>btw, roger, soccer here is not a white sport. cricket and tennis are.
Yes, about soccer you're more like the rest of the world than we are, Ange. In the US, first baseball, and then basketball are the city games (read black and brown). Football with its military links and inherently (capitalist) discipline (brilliantly explained by George Carlin in a comedy bit), is everywhere, and has overtaken both, I think, in the American mind. Tennis and golf, are originally country club based white and changing only slowly, with the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods following in the footsteps of Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, and Charley Sifford (btw, I think of Scurry as the Althea Gibson of soccer, the great, black tennis player *and* golfer).
But soccer is out of place here. It should be a city game because of its economics. But being a game of mostly quickness, speed, and finesse, it does lack a certain macho (like the dunk in basketball or the all-out blitz in football) that American boys crave. That problem should affect the development of the women's game less, I think.
Instead, soccer is played here almost exclusively by rich white suburban kids. This restriction is one reason why the US men's team is unlikely to ever be any good, and a measure of just how special the US women's team is to reach the top of the world.
But I want to add another dimension and go out on a limb. The main ad campaign for the women's team prior to the World Cup (not counting those ads imploring Clinton to come to the final which were a waste of money--Willie went to two games cause he knows a good thing to milk when he sees it) was about teamwork: "Then I'll have two fillings (in the dentist office)". Teamwork is socialist; atomistic, everyone-for-themselves is capitalist. Most team sports teach teamwork, but not to the same degree or with the same effect. Basketball is supposed to be about teamwork, but watch any recent NBA game and you see it often isn't. Teams spread out the floor on offense and set up situations where players can use their individual skills to score.
Soccer is different. Knowing what the other guys on your team are going to do and working together is essential, the necessary precondition for winning. Yet, unlike football with its rigid discipline, creativity within the team context is also important. To be really good, a team needs creative players. So where is one place a kid can learn important principles like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (and that Thatcher is a fool when she says there is no society (social interrest)) to counteract the atomistic propaganda with which he is constantly bombarded (in school (from his economics teacher), media, etc.)? On the soccer field. All of this ties in to working class consciousness.
> and
>soccer is the only sport globally where a world series really means world
>series, unlike that odd thing over there called 'the world series' which only
>US guys in bulky costumes play.
Baseball, you mean baseball!! In bulky costumes?!? Don't you get to see these games there either, Ange?
There are lots of places in the world where baseball has not caught on, but don't be surprised if within, say, the next decade, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Carribean, parts of South America, and perhaps Cuba after Fidel combine for a championship, or even regular season baseball leagues. The money is there and the owners will be chasing it. I almost forgot Australia. Your native son Dave Nilsson, recently bought the pro league there (he bought the whole league didn't he) and is apparently intent on playing for your Olympic team in 2000. He even bought himself out of his American contract for next year to be able do it. Australia could be a part of the new world order in baseball too.