Everybody Else’s Sport

Any sport sounds stupid on paper. Sitting in a boat dangling a string in the water while waiting for a fish? Shooting defenseless animals running away? Ten overgrown men dropping sweat on a gym floor and trying to get a ball through a hoop twice a minute? Waiting for hours until a man with a bat hits a little rubber-core ball into stands where people are eating hot dogs and drinking beer? Hitting a little white ball into holes in the grass? A team of huge men armored with helmets and shoulder pads crashing full-speed into others like them?

Or how about chasing an inflated sphere back and forth across a big, grassy field, infrequently kicking it into a net guarded by a grown man wearing gloves and shorts?

But the excitement of sports is in the playing, the having played, the might have played and the talking and yelling about the play you are watching. And that’s what the world (outside of Sacramento and Los Angeles or New Jersey and Boston) is now doing: watching the quadrennial international score-settler, the World Cup, which opened today at 4:30 a.m., Pacific Daylight Time, when France played Senegal in Seoul.

Today’s match marks the beginning of the monthlong final phase of a competition between teams from more than 180 nations that began March 4, 2000.

The U.S. national soccer team plays Portugal on Wednesday, then South Korea and Poland later. Given how lightly most Americans regard soccer, making the second round would be a considerable achievement.

While the rest of the world goes crazy, Nielsen Media Research, which regularly breaks out ratings for such sports bottom dwellers as horse racing and hockey, does not even list soccer. The sport does not make the cut of the 100 best-watched programs in the U.S.

Yet soccer has inspired Irish fans to petition the prime minister to move clocks ahead nine hours to be in sync with Japan. And some churches in England will show telecasts of the Cup on Sunday morning and allow parishioners to bring in beer and their breakfast. It’s part of an effort to compete with pubs and restaurants, which have been granted permission to open and sell beer at 7 a.m. during the Cup.

In Los Angeles, games will be televised live at 11:30 p.m., 2 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. At those hours, most U.S. kids won’t be able to see the magic of France’s Zinedine Zidane, the best player in the world and the son of an Algerian janitor.

Considering the millions of Americans who have kicked around a soccer ball in youth competitions, it’s a puzzlement that the sport doesn’t make television big-time. But until it does, we’ve got Shaq.