Jean Tisserand
EDITOR'S NOTE:
What Tisserand calls football is the
peculiar sport that is played in North America. What normal people call
football, he calls soccer.
As everyone knows, Americans are, in general, very competitive. Our global corporations buy out everyone else's corporations. Our military whips butt all over the world, and in the Olympics, we count medals. But in soccer, the United States Team is the world's patsy. Even Croatia laughs at us (Come to think of it, that's not the only reason Croatia laughs at us, but Bosnia is off-topic here).
So, while the world riveted its attention to the World Cup finals between France and Orange's neighbor to the south, Americans yawned. Not because we hate soccer. It's a great sport for boys to run off their excess energy. In fact, the fastest-growing political constituency in the United States today is known as "soccer moms": you know, the tired women who try to have careers, do all the housework, be good mothers, and cheer on their children at all their soccer matches. But serious American athletes simply do not run around in baggy shorts and kneesocks. Instead, in the real football, you pad up the player until he looks like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, put a flimsy jersey on top, and encase the bottom in spandex. This choice of uniform is very important. The shirt (called a jersey) tears easily for educational reasons — it's the only way most American men would know what a flat stomach looks like. As to the pants, they are skintight so their wives will watch the game instead of using the time to plan a divorce.
Oh, soccer is more popular than it used to be. Forty years ago, it would have been un-American to play the sport, and the FBI would have been putting infiltrators on the team to make sure you weren't including a little Marxism with your goal shot. Now, Americans even have a professional soccer league! My home town of Columbus, Ohio, a city that has always been denied pro teams in the sports Americans really care about, does have one of the nation's most successful Major League Soccer franchises. Why, we're building a new stadium to draw crowds of 20,000! (By contrast, I should mention that The Ohio State University, also located in Columbus, is expanding its football stadium to hold some 106,000 people — and the engineers would try to add 20,000 more if they could figure out how to enable the top rows to actually see the game. Earlier, I said Columbus has been denied pro football, baseball, and basketball teams. I suppose, in fairness, that the $80,000,000 franchise fee for the National Football League might have something to do with this.
As I understand it, soccer is a sport with continuous action, but very simple rules:
1. If you're not the goalie, you cannot use your hands; but you can hit the ball with any other part, but in reality the ball is usually kicked.
2. You get a penalty if you hit or kick anything other than the game ball.
3. The idea is to get the ball in the net behind the goalie.
Americans, however, prefer sports with less action. If we want action, we'll go to the Cineplex and pay $6.00 to see a violent movie with lots of car chases and explosions. But since our country boasts the world's richest and busiest lawyers, it is only natural that we would want rulebooks the size of encyclopedias, so we can find excuses for swearing at the referee (or umpire in baseball):
·
Baseball. "What's the matter,
umpire, are you blind? That's not a strike, the ball went below the batter's
waist! (How this is determined with precision every time when the ball is
moving at 140 km/h without the help of a camera is one of the wonders of the
age).
·
Football. "What's the matter, ref,
are you blind? That wasn't an interception,
that was a pass interference!"
·
Basketball. "What's the matter,
ref, are you blind? Basketball is a tiring sport. His back is on the floor,
because he's taking a nap. I didn't
foul him!"
So, the fun of sports for Americans is in the arguments they create over the complex rules. We also enjoy listening to big-money deals and courtroom arguments in our sports news, but that's another story.
In football, we also enjoy our fancy technology with instant replays, slow-motion and reverse-angle cameras, and the announcer's electronic highlighter to show us the military tactics used in the Green Bay Packers' latest variation on an I formation.
I mean, really, if we cared about
athletics, we would all be soccer fans.
* Technical note: In football, there are three ways to move the ball: kicking (but since you lose the ball, you have to be desparate or working for a field goal), running with the ball, and throwing it, known as passing. Only the quarterback can pass the ball, which is headed for a receiver downfield. If an opponent catches the ball in front of the receiver, that is an interception, which is legal. If the opponent tackles the receiver too early, or bumps the ball out of the receiver's hand, that is pass interference, which is illegal. The penalty in football is for your team to have to do the play over again, 5-15 yards (a yard is a little less than a meter) from where the earlier play was made.
The
Tisserand Museum
October, 2000