It if was not enough to have to listen to Michael Wilbon gratuitously ping soccer for no good reason on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption – which I watch religiously – now comes CNN’s Rowland Martin not only to demean the world’s most popular sport but to advocate violence against gays. Wilbon is quite sane on the gay matter but civil rights pressure groups are after Martin’s head.
The groups want Martin fired for tweets he dispatched during the Super Bowl commenting on the ad for the H&M store line that featured soccer superstar David Beckham in his allegedly sexy underwear. Martin evidently believes that any male drawn to the ad should have violence visited upon him. CNN deciding to make do without Martin is fine with me if his remarks are adjudged to be anti-gay.
Decidedly not fine with me are Wilbon’s and Martin’s continued uncool remarks about soccer – the real football – and the world’s most popular and democratic sport. Their attitude is not a small thing.
Anyone can dislike any sport but soccer-fútbol more than any sport is a metaphor for our new globalized age. And Wilbon and Martin to me represent the majority of Americans who have yet to get the message that how America accommodates to the rest of the world – and not the other way around – might well determine how the country survives the future.
Had we as a nation better understood globalization – defined as the integration of world’s economy not as an exploitative business model – when it began to gather steam we might not have lost millions of jobs that are never to come back. Wibon and Martin might do well to think of this soccer-fútbol thing as something akin to the revolution that Jackie Robinson and the black athletes of their era unleashed on the country that forced everyone around them to change – for their own good.
Uttering nonsense about soccer reveals a parochial mind that hardly inspires faith in the future. It is ironic that the most democratic of nations is coming so late to soccer. More people in the world watch each of the Barcelona-Real Madrid soccer matches played sometimes several times a year than the increasingly irrelevant Super Bowl.
The world no longer revolves around the United States, and it has never revolved around any of its sports. It might come as news to Wilbon and Martin but more kids in the United States now play soccer than they do football, due in no small part to what we know now about concussions. An increasing number of parents do not want their kids anywhere near a football field – which I certainly understand but which nevertheless disconcerts me. After all, I am not a soccer-only HispanicLatino fútbolista.
A now long-suffering fan of the Dallas Cowboys and at the moment a disaffected Texas Longhorn, I am, however, less and less a fan of nativists who do not realize that most of the world has not ever seen a football. None of this is more important than Wilbon and Martin and Americans seeing that the world around them has changed – forever. In today’s world, second-rung soccer players like the Russian Andrei Arshavin eclipse a Kobe or even a Michael Jordan. Tom Brady, Eli Manning – compared favorably to global superstars like Lionel Messi, Fernando Torres or Cristiano Ronaldo? Really?
Wilbon and Martin are smart guys, but like many Americans their provincialism makes them seem smaller still.
Feel free to forward these blogs that deal with business topics on Mondays, politics on Wednesdays and social and personal and professional development on Fridays. Additional thoughts are published invariably on Tuesdays or Thursdays.