Real Football

A football game is right-this-minute coming on the TV. And it’s the best kind of football: American football. We have none of that running up and down a field while trying to kick a round ball into a net. No, in America we have manly football, football played the way God intended: with huge men crashing into each other and giving each other concussions, torn ligaments, sprained muscles, and the occasional career-ending injury. (After 30 years, I can still remember seeing Joe Theismann’s lower right leg snap like a pretzel stick during a tackle that was dubbed "The Hit That No One Who Saw It Can Ever Forget" by the Washington Post.)

Soccer (called association football by those who don’t speak American) is sometimes called “the beautiful game”. Beautiful? Really? Americans don’t watch football because it’s pretty. We watch football because it’s not pretty. It’s bone-crunching, brain-jarring, gut-wrenching, team warfare combined with the strategy of a world-class chess game. In other words, pure fun.

I’ve tried to watch soccer. I see people running around after a ball but continually stumbling into the ball and inadvertently kicking it further away. Sometimes they’re so clumsy they actually kick the ball into a teammate’s head. It’s obvious these players need to be better trained.

I suppose soccer has a certain appeal for those who enjoy watching two teams run around aimlessly for 90 or more minutes just to score one or two points. Whenever I’ve tried to watch a soccer game, after a few minutes I wanted to yell at the TV, “For the love of God, somebody pick up that ball and run with it!” I had to change the channel. The game is too frustrating to watch.

To a European football fan, I imagine American football must look like total chaos. A European fan who watched the American game for a few minutes would probably say, “I don’t get it.” That’s totally understandable. It’s what many Americans say about soccer.

Ooh, a player is down on the ground now, injured. It’s the third injury of the first half. Well, that’s too bad. American fans hate to see a player get hurt. Because, as long as a player is lying injured on the field, there is no football being played. And we’re at the game, or watching it on TV, to see a football game played. Somewhere in America, there is a guy sitting on a sofa drinking beer and yelling at his TV, “Get that injured player off the field! If I wanted to watch a game with nothing happening, I’d be watching soccer!”