I grew up liking just about all sports. Of course, to a person born in the 1952, the important high school boys sports were football, basketball and track with baseball played in the summer. The Olympics were always a big deal when they had them every four years with track and field being the marquee event.
When I was a junior in high school, soccer was introduced ay my high school in the physical education classes, with an intramural league set up. Being 6'2" with good speed and reflexes and reasonably good leaping ability, I got to be, or rather, had to be the goalie.
The sport was limited to the non-football playing boys of which there weren't that many. I would have liked to play football but with my mother adamantly opposed to that possibility, I instead played basketball and ran track.
I'm not sure we actually played real soccer or "futbol" as it is know elsewhere in the world. Everybody just chased the ball, with half of them kicking it at me and the other half kicking it at the other goal. After completing the relatively short season, I decided not to play again and didn't.
I have never been a sport snob, preferring to place value or importance on all sporting venues whether I liked the actual sport or not. I was a sportswriter after my freshman year in high school and I was heavily involved in writing for numerous outlets while I was in college, so I was exposed to all kind of sports. They all have their place.
Having said all that brings me to today's topic -- the men's World Cup! It is over, France has laid claim to the World Cup Champions trophy and the parties are still raging all over that western European country.
I will admit that I did not watch a single game, did not care to watch a single game, and have in fact, never, ever watched a single professional soccer (futbol) game. I have my reasons which I will list.
I have seen an abundance of excerpts from videos of sportcasters who, to me, are easily excitable. There was this one commentator who was gushing over the fact that his team had something like 20 shots on goal! In just the first half! But, they all missed as they were scoreless at the half.
I don't know, but having more missed shots than your opponent has is not really something to cheer about. I get it that teams who get off twice as many shots as their competition are probably playing better, but when the score is 0-0, does it really matter?
There are a lot of football games that end with one team dominating the statistics, getting the most yards, with the other team scoring the most points. All that matters is the score. All that matters.
Soccer is a low scoring affair. Bunches of games in the World Game ended in 0-0, 1-1 or 2-2 ties. To break ties, the teams have a series of penalty kicks to decide things. That is like settling tied basketball games by having a free throw shoot off at the end. Kind of anticlimactic.
Back in the mid '90s, I decided to start an elementary indoor soccer league in our old gym at Batesville Southside. It was one of those old gyms with the bench below the check-in table with a wall around the floor four feet high. With those kind of walls, we didn't have to have out of bounds plays except for a few times when the ball went into the stands.
The problem I soon had was that there were a few athletes (who went on to all-state status as athletes) who were so good a guarding the goal, nobody could ever score. I finally decided that for my league, there would be no goalies. Of course, this led to games with scores like 21-19, 30-25, or 19-10, but the kids seemed to like it much better.
Goalies, in my opinion, are too much the deciding factor in games on the pro levels. Sometimes a baseball pitcher can dominate a game, or a quarterback can dominate a football game but that is a rare thing as a rule.
People on television refer to soccer as the "beautiful game." Okaaaaaay. It is certainly the oldest team sport in existence, dating back to ancient China, Greece and Rome. There were games in those cultures that were similar to soccer in that they had a ball kicked around in a rectangular space and the population was nuts about it.
Soccer supposedly started in the British Isles just about the time the Norman rulers were kind of ousted from England after a very long tenure running the land. There were stories about rebelling Englishmen who beheaded retreating Norman soldiers, then used their heads as a ball to kick around an open field. As the story went, the game got so popular they had to switch to some other kind of ball when they ran out of Norman heads, eventually turning to cow bladders.
While that may or not be true, it was true that the game of soccer as we know it today, was organized in England in the 1860s. FIFA, the world governing body of soccer (futbol) claims that time as their origin. There was a lot of disagreement at that time what the rules ought to be with some sports folks splitting off with a version of futbol that became known as rugby. Over in the U.S., an even more different version of football was started up with a rugby style ball but completely different playing procedures.
Fast forward to today. There are quite a few countries playing rugby, a very few playing American football with the entire world fielding FIFA certified soccer teams. Every four years they have a world tournament with this year's playoffs held in Russia.
