The Day After Heartbreak.

It’s Friday the 13th at 12:30 and Outcast’s “B.O.B.” from their Stankonia album is pumping through my miniscule two inch speakers while a soccer match between France and the Netherlands is glowing on the television over my left shoulder. As I type this I’m yawning regularly with a notebook full of notes on Lauryn Hill’s Miseducation of Lauryn Hill album and a white mug full of cranberry juice on my desk/table in the kitchen of my studio. I had originally planned on writing about The Miseducation, but I can’t bring myself to do it after last night’s second half collapse – something I’m not going to be able to bring myself to write about today either – lets just say that I wanted to throw a bottle at the big screen in the bar I watched the game at yesterday.

I woke up this morning (after falling asleep around 2am) around 7:30 and clicked on the local news, knowing turning to ESPN like I normally would after my routine pilgrimage to the toilet following waking up would just put a cloud over the rest of my day. I couldn’t resist, though. I picked up the remote, punched in the number 26 and watched about 12 seconds of baseball highlights before the pundits talked about how terribly the Lakers played in the second half of Game 4 (I said after Game 1 that the third quarter would ruin the Lakers, best call I’ve ever made). I couldn’t handle it. I turned immediately. One channel up, 27 if you will, was ESPN2, pre-game coverage of the first European Soccer League (doubt that’s what the league is actually called) game of the day. I really can’t stand soccer, so I got up and played Lauryn Hill’s classic for the umpteenth time while I whipped up some breakfast. As I ate, I listened. After I finished, I listened. When I listened to the last word on “Tell Him,” the last song on the album, I listened to the whole thing again. The second time I listened to The Miseducation, I sat on my couch, notebook in lab, pen in hand, television on mute.

I listened and wrote all of my arguments about why The Miseducation matters, and as I finished up some final thoughts before I got over to my computer I looked up and the France-Netherlands game was on. I watched for a couple of seconds, music still playing in the background, and thought “I could never watch this on the regular.” However, two minutes passed. Three. Four. Five. Ten. Twenty. Before I realized, I had been watching this game for about 30 minutes – and nothing happened! I’m not going to say that I wasted 30 minutes of my life watching that game, because it inspired what I’m writing now (who would have known soccer would have been a muse!) and I’ve done much worse with other 30 minute periods of my life – much worse. Anyway, as I sat there watching this 1-0 game going into the 45th minute (note: the score was 1-0 before I started watching) I began to realize why soccer (or hockey) will never be accepted in the US like football, baseball and (sigh) basketball.

There are three fundamental flaws that are the reason for why both soccer and hockey will never be widely accepted by Americans. The reasons are, in no particular order of importance:

1. The lack of a defining play (i.e. a touchdown)
2. The lack of star power (i.e. Michael Jordan)
3. The way the games are filmed

What makes this worse is the fact that all three of the listed factors are all interrelated, you have to change all three if you want to change one, which is why hockey and soccer have always been, are now, and will always be niche sports, and they’ll never find a niche larger than either football, baseball or basketball in the states. Let me explain why this is.

With soccer and hockey, you have low scoring games, and when the athletes of the sport score, it’s a goal. That’s it. They scored a goal and that goal is celebrated. I’m not saying that I have a problem with celebrating after every time someone scores, because it happens in football and baseball too (and basketball if you want to count Ronny Turiaf), but when you score in soccer or hockey, it’s just a goal. There is no defining play in either sport that makes the game more interesting to watch. Other sports can be just as slow as soccer and hockey, but there is a defining play in each of the three major sports that fans can look forward to. In football there is the touchdown, in baseball there is the homerun, and in basketball there is the slam dunk (please keep in mind that I’m talking about the most basic fans possible because I’d kill myself before I just sat around waiting for slam dunks and homeruns, there is way more to the game than just that, but I digress). In soccer and hockey, what else is there? There is nothing less exciting than waiting 20 minutes for a goal. Granted, I know a homerun, if no one is on base, only gets you one point, and I understand that you can wait just as long in baseball for a run to be scored, but there are myriad ways for points to be scored in baseball. Same goes for basketball, there isn’t just a slam dunk and there aren’t just touchdowns in football. The variety in scoring is what separates the three majors from the other two. Two hours of touchdowns (both rushing and passing), field goals, and safety’s is going to win over two hours of goals every day of the week, or at least every Sunday.

