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Jun 11 2010 ∞
katiepenny wrote: LOTS OF BLASPHEMY I, too, am sort of fascinated by why you damned yanks hate football (Not soccer. ‘Soccer’ is what I do when the barmaid tells me I have had too much to drink). I had always assumed that it was because you were too busy manifesting your destiny all over ethnic minorities and making up your own silly games to spend time losing at the ones the rest of the world plays, but apparently there is more to it than that, so I have put down my glass of gin for just long enough to explain to you in a condescending manner why the beatiful game is the greatest sport on the planet, and why all Americans should love it. Football is a game of passion, you can’t get good just by using the traditional US problem-solving tactic of throwing money around. Look at England, they have the most lucrative and high-standard domestic league on the planet and they haven’t won squat in nearly half a century. Calling football slow is missing the point. A game of football is constant movement for 90 minutes, with play only stopping at half time (and for injuries. And free-kicks. And throw-ins. And goal kicks, and corners, and the referee falling over, and naked people running on to the pitch). One can only assume that the average American prefers spending three hours watching brief flurries of activity followed by endless jumbo-tron replays and T.V. time-outs because the breaks give them a chance to buy more beer from the roving vendors. Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound so bad…  Nike may not be able to convince Americans to go to the World Cup, but if McDonalds started offering a football-shaped burger that came with a chance to win a V8 pickup truck to anyone who bought a ticket there would be a stampede. Football, much like real life, is often bitterly dissapointing, which is probably why the British like it so much. Often, a team will strive and outplay their opponents for a whole match, but still wind up losers due to bad luck or pure chance, and SO IT SHOULD BE! Life is not some Horatio Alger novel where hard graft and ingenuity is always rewarded with success; life is brutal, cruel, and unfair, and sports should reflect this. You say ‘football players are too thin for my tastes’, I hear ‘I like fat guys’. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to… There are things to be said for gridiron. (Yeah, I called it gridiron. You going to make something of it? Didn’t think so.) I would compare a great American Football team to a great performing seal at an aquatic theme park: it requires months of slow and careful training in order to do something spectacularly improbable for about five seconds, and then needs plenty of time to recover and snack before doing it again. At this point I think the rest of the world is pretty glad that the USA doesn’t give a rat’s about the World Cup, it gives us other countries a chance to have a party together without having to worry about America showing up drunk and invading someone.

katiepenny wrote:

LOTS OF BLASPHEMY

I, too, am sort of fascinated by why you damned yanks hate football (Not soccer. ‘Soccer’ is what I do when the barmaid tells me I have had too much to drink). I had always assumed that it was because you were too busy manifesting your destiny all over ethnic minorities and making up your own silly games to spend time losing at the ones the rest of the world plays, but apparently there is more to it than that, so I have put down my glass of gin for just long enough to explain to you in a condescending manner why the beatiful game is the greatest sport on the planet, and why all Americans should love it.

  1. Football is a game of passion, you can’t get good just by using the traditional US problem-solving tactic of throwing money around. Look at England, they have the most lucrative and high-standard domestic league on the planet and they haven’t won squat in nearly half a century.
  2. Calling football slow is missing the point. A game of football is constant movement for 90 minutes, with play only stopping at half time (and for injuries. And free-kicks. And throw-ins. And goal kicks, and corners, and the referee falling over, and naked people running on to the pitch). One can only assume that the average American prefers spending three hours watching brief flurries of activity followed by endless jumbo-tron replays and T.V. time-outs because the breaks give them a chance to buy more beer from the roving vendors. Come to think of it, that doesn’t sound so bad… 
  3. Nike may not be able to convince Americans to go to the World Cup, but if McDonalds started offering a football-shaped burger that came with a chance to win a V8 pickup truck to anyone who bought a ticket there would be a stampede.
  4. Football, much like real life, is often bitterly dissapointing, which is probably why the British like it so much. Often, a team will strive and outplay their opponents for a whole match, but still wind up losers due to bad luck or pure chance, and SO IT SHOULD BE! Life is not some Horatio Alger novel where hard graft and ingenuity is always rewarded with success; life is brutal, cruel, and unfair, and sports should reflect this.
  5. You say ‘football players are too thin for my tastes’, I hear ‘I like fat guys’. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to…
  6. There are things to be said for gridiron. (Yeah, I called it gridiron. You going to make something of it? Didn’t think so.) I would compare a great American Football team to a great performing seal at an aquatic theme park: it requires months of slow and careful training in order to do something spectacularly improbable for about five seconds, and then needs plenty of time to recover and snack before doing it again.
  7. At this point I think the rest of the world is pretty glad that the USA doesn’t give a rat’s about the World Cup, it gives us other countries a chance to have a party together without having to worry about America showing up drunk and invading someone.

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