When I was a little lad (or a “sprog,” as our Australian rivals might say), I was on a peewee soccer team in Anchorage. Even at that age, I was a sensitive soul – an asthmatic dreamer, some would say, with not much of a predilection for team sports and even less of a competitive spirit.
I would later find my niche in high school, in the fifth seat of an 8-man rowing scull on Sand Lake, and would also lose a pair of sunglasses flipping a single boat trying to beat the record from dock to dock and back – so much for competition – but as a soccer player, I was lacking. In one notable instance, I had to be dissuaded from bringing a butterfly net out onto the field and chasing insects while my teammates looked on with as much disdain as four-year-olds can muster. A similar incident occurred during my short-lived Little League career, ending with a kickball to the head and a solemn silent vow to stick to individual sports.
As I say, a sensitive soul. Thank God for the debate team.
To the more devoted readers of my work, this will make an unsurprising amount of sense. There’s a reason I became a semi-professional columnist turned disheveled lawyer, and not something more aggressively masculine, like a crab boat captain or a Chippendales dancer. I digress – this was all intended to be sort of a thematic lead-in to my special one-off column about the World Cup, but has turned, as many of my columns do, into an airing of grievances-slash-uncomfortably public therapy session. Let’s start again – but keep the soccer story in mind, it’ll be funny.
Prep Work
Jeff Landfield had reached out earlier this week to ask whether I would watch the next USA game in the World Cup. I had been under the impression that the Cup was over and we had won, if I had to be brutally honest. It might have been some misplaced jingoism; Jeff’s phone call came in between the flyweight and bantamweight rounds at the UFC 250 event so I was kind of hopped up on Winco cherries and American Spirits and watching ultraviolence play out on the White House lawn. God bless America.
“You want to watch the next US game, do a little David Foster Wallace thing?”
“I kind of thought we already won, dog.”
“Noooo!!!! (disgusted snort) Next game is against….. Australia. June 19. Get me something good.”
As a side note: I lost 20 bucks that night when Pereira ruined the third leg of my four-way parlay, and an additional 15 when Topuria got beaten halfway to death by Gaethje, so I was in a foul mood.
As I say, my experience with soccer was limited to some ill-fated youth league action; Will Ferrell’s “Kicking and Screaming;” the German exchange students that would flood my elementary school every year, tossing scarves over one shoulder, discussing the relative merits of Leipzig or Stuttgart; and Bill Buford’s “Among the Thugs,” about football hooligans in Manchester. At any rate, I felt I had to come into this thing with some background knowledge. Here is what I learned from a quick pre-game Google search:
- The Australian team is called “The Socceroos.”
That’s it. Upon learning this piece of information, I decided that any more research could only make this column worse. The Socceroos – come the fuck on, man. A deeply unserious country. You forget, sometimes, that a part of the world that gave us “Mad Max” and the Simpsons episode where Bart wants to see how the toilets flush south of the equator also gave us Vegemite and tradies in terrible mullets. Even if I didn’t love my country, rivals like the Socceroos make Americans look even better by comparison.
The morning of Legitimate Federal Holiday Juneteenth dawned bright and clear. The USA/Australia match, set in Seattle, was scheduled to start at 12 PM Pacific – and apparently, the city government laid the hammer down in anticipation of the World Cup, cleaning up several million pounds of trash so our European counterparts wouldn’t think less of us. Which, you know, when it takes a multi-national sports championship for city governments to start valuing health and safety – echoes of Xi’s visit to California, you know? At least the streets are clean.
I booted up Peacock at 10 minutes to noon to start taking notes – only to realize that the broadcast was exclusively in Spanish. A thin sheen of panic overtook me. Telemundo’s contract with NBC apparently means that in the States, the Spanish-language coverage of the World Cup belongs to Peacock. Even the subtitles were in Spanish. Ay, carumba. I debated keeping it as is – I mean, “Moron Columnist Watches Spanish Broadcast” would be a fun wrinkle to this series – but decided against it. I needed to know generally what was happening. I quickly copped a free trial to Fox, making a mental note to cancel before the $20 subscription fee kicked in, and settled in for some futbol.
The stadium was packed – I mean, Lumen Field looked like a chunk of Australian wagyu, marbled red and white with team colors. I missed the kickoff because of the aforementioned Peacock fiasco, and caught the game about a minute in. Of note – soccer announcers lean towards a touch of the melodramatic, almost Gothic, in their analysis. At one point towards the end of the match, one of them referred to a goal-side jumble of players as a “mess of bodies and limbs everywhere,” like poetry about the Crimean War. They also exude the aura of the friend that overpronounces everything at the ethnic restaurant – “Turkiye,” instead of Turkey, “1-nil,” et cetera. It’s Turkey, pal, and in America, we say Zero. Billy Corgan fought for your right to say Zero, jabroni – and don’t you forget it.
As for the “Beautiful Game,” I generally liked it! It’s a thinking man’s sport, like chessboxing, or cornhole. The length of the field and the convergence of players necessitates a certain war-like strategy, and then a frenzy of action at intervals. But then long, long pauses. Long …… pauses. What would liven up this sport? Maybe some sticks, smaller field, fights … put the whole thing on ice? Something to consider.
The United States got a point fairly early on, an own goal by the Aussies at about ten minutes. That has to feel awful – you can’t get an “own touchdown,” or “own basket.” It’s like enabling friendly fire in Halo – or in real life, I guess.
There is something in this game called “off-sides” which I had to look up and still don’t fully understand, but it sent me down a strange Wikipedia rabbit hole of the Eton wall game, arcane English boy’s school game rules, and phrases like “[H]ee who hath the ball […] must deale no Fore-ball, viz. he may not throw it to any of his mates, standing neerer the goale, then himselfe.” What a sport.
The Americans got a second goal at about 44 minutes, with Freeman heading it in – after a brief altercation regarding whether or not the off-sides rules applied, the refs called it for the US of A. That’s right. You may have invented this sport, but it takes an American team to excel, I say, conveniently ignoring most of World Cup history.
Towards the end of the game, one of the refs went down with a cramp. I would have used the opportunity to sneak in some nasty play, but apparently these cats are made of more noble stuff.
At the end of the game, the Americans remained up 2-0 and are advancing to play Turkey on the June 25. We beat them in World War 1 (frantically googling to make sure the Ottoman Empire is modern-day Turkey) and I imagine we can do it again. As a cultural chauvinist, I have to imagine that we’re the best at every sport invented or ever to be invented. USA!!!
Jacob Hersh was born and raised in Anchorage. He recently graduated with a law degree from the University of Idaho and is now studying for the bar. He occasionally does movie reviews and writes weird columns for the Landmine to get extra money for beer.