If It Moves, Kick It is a tumblelog.

A classic old-fashioned All-American anti-soccer sportswriting rant

It’s awfully hot out in Las Vegas, where Tim Dahlberg pines for the good old days when Americans rooted for sports that were, well, American:

“We’ve seen this all before, beginning in 1994 when the World Cup was played in the U.S. and a cute dog named Stryker was the mascot. Tens of thousands of kids around the country already were playing the game, so FIFA figured that giving the U.S. the World Cup would spawn a new generation of soccer lovers from Texas to Maine.

“Didn’t happen, so they tried again with the 1999 women’s World Cup. I was there, among 90,000 screaming tweeners and their parents, to watch four teams combine for zero — count ‘em, zero — goals in regulation in the two final games at the Rose Bowl, a day now remembered by most for Brandi Chastain showing off her sports bra.

“Those screaming girls are grown up now and have grown out of their brief flirtation with the game. The women’s pro league spawned by that World Cup was a bust, and MLS isn’t doing a lot better now, even with the brief hysteria of a David Beckham sighting.

“Face it. We’re a nation that loves football, not futbol. We prefer sports where scoring comes in bunches, and we like a sport even more when we play it better than other countries.”

Happy Independence Day!

Out of the ‘burbs, and on to the streets!

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post nabs what ails us on the Elysian pitches of America — it’s the Elysian pitches, natch:

“The suspicion in soccer circles is that the American game is played too much in comfortable suburban leagues, and not enough in the streets. A great American star is out there somewhere, in a neighborhood blackening with soot, playing from one crack in the sidewalk to another, but he’s dribbling a basketball. The pick-up game is essential to mastery of any sport; it’s how kids come to create new moves and make them their own, how they learn to create and aspire and imagine. Instead we’re cultivating players in little leagues overmanaged by adults handing out juice boxes.”

Those selfish groovy cat American soccer-lovers

ESPN.com’s Jeff McGregor assesses America’s experience at the World Cup, and wonders if soccer means anything to most of the huddled masses, and if it ever will:

“Weirdly, while the rest of us struggle, some of the original American fans, the deep believers and postwar pre-modern footie zealots don’t want to let the game go. They want to keep it for themselves, keep it small and cool and solitary. Like when you were a teenager and you discovered a passion of your own and you held it close and tight; and as soon as your parents found out about it, or even your friends, it was ruined. No matter what you say about soccer, it seems to them like the wrong thing to say about soccer. If you don’t believe me, read the comments on any American soccer thread on the internet. There’s a core constituency there holding the game in trust only for themselves. Holding it hostage, like a priesthood.

“These are the same kind of folks who loved jazz to death in this country, smothered it with the same ‘You can’t understand the beauty of this’ condescension and obsession. Come to think of it, that’s another strike against soccer in the American mind, too: It’s too much like jazz. Too improvisational, too fluid, too ungoverned. Maybe that’s why jazz as a going concern fled this country to Europe all those years ago. We tend to prefer games and melodies that keep us thinking inside the box.”

What the World Cup is all about

Luke O’Brien’s last U.S. dispatch from South Africa sums up the ecstasy and the agony of a very flawed team that nonetheless provided few dull moments: 

“There’s been so much palaver in recent days about the ascendant American squad, so much of it fueled by the feel-good hype that stems from several miraculous near-losses against sardine-size teams. Some of it is accurate. Much of it is wishful hyperbole. In the past two World Cups, the United States has won a single game. Barely. The victory came against a side that was happy just to make the tournament. This is not the track record of champions. (It’s the track record of England!) But that’s how crazy the World Cup is. One day Bob Bradley is dubbed the next coming of Brian Clough. One bad game later, he’s a chump. The reality is that the U.S. national team wasn’t as good as we wanted to believe it was. I am reminded of the simple, irrefutable words of the man sitting next to me at the Spain-Chile game: “The system is not important. The talent of the players is important.” My seatmate: Bora Milutinović, the first coach to take the Americans to the knockout round in the modern era.

“After the disappointment of last night’s loss wears off, we’ll be able to appreciate what the 2010 World Cup revealed about American soccer. The team played ferociously. At times, it played beautifully. By giving up so many early goals, it had to. The games were never boring. Often, they were inspirational. If Tim Howard had somehow headed home a tying goal in the waning minutes of the Ghana game—he came tantalizingly close—it would have instantly gone down as one of the best strikes in World Cup history. Failing a last-minute equalizer from a goalkeeper, Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria will stand as one of the landmark strikes in the history of American soccer.”

