Asia Times: The Koreas


	June 29, 2002	atimes.com

The Koreas

COMMENTARY
Sport is all about losing, too
By David Simmons

BANGKOK - World Cup fever has reportedly overcome the renowned immunity of Canadians to socceritis and infected that country as well as the rest of the world, at least in the east where some of the Korea/Japan games can be watched during semi-normal waking hours. But not everyone is taking it well.

"Who gives a damn?" fumed Helen in an e-mail from Ontario. "It's a sport that's not too popular in this country, we don't even have a team, and it's not even being played on this continent. Bandwagon fans disgust me. People at work who have never even said the word 'soccer' in my presence in 27 years are suddenly the world's biggest fans. I don't understand it."

Europeans, Latin Americans, Africans and Asians, on the other hand, have trouble understanding why soccer is, as a rule, unpopular in North America. And I can attest that as a Canadian non-soccer fan stranded in Asia, June has been a lonely, fish-out-of-water sort of month. Every television in Thailand is tuned to the World Cup, in the bars, the restaurants, places of business, even my own living room, where there always seem to be at least three times as many Thais as I have officially sanctioned.

I've tried to get into the spirit. Certainly the Korea story has been fascinating apart from the matches themselves. But the hard truth is that soccer - the game, as opposed to the intrigue, the politics, the marketing, the nationalism, the Red Devils - is boring. I just can't watch it without my mind wandering and my eyes glazing over - which inevitably is when someone accidentally scores a goal, possibly the only one that week.

Now, I understand there is more to any game than the game itself. I am aware that soccer has a global following, and to those who actually follow the sport, as opposed to glancing at it every four years when the World Cup occurs, there is entertainment to be had. Fans know the players, follow their exploits, enjoy seeing their heroes' familiar talents exercised on the pitch, albeit for no apparent purpose. The enjoyment is cultivated over a series of matches, of tournaments, of months or years. It is not really essential to this enjoyment for anything actually to happen in a particular match.

Of course, this phenomenon, this enjoyment of a sport as a genre, as an ongoing event rather than a spectacle of actual goal-scoring, is not unique to soccer. An individual game of baseball has similar anesthetic effects to soccer's, yet its many fans can regale you for hours with statistics, which evidently are that sport's real purpose. Even the sport I do follow with some regularity, Formula One motor racing, entertains in a similar way. Months can go by before anything out of the ordinary occurs at a Grand Prix. ("Michael Schumacher, after stopping in the pits for a quick lunch and a visit to the loo, has managed to re-enter the track four minutes ahead of second-place Juan Pablo Montoya ... But it's not over yet, Schumacher's Ferrari could explode, as it did at Monte Carlo in 1998 ...") Yet for the loyal fan, the strategy, the persistence of the underdogs, the dramas in the pits, the exotic locations, the intricacies of man/machine coordination, the off-track politics and intrigues, keep him coming back.

I recently asked a friend, a former sports editor, why such a dull sport as soccer is so universally popular. "Because it's a simple sport," he said. "Anyone can play it, and so they do, and when they see professionals playing it, they can follow it easily."

It's true. All you need is a ball and a few more kids, a few stones to mark out a goal, a bit of vacant dirt to play on. In Canada, most kids would rather play hockey, but even if it happens to be winter and there's a convenient frozen pond of iced-down back yard to play on, you still need skates, sticks, pucks and paraphernalia. It takes a good deal of effort and planning to scare up even a casual hockey game, and even at a basic level you need some skill to play it. I was too clumsy to be able to skate without falling on my head, so my National Hockey League hopes were doomed from the start. But everyone, even me, even girls, even the poorest of the poor in Latin America, Africa, Thailand, has played soccer and had fun doing it.

Why, then, has soccer failed to attract a broad following in North America? Probably because most North Americans' sport participation rarely extends beyond the living-room couch, and almost anything is more interesting than soccer to watch on television if you have a choice - and in North America you do, in droves: hockey, Canadian and American football, baseball, motor racing, basketball, golf, bowling, darts, tiddlywinks.

This embarras du choix, and the plethora of television sets and television channels, lends itself to more individuality among North American sports fans than in Asia and many other places, probably even Europe. While mother is in the living room watching hockey, dad is in the den watching Anna Kournikova and the kids are in their room hacking into the White House database. So national followings of any sport are less intense. Hardcore sports nuts typically follow several sports, each in its season, and there is no reason to venture outside the bounds of North America and deal with such irritations as time zones to follow something like World Cup soccer.

While people everywhere, including North America, tend to lose their perspective about sport and come to believe it has some importance beyond entertainment value, this phenomenon gets a bit radical when it comes to soccer because of its nearly universal popularity, and hence its global hype. South Korea is talking seriously about revamping its entire economic strategy to emulate the management style of some Dutchman whose only claim to fame is being able to inspire a gang of previously disastrous soccer players not to faint at the sight of millionaire footballers from the Mediterranean. Well, excuse me, but let's get a grip, Mr Kim. South Koreans have fought their way back from near-bankruptcy in the wake of the 1997-98 crisis to enviable economic prowess at the fiscal equivalent of the speed of light, without the benefit of any stimulus from Netherlandic jocks. By all means, let's market those Gallant Guus action figures and Hiddink of Holland hentai series, but let's take a few deep breaths before making him finance minister.

This sort of fuzzifying of sports - ie, the playing of games - and economics is predictable in this era of the beatification of business. Competition is king, in this phase the world is going through, egged on by the corporate class. And that's what happens on the soccer pitch - competition. That's what sport is about.

George Orwell or somebody said that the trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. The corollary to that is that somebody loses them, and in the winner-take-all scenario favored by corporate-driven globalization, and globalized sports such as World Cup football, there are far more losers than winners.

In May, just before the World Cup tournament kicked off in Korea and Japan, the British Broadcasting Corp televised a feature on a girls' soccer team in Kenya that had won scholarships for their prowess on the pitch. This was a good thing, according to the BBC, for these worthy lasses would not otherwise have been able to get a decent education. My thoughts, of course, were with the runners-up, who had played their hearts out on exactly the same pitch but, possibly (for all we know) by virtue of a fluke goal or some inappropriate (maybe even conspiratorial!) officiating, don't get to go to college.

Sport is supposed to be about fun, just as other forms of competition are supposed to be about gain and benefit, but the world is full of second-placers condemned to squalor, of geeky, lonely schoolchildren unwanted by any team, of Joe Lunchbuckets laid off at the age of 50 from firms that didn't quite measure up to the demands of the market. Of once-great national teams flying into airports silent of cheers.

Too gloomy a perspective? Maybe. And maybe I would have been more chipper if Korea had won the semi-final on Tuesday and my wife would now owe me 60 baht. After all, life is just a game.

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