Sport For The Sake Of Sport
It’s World Cup time again, America. I know it’s hard to miss because you don’t really understand or like ‘soccer’– football to the other 95% of the world that could give a shit about Terrell Owens and Coors Light. But I do have a problem with the scant few moderately knowledgeable people that follow sporting events not authorized by ABC and the NFL—mainly because the vast majority of Americans lack the capacity to understand the spirit of the World Cup and instead lapse back into their partisan shells and decide to use the competition as some sort of springboard for their hackneyed agendas.
The politicization of sport has gone way too far. Every asshole who argued that Iran should be banned from the World Cup as a warning about the unacceptability of their nuclear ambitions should be fired out of a cannon into a brick wall suspended over a bed of nails. FIFA is not a god damn political organization, and neither is the Olympic Committee (thought they’ve tried to play the part before). These periodic international competitions are the world’s best chances to actually be brought together by the universality and utter neutrality of sport. You root for your team—you root against your team’s rivals—you root against whatever teams have the best chance of beating yours later on. Politics should play no part in the equation, and the pettiness shown by so many people (especially, I’m ashamed to say, Americans) utterly corrupts the beauty of the last major international sporting competition not completely overrun by commercialization.
80,000 German fans boo when Argentina subs Cambiasso for Riquelme in the 71st minute because they know a fresh defensive midfielder that late in the game doesn’t bode well for their team. Americans belie the fact that they know very little about soccer and even less about the true spirit of competition by saying ‘Gawd, France won? I hate France and I hope they lose!’…… What? Can you really be serious? France (the World Cup team) made the semi-finals and you hate France (their government’s stances and their ‘innate’ arrogance) so you hope France (the athletes that have nothing to do with any of that stuff) lose? Isn’t that along the same lines as saying ‘I hate the economic policies of the industrial West so I will kidnap and murder their humanitarian aid-workers’? For fuck’s sake people, confine your petty squabbling to the appropriate venue.
So Americans root against the Mexican team over immigration (because the better they do, the more Mexicans feel compelled to immigrate???), against France ostensibly over the thrashing they took in our press over their non-support of ‘Operation Iraqi Quagmire’, and against Iran because that’s the nation taking up most of the attention of our national press at the moment. But then Mexico plays Iran and flawed logic hits the fan because instead of thinking ‘which team will improve our chances of advancing?’ we’re stuck with ‘Uh oh, I can either root for illegal immigration or nuclear armament’. But maybe that’s predictable– Americans are notoriously uncompromising when it comes to their ‘ideals’, and having no knowledge of these teams or nations outside of vague political stances, it makes sense that they prefer to transfer the policies of governments nearly as bumbling and untrustworthy as their own onto the athletes of other countries. For many Americans the World Cup is not even about sport—it’s about that same errant string of patriotism that allows us to spend 1.5 billion dollars a week to have a 200,000 man camp-out in the desert (imagine all the marshmallows) while children’s eyes are disintegrating in central Africa from unclean water and countless blessed, holy, white Americans will go without food tonight.
If you’re worried about political issues, go vote. Elect politicians who will actually address your concerns in a constructive and non-reactionary way. But leave it out of international competition. The World Cup is one of the last bastions of sport for the sake of pride and sport, still immune (more or less) to the blatant commercialization that mars every homegrown athletic competition—no commercial breaks, no trading or buying players like cattle, and even a semblance of sportsmanship when an Italian player goes down and the Ukranians, behind by 3 goals, kick the ball out to give Italy a chance to collect their injured man. And best of all, no politics— do you think Portugal gives a shit about British policies when the game ends and they exchange jerseys and hug in the middle of the field like brothers? This is a real chance for international dialogue and unification— until the undiscerning eye of the venture capitalist sweeps across the competition and decides that every nation with a welfare state deserves to lose.
By all means America, get interested, get involved, call it football and root for your team— but if one more mother fucker bags on Zinedine Zidane for being a ‘cigarette-smoking, wine-swilling surrender-monkey’ I’m going to take a machete to their face.
And oh yeah, VIVA ITALIA!!!!
Adam