These defining plays, in turn create stardom. If you placed 25 million dollars on a table in front of me and asked me to name five current professional hockey players, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I would lose out on that 25 million dollars. The same goes with international soccer players, hell, I couldn’t name a soccer player, in whatever the US soccer league is called, outside of David Beckham – and I probably wouldn’t even know that if he wasn’t on Snoop Dogg’s fatherhood show that one time. Americans do not want to watch sports when they can’t identify with the players in the league. I know Sidney Crosby is supposedly a beast on the ice, but his team, the Penguins, lost to the Red Wings, and I couldn’t name one player from Detroit’s hockey team. Shit, after the Stanley Cup Finals, one of the hockey analysts said on of the Red Wings’ players might be the greatest of all time – that’s right, even better than Wayne Gretzky (I can’t believe I spelled that right the first time)! How can you gain fans of your league when the average sports fan can’t even name a guy who is potentially the greatest to ever play the sport? American’s need the Joe Montanas, the Michael Jordans and the Ken Griffey Jrs of the world to stay interested. Moreover, they need more than just one great player because Americans love to debate about things like this.

You need the defining plays to create these stars, because it is the stars who are going to make these defining plays, which in turn generates legend and fan interest. No defining play, no stars, no fan interest. No touchdowns, no Jerry Rice, no football fans. It’s as simple as that. Goals; period. There is no star between goals and fan interest in soccer because there is no defining play to create the star, hence the lack of fan interest. Soccer and hockey will forever remain niche sports because they’re the kind of sports you have to play to appreciate. I’m sure if my father gave me a pair of shin pads instead of a bat and glove when I was five years old I’d have a better appreciation of the game because I would have played it. But since I don’t know about all of the work put into preparing for a single game or even a season, since I don’t know about the nuances of placing forwards and defenders on certain spots on the field I’ll never fully appreciate soccer the way all of the middle class blonde girls who played AYSO together for nine years in from your fourth grade class would. Fans who never played soccer could never appreciate a goal in the 32nd minute the way fans who never stepped on a football field could appreciate a touchdown or fans who never stepped on a baseball field could appreciate a homerun – or a dunk in basketball. It’s more exciting than the infrequent, bland goals of soccer and hockey, which brings us to this: the way soccer and hockey are filmed is just as bland as the way points are scored.

There aren’t too many differences between the way football, basketball, soccer and hockey are filmed, but there are a couple of minor variations that make a huge difference in terms of viewer tolerance. Let me explain. The main camera view in all four sports is an aerial view of the stadium/arena allowing you to see as much of the action as possible, and there is nothing wrong with this, but this is the only view soccer and hockey uses. We rarely learn anything about the personalities of the players during the course of a hockey game, and it’s even worse in soccer matches. During football games, when a team breaks out of a huddle you have close ups on the quarterbacks as the walk up to the line. I love watching Peyton Manning walking up the line of scrimmage with nothing but intensity in his face as he points at Ray Lewis and the weak side safety while licking his fingers for no reason. I know he’s definitely into this game. When the play gets going, the camera focuses on where the ball is going, and after plays you get close up on the player who handled the ball or the defender who made the play. The same kind of things happen in basketball. I love it when camera man 3 zooms in on Baron Davis after he yells with nothing but passion after he shits (dunks) on Andrei Kirilinko. I love watching Richard Hamilton take three regular dribbles, then one to the side of his body before he knocks down a free throw. We learn little mannerisms about each players personality while they have their 5-20 seconds of individual air time, and this is something you only get in soccer or hockey after goals or scored, and that doesn’t happen enough in either sport for us to really have the time to relate with any of the individual players.

Baseball has gone about filming their games a completely different way, and it’s something soccer or hockey would never be able to use because of the way the games are played. Some people argue that baseball is boring, but you get to learn so much about every player who plays in each game because of all of the down time, which makes for an interesting watch every time. You’ll have a batter come up to the plate, and the announcer will tell a quick anecdote about said player while his stats are shown in the graphic at the bottom of the page. We learn about the pitchers throughout the games, we learn about the history of the game, the history of each individual team – and we get to see homeruns too! You can learn more about a star player in the MLB in a week than you’d ever learn about one in either soccer or hockey in a whole season because he’s going to get anywhere from 3-5 at bats per game and play anywhere from 3-6 games in a week, so that’s potentially 30 different anecdotes about that individual player. You can get that kind of information about an athlete while watching golf or tennis – which have more stars and are filmed way better than hockey or soccer ever will – and those two sports are more accepted in the US more than soccer and hockey are too.

Sorry if you happen to be a fan of either soccer or hockey, but it’s the truth. Maybe you should have grown up playing a better sport. I just had to spend some time bashing something after that loss last night. I have some pretty hilarious stories from the night though, I’ll find some time to tell you guys sometime in the next week, lets just say Davion and I were dying all night. That’s all for the day though. I’ll get back at you guys tomorrow.

Stay Hideous
-PB

(Word count to date: 10,790
93 days and 89,210 words to go)