WHAT'S THE POINT? IF YOU HAVE TO ASK...

I know, I know. It's the Men's World Cup Final that is Sunday, not the women's. But all things soccer remind me of Brandy Chastain celebrating after defeating China for the 1999 Women's World Cup. It's the greatest victory photo ever. That it was considered controversial because it showed her bra is laughable now. And it was laughable then. Shame on anyone who saw anything in it but a fantastic athlete with a brilliant, powerful body. Anyway, France and Italy meet on Sunday, and Rick, who has taken a late liking to the sport, as have I, had these reflections:

I never played any team sports. In gym class I never liked basketball, baseball and such. Chasing after balls was not my strong suit, and it seemed rather pointless at the time. I preferred gymnastics. And even better were the things we didn’t do in gym, like skiing or skateboarding.  There were no mountain bikes when I was a kid, but there should have been. I broke three bikes in the time it took to break one arm. I started climbing as a kid — long before I had a rope. It was simple good luck that I never fell off anything high enough to do me lasting harm.
 
I no longer think that team sports are pointless. Or, actually, they are pointless. They are pointless in very much the same way that my balance sports are pointless. They are chosen because they are hard to perform well: The attraction is in the unnecessary challenge. It just has to be an interesting challenge. Big professional team sports are pointless in another way as well. All societies when they achieve any surplus labor seem to promptly begin grandiose projects that are, at root, unnecessary. We no longer want to build pyramids or cathedrals, but, after all, these are now easy for us. Men on the moon were grand indeed, and not easy, but proved to be of passing interest. But we have big team sports. Their enduring success suggests that they are the ideal fulfillment of our own grand excesses. During the last NCAA men’s basketball tournament, I read several articles that claimed that office betting pools were causing this huge loss in productivity and costing the nation’s employers billions. But, hey, we can afford it.
 
The moral-improvement crowd might be offended at my glorifying the pointlessness of sport. Sports create leadership, self-esteem, role models, they will say. The British Empire was forged on the pitches of Eton. Hogwash. Did English sport go sour before the Empire went belly up? And really, what kind of role model is a twenty-something multimillionaire? Is that a realistic benchmark of success for today’s youth? That’s all so whatever.
 
I’ll stick with inspired pointlessness. But the inspired bit is important. For instance, baseball strikes me as an insipid sport. The only attraction I can imagine is that of the fan who loves to go around spouting endless sports trivia. If you don’t like statistics, then baseball becomes so much standing around to see if a guy can hit a ball with a stick. The swatting at the ball part isn’t so bad, but seems a poor return for all the preparation time. Cricket, if anything, is even worse. At least it seems to take even longer to play.
 
My two favorite team sports are very unlike each other even though they kind of have the same name. On the one hand we have soccer, which we should call football like the rest of the world does. There are three brilliant things about this game.  First, it is basically very simple and hardly even needs a ball to play. Everywhere in the world there are kids on the street playing pickup soccer. (Except in middle class America which prohibits pickup sports.) If the kids are too poor to have a ball, they will make one out of a wad of old clothes. The rules are simple and straightforward.  In no time at all, you can learn how this game is played. But the rules make the game very, very hard. Humans are good and versatile runners. Few other animals are good at both sprinting and long distance. We can run well almost by instinct. The inspired element of soccer is to hobble that great running instinct with the requirement that you kick the ball while you are running. Running and kicking are nothing like each other and need very different balance. Soccer players should be falling down all over the field from the mere effort of trying to do both. So dribbling, passing, and shooting are all hard. To that is added a not very large goal that is defended by a keeper who can use his or her hands. To score even a single goal against these obstacles is an amazing achievement. And a virtue of these low-scoring games is that you can never be sure that even a dominant team will win. They might fail to score: One to nothing upsets are not rare. The third great thing about soccer is that the players are left almost entirely to their own devices throughout the game. The field is large, the play stops only briefly, and substitutions are very limited. The coach’s role is to prepare the players for the game — once they are on the field, they have to play with only whatever skills and desires they brought with them that day.
 
American football couldn’t be more different. Although it is played at several levels, I think that it is the perfect sport for large professional franchises that can bring lots of money to the game. They need to. Played in this way, football is a stunningly complex sport. Like a military, there is a lot of “tail” for the “tooth.” The roster for a team is large, and unlike soccer, several different line-ups are fielded during a game. But the amazing bit is what goes into getting those men ready.
There are many ranks of support that you see on the sidelines, up in the “booth,” and even farther behind the scenes. A football play is an exacting bit of choreography with men spread across the field needing to act carefully in sync. It is a strange dance, though, where your “partner” is trying to get you to stumble. So the enduring tension of football is between trying to execute your plan as you designed it and reacting to your opponent’s reactions. This makes football perhaps the most strategic of team sports. These professional teams can develop and train their players to run hundreds of plays full of variation and misdirection. The stereotype of the dumb jock doesn’t apply. At the very least, these guys need excellent memories.
 
I never watched football until I started hanging out with some people who knew it.  You can see at a glance that it is complex, but getting some good explanations shows that it is deep. I learn more about the sport with every game I watch, and I still don’t think I know much. So much is there to see, though. The success of the sport depends upon television. Without it, the teams would never have built the revenue to run such large complex organizations. But being a big-money sport also means that they can pack the stadium with TV cameras and hire a crew of top professionals to put on a big show with high production values. There is little about the game that they cannot show you and from multiple angles and in close-up. If there are two armies contesting on the field with their long tails of supply and command, then there is another army to bring it all to you in your living room.  When a big play that is so improbable as to seem impossible happens, you get all the glorious details. Truly a sport for our age.