American Sport
Like many a Ruster I was fast asleep by the time the Super Bowl began. I heard that the 51st Super Bowl was the greatest ever and the first to be determined in over time so I followed late in the afternoon yesterday the highlights of the fourth quarter when the New England Patriots mounted a tremendous comeback. When Channel 4 innovatively in the eighties showed what can be done with modest broadcasting rights by promoting cycling, Italian football and Gridiron football I was for a brief period attracted to the latter but it did not last and truth to say I have never really got on with any American sport.
Whenever I visit a country I make a point of going to a sport event partly for love of sport and partly as it’s an opportunity to get away from tourist sites and see the actual people. I went to a baseball game in New York and twice to the Joe Robbie stadium in Miami to see the Dolphins. At the latter I was amazed how much food and drink were consumed first at the tailgate parties in the car parks and then in the stadium itself where there was a food outlet at every entrance in the concourse. Food was also delivered to the seat personally by attendants. That the stadium design and comfort levels were years ahead of their British equivalent was undone by the drunken grossness of those around me. This does not seem to have changed as even in that most decorous of all games, golf, last Sunday Hideki Matsuyama was targeted by drunken oafs at the 16th hole where 20,000 foregather. The standard of decorum at the US Open tennis is little better.
There is another aspect of US sport which turns me right off namely their love of the statistic. With many American owners this Moneyball nonsense has now infected soccer and there are those naive enough to believe that this is the very essence of determining achievement in the sport. Let me tell these poor misguided people of the greatest sporting feat I have ever witnessed which happened in the 1970 World Cup between Brazil and Uruguay. A diagonal pass put the legendary Pele through but it seemed unlikely he would get to the ball before the able Uruguayan keeper Mazurkiwicz. The old fashioned Sherman tank of a British centre forward might have lumbered on hopeful he might intimidate the keeper into error or the nippier forward might have hoped to get there first. The great Pele did neither. Conscious that the keeper would be aware of him, he actually weaved away to the left away from ball and keeper. The dumbfounded keeper remained stationary as the ball went right past him. Pele then went behind the keeper retrieved the ball, his shot was then cleared off the line. This – the greatest skill imaginable – would only appear as a missed chance in the analytic notebook. I don’t get American football any more than it gets soccer. The story is also told of the owner of the New York Cosmos, frustrated by the great Franz Beckenbauer playing immaculately as ever from the back, was heard to shout out “I’m paying a million bucks for this guy tell him to get his ass up front!”
I am not at interested if a wide receiver can rush 6000 yards, it’s how he catches ball under pressure that I admire. I don’t need to hear Lady Gaga at the Super Bowl and I prefer the non-PC humour of a British soccer crowd to majorettes.
