While watching the ferocious action of a couple of World Cup games the other day, I found my mind drifting between goals. And in those six hours, I wondered what it would take for Americans to fall in love with soccer after all these years of raging indifference.
I remembered a conversation I once had with Lee Stern, owner of the late and great Sting team that brought such glory to the city of Chicago. Stern promised soccer would become the sport of the ’70s in the United States. He was so enthusiastic, even after admitting he might have jumped the gun, that he then revised his forecast. Soccer would become our sport of the ’80s.
Regrettably, I lost touch with Stern during the ’90s, but I feel confident that we are both thinking alike now. Soccer will surely be the sport of the ’00s.
Stern’s theory was sound, for it was based on the unassailable fact that so many of America’s children had begun playing soccer in schools and community leagues throughout the country. Stern reasoned that when those youngsters grew up and got their driver’s licenses, they would head directly to the nearest professional soccer game, wallets in hand.
In other words, the boys and girls participating in soccer would compose an entire generation of soccer fans for life.
“What I didn’t realize,” Stern rued, “was that those kids would get in their cars and go to the shopping malls instead.”
Shades of Jack Kent Cooke, who bought the Los Angeles Kings and figured he couldn’t miss with a million transplanted Canadians living in Southern California. When Cooke opened for business, what he saw were thousands of empty seats.
Concluded Cooke: “Now I know why all these people left Canada. They hate hockey.”
But after Cooke sold the Kings, Wayne Gretzky joined them, and the rest is history. Now hockey is hot in the Sun Belt. Florida got the NHL before major-league baseball, would you believe? Carolina is in the Stanley Cup finals, for goodness’ sakes.
Soccer fever also can overtake America, better late than never. Sports don’t have to be mainstream to succeed, as witnessed by the Fire, which is doing nicely in the suburbs, away from that dump Soldier Field. Sports don’t have to be major league, either. The Wolves won the American Hockey League championship, and you can see home games on TV or in person without taking out a second mortgage.
Besides, the bigger the games, the more they cultivate suspicion. Look at baseball, and its ongoing steroid controversy, or basketball, with all that conspiracy talk about how referees made sure the Los Angeles Lakers would reach the NBA Finals instead of the Sacramento Kings.
Soccer has its problems, on the international and local levels, but how do you accuse players of taking performance-enhancing drugs when nobody scores? You don’t test players for foreign substances. You want to test them for malnutrition. So many guys are always falling down. Maybe they’re hungry. The same goes for point shaving. When the final is 0-0, how can it be fixed? No gambler would pay both teams to dump the same game. Soccer seems clean to me.
Given Americans’ affinity for offense, however, I would offer one suggestion. Make every goal count for six points instead of one, just like football does with touchdowns. It will create the illusion that more is happening. I also would vote for a minor alteration regarding goalkeepers. They can’t use their hands either.
Enjoy. The Cubs can’t beat Milwaukee, but our soccer heroes beat Portugal 18-12. And they aren’t going on strike.
