It Is Not Football

Sunday night I was watching a network I find myself rarely viewing any more, certainly far less than in years past.  That would be ESPN, the sports network that essentially started sports networks many years ago.

I rarely watch them because my taste in sports, no less now than in past years, runs to the following of my particular teams -- the Red Sox in baseball and the Capitals in hockey.  In both cases, their games are broadcast by regional sports networks, leaving me no reason to watch ESPN.  ESPN has Monday Night Football, but unless a team I care about is playing, their late game starts (I live in the Eastern Time Zone) simply make watching them fruitless.  I'm not going to stay up that late.

But Sunday night featured a game between the Red Sox and Yankees, and I certainly was going to see that one (the Sox won behind a bunch of homers and a strikingly good complete game by unheralded knuckleballer Steven Wright).  So ESPN it was.

Now, I don't have a great antipathy toward ESPN.  Yes, they are owned by the Disney people, the same folks who own ABC and try to tell us that George Stephanopoulos is an unbiased journalist.  and yes, their dismissal of Curt Schilling for questioning bathroom laws was pretty much beyond the pale.  But it isn't going to prevent me from actually watching something on ESPN that I want to see.

So there I am, watching the game.  As you surely know, there is this thing that used to be called the "crawl", and may still be.  The "crawl" is the accounting of scores and news that creeps across the bottom of the screen during a broadcast.  In the case of ESPN, the crawl is nearly constant, and even the casual viewer quickly gets used to its presence.

Baseball, as we know, is a leisurely-paced game.  Between pitches, one's gaze naturally may drift a tad lower to where we look at the crawl and actually notice what is there.  And Sunday night, I found some surprisingly frequent things there.

I can't quote them verbatim, nor do I really need to.  Suffice it to say that that there were not only scores, but news about two leagues that I wouldn't have thought that enough people would care about to be worth the time.  The first was the "English Premier League."  The second was "La Liga Mexicana" or something like that -- my Spanish is as good as it ever was, which means "awful."

I didn't think anyone would really care all that much, for two reasons.  First, obviously those leagues are not in the U.S., or even Canada.  One is across the ocean, and the other in a place where they don't speak English.  The second is more obvious -- it's soccer -- and Americans just don't watch soccer.

Now, Americans play soccer.  I used to play soccer as often as I could.  It's a great game to play and a lot of fun.  I played in North Carolina (in goal) as a student, and I played in Virginia in my thirties.  I was a wing then, and actually scored a few goals, even though there were a lot better players than I.  OK, they mostly all were better.  Don't get me wrong; I like soccer.

But watching soccer, well, that's a whole 'nother thing.  Soccer on TV is about as dull as a Hillary Clinton speech.  The ball goes this way, the ball goes that way.  Every two and a half hours or so, someone scores a goal, an announcer screams and mad foreigners run around the field celebrating.  Players take dives about as often as they do in the NBA (which I also don't watch).  The rest of the time, the ball goes this way and the ball goes that way.

Here's the thing.  This wasn't about watching soccer on TV; this was ESPN feeling the need to show scores and even injury news (not kidding) about these leagues as often as they showed the scores of other baseball games and the NBA and NHL.  Which, by the way, are different from foreign soccer in that they are (A) American and (B) cared about by people watching the ball game in progress.

Baseball, as I mentioned, has a leisurely pace to it.  That gave me the opportunity to ponder just why ESPN thought it worthy to scroll the results and scoring and injury reports from foreign soccer leagues.  And I came up with the logical answer.

No, people here don't care about foreign soccer.  But ESPN wants us to care.  "Sure", you're thinking, "it's because they actually broadcast those leagues and need to puff up interest."  Well, that may be true.  I don't even know if ESPN does broadcast foreign soccer matches.  I wouldn't know because, like most Americans, I don't care and I am not going to watch it.

But more than that, I suspect, is that ESPN, as a card-carrying entity of the American left, is legitimately into that whole globalization thing, the one that says that if it's loved by others but not by Americans, we're the ones who are wrong.  Soccer may be boring as heck, but they love it overseas in those countries that aren't doing as well as we are, so we need to be made to love it.

I'm serious.  They surely love it over there; they get pretty riled up at those matches.  But that doesn't mean that Americans can, or should, be any more interested than we are.  And it certainly is not up to ESPN to keep trying to shove it down our throat.  OK, if they broadcast it, I guess it is.

But here's the thing.  Every four years (is it four?) they play the World Cup, soccer's biggest tournament.  The USA men's team generally is a part of it and generally does OK but not well enough.  Then, we watch.  It's still dull, but it's the USA.  The women have a World Cup too, and the USA women win that sometimes.  Fewer people watch, but some do.

And then comes the gloom, as far as soccer goes.  We keep thinking, particularly after the men advance further than expected in the World Cup, that Americans are finally going to start watching soccer.  And within a couple months, we're right back to nobody watching soccer in the USA until the next World Cup.  It is a fruitless cycle that recurs every four years (it is four, right?).

It can't be just me.  Soccer is a game for Americans to play, but not watch.  It is now and ever shall be, even if ESPN and the foreign-obsessed American left try otherwise.

Amen.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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