American Smorgasbord (Oxymoron Project)

(This essay is a WIP in regards to being the introduction to the book Oxymoron.)

I never realized how unpatriotic I was growing up; I was a Little League Baseball All-Star, a state level junior bowler, and a white kid raised in suburbia by parents that are still married and live in the same house I was brought home to.

I vote. Always.

I had a paper route in 6th grade.

I registered for the draft and to vote on my 18th birthday. Thanks, Bob.

There is an American flag that flew over the US Capitol in my living room.

I regularly attend 4th of July parades and fireworks displays.

On more than one occasion I have been to Disneyland.

In my travels I have been to and seen the Little Big Horn, the Hollywood sign, Ground Zero, Alcatraz, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the grassy knoll, and ridden in a San Francisco street car.

My library card is in my wallet.

Opening day of baseball season should be a national holiday.

I have sent Christmas cards and wedding invitations to the White House.

Still, I am apparently not American enough for some people.

"Soccer?!" He said, "Leave that f*(#ing game to the Europeans." This comment came in the Summer of 2009 in Seattle at a punk show I was attending. The implications of his comment were not lost on me and felt much like the sentiment of New York newspaper writer Dick Young, who once described it as a game for "commie pansies".

I knew people who didn't like or follow the game. The indifference of some of my friends when I went to the World Cup was noted. I noticed all the soccer haters in the sports media. I had watched the Pele press conference scene in Once In A Lifetime. But, I had never been treated like a treasonous bastard for being a soccer fan before.

All my friends played soccer growing up. When I was little the NASL, Pele, and the Seattle Sounders were all the rage in town. I never experienced the direct anti-Americanism because it wasn't in my sphere of normal before becoming an adult and facing it. Much like everyone every where assumes that their normal is the normal, so did I. When we went on road trips to Vancouver, BC and Portland, OR in 1977 to watch the Sounders play in the playoffs and in the Soccer Bowl, that was my earliest real hard core fan experiences. The crowds came to the Kingdome and we had season tickets. Canadian Exchange programs with my youth soccer teams occurred basically every year. I just thought that the was the way things were. When your first big sporting event is a large crowd in the Kingdome to see the Sounders in 1976 and you are still 8 years old, that sticks with you.

In many countries soccer is the sport. It is not simply the biggest sport, it is often the only sport played. This is not true in all instances, even Brazil and England have other thriving sports like volleyball or rugby, but the outside perception is that those parts of the world are soccer-centric and the US of A is a sports hodgepodge. In many third world countries the importance of soccer to the nation is staggering and even these smaller leagues draw throngs of passionate fans to some very scary stadiums.

The US of A has many major sports; along with major college sports that rival the pros in some areas, and a massive network of minor sports, niche sports, and fad sports. It is and has always been okay to be a huge minor league fan, or into tennis, or to prefer college over pros, but being a soccer fan has always been a bit unseemly and prone to the wrath of sportswriters. I have a good friend totally into NASCAR and another who pretty much loathes professionalism, those things are both okay.

Despite this American Smorgasbord, Soccer was specifically targeted as Un-American.

Some of this is actually self inflicted.

Soccer fans, myself included, are often extraordinarily self righteous about soccer. Really, we are. Stop laughing.

Some of this is the remnant of the Great Depression. Really. Prior to the 1930s there were strong and thriving soccer leagues drawing large crowds and having players poached by English and Scottish teams. Our semifinal appearance in the 1930 World Cup was not really a huge surprise at the time in that sense. Once the Depression hit however, many immigrant families feared a backlash and turned their attentions to what are now the major sports like baseball, killing those leagues and in a sense adding fuel to the fire. That may sound like blaming the victim, but it really didn't help.

But, most of this is that US sportswriters and fans didn't like a sport Americans did not dominate. We, as Americans, love the sports we have created above all else. The World Series is played here. The World Cup involves everyone else. We have tended to like it that way. These things are now changing as the world has shrunk and American cultural isolationism is not what it once was. It doesn't hurt that the US now routinely qualifies for the World Cup, that there is a good league in MLS, and that there is now soccer infrastructure in the form of Soccer Specific Stadiums.

There are soccer fans in the US that now can follow world soccer on a daily basis due to cable and Internet. Those fans that only follow the games abroad, as opposed to following them as an augment to American teams are referred to as Eurosnobs. To me, being a Eurosnob is the same as being a fan of the Lakers or Yankees Cowboys when you live somewhere else and have no connection to LA or New York or Dallas other than liking the glamour of the teams. Let's face it, in the cable and Internet era, an argument can be made that if you never go to games in person where a team is actually from really ceases to matter. Other than local radio or news coverage, one team is the same as any other regardless of location. To me that is silly, since I go to games, but on an intellectual level I have to confess that it does make some sense, even if only to justify my own Liverpool fandom. Where issue is taken with the Euro snobbery is where it turns it back on American soccer, as I believe the core of support comes from being in tune with your local team.

Oxymoron is my look at the changing landscape of American sporting culture over the last few decades from the perspective of an American fan caught up in the whirl wind. Using the arrival of Pele as a general starting point and the arrival of Beckham as an ending point is both accurate and convenient, since it coincides with my sporting life and personal soccer journey. The irony of using the arrival of two foreign stars is not lost on me.

This is not my autobiography, although that will certainly partially be true in a soccer sense as it is the autobiography of a soccer fan embedded in my life experiences. Given that my life experiences have not included everything about American soccer in person, there are built in limitations. I have attended a number of major and significant soccer events related to American soccer over the decades. My experiences represent virtually all aspects of the changes in American soccer over the decades covered. I hope some of the experiences are interesting. But, limitations are a part of the fan journey as we don't always get to be there. I have striven for factual accuracy and done years of library and Internet research to get the dates, places, names, and scores correct. I have gathered media guides and read old programs and soccer periodicals and gone through my own ridiculous collection of ticket stubs to verify my own attendance at certain events.

I have had an odd journey as a soccer fan. I remember walking into the Kingdome for the NASL Sounders opener in 1976 at 8 and being a part of a similar sized crowd at Qwest Field (same site, different building) I was a part of at the MLS Sounders opener in 2009 when I was 41. However, in between things have not been exactly consistent.

Oh, and Commie Pansies have never won a World Cup, actually.