Helping America Love Soccer

By Jim Bennett
Daily Review Atlas

Let’s face it: Soccer is a flop here. The pastime the rest of the world lives for is about as popular with Americans as Helen Thomas is with the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.

The Yankee yawn of indifference toward soccer mystifies all other nations. The typical European, Asian or Latin American sports enthusiast behaves as if the World Cup consists of one team curing cancer while the other team captures and exhibits a live Sasquatch. Yet if you were to judge the game based on the apathetic response it receives stateside, you’d think it was just some guys kicking a ball around.

What accounts for this domestic disinterest? The prevailing wisdom asserts that our collective psychological marketplace for amusements is finite; since baseball, basketball and football have filled up most of the space available for sports, there is very little room left for soccer. I don’t buy that. The popularity of “Jersey Shore” and “Glee” categorically proves that we, as a people, have no cultural gag-reflex when it comes to what we’re willing to consume as entertainment.

Another theory holds that soccer’s pace makes it too boring for attention-deficient Americans. Nah. One of our fastest growing spectator sports is three hours of watching a clump of cars circling a track.

Recently, though, I heard the least-credible theory of all. Some wit declared that soccer is a non-starter here because violent hooliganism abroad has left us with a bad impression of fútbol.
Well, that’s just crazy-talk! Who loves sports-related riots more than the people of this great republic?

Fans in the USA don’t even need a heartbreaking loss or a bad call to trigger mayhem; a joyous victory for the home team is every bit as likely to release the Kraken. The Lakers’ championship win this month touched off celebratory rioting in L.A. that was as bad as, well, the rioting after the Lakers’ championship win last year.

Celebrating a big win by making the hometown play Tina to their Ike has become tradition among U.S. sports mobs. Tigers votaries gave Motown the arson-and-rioting equivalent of an atomic wedgie after Detroit claimed the Commissioner’s Trophy in ’84. Following the Broncos’ Super Bowl XXXII win, Denver fans made the Mile-High City look like it had just been shot by the Death Star. And six years ago, as Red Sox supporters enjoyed the kind of triumph they hadn’t seen since the great World Series victory of 1918, they rejoiced by subjecting Beantown to the kind of destruction it hadn’t seen since the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy of 1919.

Which is not to say, of course, that a loss can’t stir things up too. Remember those mischievous imps from Michigan State University who, in 1999, registered their displeasure with the Spartans’ Final Four defeat by reducing the entire Lower Peninsula to a smoldering heap of post-apocalyptic rubble? Granted, they didn’t rack up double-digit and triple-digit body counts like the Brits in Belgium back in ’85 or the 2001 African riots, but those loveable MSU scamps did beat up a Taco Bell.

Truthfully, I have no idea why soccer is so unpopular here. I know nothing about sports. For most of my life, there hasn’t been a single game that I enjoyed playing, let alone watching.

Recently, however, something amazing happened: I am now hopelessly and obsessively in love with a sport! I’m referring to that noblest of all diversions, bowling. And if that can happen to me, then coaxing this country into an infatuation with soccer will be a snap.

In fact, it’s literally as easy as the press of a button.

You see, not long ago I reluctantly went to a bowling alley with a friend, and as I was preparing to seethe, cringe and loathe, I noticed a little white button on the scorekeeper’s table.

“What’s that for?” I asked, pointing.

“Oh, this?” my friend said. He pressed it.

Approximately twenty seconds later a woman with a notepad approached him. They had a brief conversation and she left. Ten minutes later she returned, carrying a tray that held Jell-O, curly fries, corn dogs and Pepsi.

I was sold. In that instant, I became a ten-pin zealot forever.

So, if they’re serious about popularizing soccer in the USA, it begins and ends with installing those magical waitress-summoning buttons in every seat at every arena in the country. Do this, and mark my words: Overnight, the American people will be saying to soccer what I now say to bowling:

“You had me at Jell-O.”

Jim Bennett is the pastor of Rozetta Baptist Church in rural Henderson County.

