stole it from them.
About the only part we have adopted from Non-American-Football is the post-game rioting. We’re good at that. Though our targeting is poor. The foreign rioters usually tear down the stadiums – ours wait until they’ve left the stadiums and are back in their own neighborhoods. This is because we have more respect for the property of large corporations than we do in our own neighborhoods.