You can have your Vanilla Yanks

Ken Silverstein isn’t letting up, USA footyheads. Are you going to lie down and take this? 

“So I’ll admit, all you people now sending me gloating emails — that’s OK, I can take it as well as give it out — the U.S. deserved to advance, no matter how lousy the competition and how lamely it performed.

“Still, cheering for the U.S. team at soccer is like rooting for Killers to win the Academy Award.

“Mediocrity Uber Alles.”

It’s just the American in him

CNN’s Roland Martin is just too hip for you soccer/footy types to fall for the hype:

“Every year I hear fans say that ‘it’s just around the corner’ or ‘this is the year’ or ‘the moment has arrived’ when soccer is accepted along the lines of football, baseball and basketball. To be honest, even the National Hockey League has suffered immeasurably, and judging by TV ratings, the lack of a major TV deal, and limited stars well-known to non-hockey fans, it’s safe to say it is no longer viewed as one of four major team sports.”

Except that no such clarion calls are being made by the people Martin claims. Hockey nuts have done no such thing either, although ESPN is excited enough about the post-lockout revival of the NHL to be interested in re-acquiring TV rights. 

As for MLS, it’s been around since 1996, not 1993. Poor research leads to lazy conclusions. Chastened polemic would have been preferable to this thin gruel. 

It’s the World Cup, stupid

The navel-gazing is non-stop! What does all this euphoria over footy really truly mean?

David Whitley of FanHouse thinks you soccer nuts are getting carried away with yourselves, especially since it was Al-freaking-geria out there, and not Brazil:

“The last minute or so of Wednesday’s match was thrilling. The preceding 90 minutes were soccer.

“In their euphoria, the soccer-philes are making their quadrennial mistake. There is soccer. And there is the World Cup.

“Sure, there will be some residual bump in popularity. But it will be measured in kids who play, not adults who watch. Just as it’s always been.”

Curb your soccer enthusiasm, America

In the most pompous link we here at IIMKI have unearthed, the historian and author Michael Mandelbaum wants you to know you shouldn’t get too excited over this World Cup thing. You see, he wrote about all this stuff in a book before. 

Not only is soccer unnatural to the American psyche, but the way the World Cup settles matches in the knockout stage ought to be truly repulsive to our tastes as well:

“In these games, if the score is tied after the regular 90 minutes of playing time and an additional overtime period, the winner is determined by a competition in penalty kicks, in which players take shots at the goal from short range with only the goalkeeper to stop them. This is a ludicrous way to decide a championship. It is as if the Super Bowl were to be decided by a field goal competition, or the college basketball championship won by a contest in shooting free throws. The failure to devise a more appropriate method smacks of the kind of reactionary Old World lack of imagination that Americans have scorned for three centuries—in this case rightly.”

So think about that when you’re watching the Ghana match tomorrow.

Mandelbaum also natters on about nationalism and why Americans don’t need to identify that way through a sport. That’s because we have people who wear other kinds of uniforms — camoflaged ones — to make us feel better about ourselves.

Leave your ideologies at the door, lads!

Bravo once again for Stefan Fatsis, who is to American soccer blogging what Landon Donovan has become at this World Cup:

“This is where soccer fearmongers on the right and worrywarts on the left are wrong. The apparent concern among certain conservatives is that soccer equals socialism and our personal bogeyman, immigration. Lock your doors, suburban U8 players of America! Over at The Nation, meanwhile, Dave Zirin frets that the comments of a couple of unlisten-to-able D.C. sports-talk radio soccer troglodytes reflect a ‘nasty undercurrent’ embedded in all US victories in all international sports. So let me see if I have it straight: The right thinks soccer is un-American and the left thinks the right will use a soccer victory as cause for American triumphalism. Drop ball, people.

“Anyone with a dust speck of knowledge of US soccer’s place in the world understands that the euphoria surrounding Donovan’s goal and the prospect for the US in this World Cup have nothing whatsoever to do with reinforcing American cultural might and everything to do with celebrating a long-time-coming (and still-not-there) American ascendancy in the rare place it hasn’t existed. Those chants of ‘U.S.A.! U.S.A.!’ aren’t an expression of American superiority. They’re a foam finger in the world’s eyeball from a historically and justifiably overlooked, disrespected, disregarded second-rate soccer country. It’s all about redemption on the field, not politics off of it.”