Copyright 2010 Daily Review Atlas. Some rights reserved

“FWD: Don’t Be a Dope”

I believe that few things have drained more credibility from the evangelical community than the willingness of some of us to jump on any bandwagon that comes down the pike, just so long as it hits our e-mail inboxes with “FWD:” in the subject line. While I strongly disagree with the media’s portrayal of all theologically conservative believers as provincial rubes, I must admit that I feel like I’m swimming against a current of Christian fingers that are clicking “send” faster than a deacon dashing for the dessert table at a potluck.

When I was growing up, if you wanted to start an urban legend that duped large numbers of people, you had to do it the old fashioned way — word of mouth. How did a generation of Americans unquestionably accept the notion that mixing Pop Rocks and Pepsi caused a lethal atomic mushroom cloud to burst from the belly of Mikey, the kid from the cereal commercial? Word of mouth. Back in my day, you sassy little jackanapes, we didn’t have Outlook Express! 

How did the news get around that Proctor & Gamble’s “Man in the Moon” symbol was a satanic emblem, personally confirmed by P & G’s CEO himself, when he appeared on the Phil Donahue show to sacrifice a goat and predict the future by gazing into its entrails? We didn’t have your fancy Blackberry textification phone e-mail dealies! We had to do it the old-fashioned way: Word of mouth! We had to concoct a bizarre chain of relationships linking us directly to the source: “My cousin dates a girl whose sister’s roommate was maid of honor at the wedding of the manicurist who does Marlo Thomas’s nails, and Marlo Thomas told her that Phil Donahue himself says Crest is the only toothpaste Beelzebub will use.”

And in my day, how do you suppose we nearly killed the travel industry? Why, it was with dramatic accounts of drugged tourists waking up in ice-filled hotel bathtubs, only to realize that black-market organ brokers had not only harvested their kidneys, but had also racked up over 75 dollars in mini-bar charges! And we didn’t have us any of those new-fangled, dot-com, rumor-mongerin’ Web sites you young punks use! It took years of verbally repeating the same unfounded, ridiculous tall tales, over and over again, with diehard conviction! Word of mouth, I say!

In 1999, I first witnessed how easily and powerfully an e-mail hoax can trigger a torrent of evangelical fury. I was working as the news director of a Christian radio station in Blue Earth, Minn., and my inbox was suddenly filled by dozens of desperate listeners, each begging me to alert church-goers everywhere that the only decent television show since Michael Landon died – “Touched by an Angel” – was about to be cancelled because atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair had filed “Petition 2493” with the FCC, calling for an end to all T.V. shows that mention God. Of course, this was an old urban legend, dating back to the mid-1970’s, so I double-checked with an FCC spokesman and then ran a news story debunking the rumor. One woman called me to say she was going to start a petition anyway, “just to be on the safe side.” (Incidentally, “Touched by an Angel” was, in fact, cancelled in 2003. However, the show wasn’t killed by the legal machinations of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, but rather by the titanic overacting of Della Reese.)

Since then, I’ve seen dozens of celebrity conversion whoppers: “Steve Irwin answered an altar call two weeks before that sting ray killed him. In fact, he was witnessing to the creature when it attacked.”

I’ve seen far too many sentimental charity rip-offs. Most recently, there was Rebeccah Beushausen, whose blog featured tearjerker pictures of “April Rose,” her disabled daughter. Well-meaning Christians started sending money and gifts. Later it was revealed that “April Rose” was actually a lifelike “Reborn Doll” whose only disability was “batteries not included.” 

And of course, there’s the passionate “Onward Christian Soldiers” call-to-arms. I recently received another breathless warning about that old chestnut Petition 2493, this time it had been updated with names like Dr. James Dobson.

I know we need to be salt and light, but may I suggest checking the story out before forwarding it? Try consulting the archives at Snopes.com – that’s a good place to start. Jesus said in Matthew 10:16: “Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

I’m glad we settled that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to e-mail my bank account information to the widow of Nigeria’s former treasury secretary so she and I can divide the seven million American dollars her late husband deposited in a Grand Cayman off-shore bank account.