It is a BIG deal around the world. I was in Boston in 1994 when the World Cup was being hosted there and the place was literally jammed with foreigners. I was taking my son to the National Age Group Track Championships which was held there the same week, resulting in my paying $100 per night for a Hotel 6 that usually cost $30.
My wife was in Germany the summer of 1974 when the Germans won the World Cup. She told me how the whole country shut down whenever the national team was playing. Back home in the U.S., I was not even aware the World Cup was even going on. Which brings me to my last observation.
I listen to lots of sports radio and an avid reader of various sports publications. For the past few weeks, I have listened to and read folks who constantly bemoan the fact that the US didn't even make the top 64 teams in the world this year. The U.S. was knocked out of a chance at the World Cup last year when they lost to Trinidad. That kind of sounds like Bentonville being defeated by Decatur.
I have seen magazine covers lamenting the state of U.S. soccer with many radio commentators asking aloud about when the U.S will finally wake up and get their soccer act together. I think the answer has been and will continue to be -- most folks don't really care.
In most of the world's countries, soccer is the only sport the natives care about. In the U.S., the sport is very distant fifth, sixth, or seventh place when it comes to athletes pursuing it professionally.
Football, basketball and baseball are hugely popular as professional sports with track, swimming, gold, tennis and a number of other sports vying for the emerging athletes with the best array of talent. Guys who are big, fast, mobile, and strong will gravitate to our major sports, for that is where they will receive the most recognition, as well as the most money professionally.
My question to all these other pundits is this. Why do we have to worry whether we can get a strong soccer program or not? The fact that it is important to every other country in the world doesn't mean it has to be here.
America has never been a place known for its "fall in line and be like everybody else." The U.S. started a republican constitutional government, something no other country had ever tried. The U.S fought a bloody Civil War to free a minority of its citizens bound in slavery, something no other slave holding country ever did or had to do.
When World War I broke out and we sent two million men to France, our leaders refused to follow the lead of our allies and send waves of men mindlessly across battlefields to face certain death. Millions of men on the allied side died on very few acres of ground repeating the same strategy, over and over. The U.S. came over, changed the game plan, and the war was over in months.
In the 1800s, 80 percent of American millionaires inherited their money, with the number down to 20 percent in the late 1900s with 80 percent of the nouveau riche making it on their own. This kind of statistic is not common in other countries.
The fact is, the U.S. is not like any other country. We don't have to have a great or even good national soccer team to feed our national pride. Maybe someday things will change and the U.S. will develop a soccer power among the men's programs. I wouldn't oppose such a development, but whether it develops or not seems inconsequential.
I am glad for France for them to have gotten their day of glory this week. With the rampant terrorism in that country lately, it needs something to celebrate. For the teams that did well and made their home countries proud -- congratulations. May you all win the next Cup.
We will certainly qualify for the World Cup in 2026. That is because the U.S. is going to be the host team which gives them an automatic bid. This past Cup saw Russia get in to play despite having a 70th world ranking. They played well at home, making the final eight before Croatia defeated them. Croatia finished second overall. Maybe the U.S. can use the home field advantage to make a run.
I do think that should the U.S. make a challenge in 2026, it might be as a result of the importation of foreign athletes who eat, drink and breath soccer. The victorious French had a number of players who were not French but had immigrated.
One final parting thought.
To all those soccer moms and youth soccer players out there, this column was not meant as a criticism of the sport as a sport. Millions of American youths play the game in youth leagues in every city in every state. Any sport that gets kids off the couch or off their devices to go running through the grass is a good thing.
We have more youth players than any other country in the world, but the huge majority don't play past the sixth grade. That is neither good nor bad, it just is. This fact confounds a lot of people, but at the end of the day, kids and folks should be able to do or play what they want to.
One word of warning. If you go to a city hosting a World Cup game in 2026, stay with a friend or relative or be prepared to pay $250 a night for a Motel 6.
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Editor's note: John McGee, an award-winning columnist, sports writer and art teacher at Pea Ridge elementary schools, writes a regular sports column for The Times. He can be contacted through The Times at [email protected].
Sports on 07/18/2018