I know it’s been awhile since I’ve made my presence felt in the Saw*Kick community, far too long. For that I apologize, can we still be friends? Anyway, let’s see if we can move forward: Today I’m writing in response to a heated exchange between The J-Man and Team Alpha here on the WSKR radio waves regarding the value of soccer. Having enjoyed participating in several seasons for both sports, I consider myself a pretty fair arbiter between supporters of the two sports. There are a few questions we must ask regarding the value of soccer in our society, I’ll try to answer them as best I can, if that’s not good enough you can go to hell.
What is a fair reflection of the value of a sport? Fan base size? NASCAR enjoys a fan base that rivals the NFL in this country (read: a whole shit load of people care about it); does that make it a good sport? Nay. Does the number of countries that a sport is followed in make it a valuable sport? Cock fighting would probably be the most important sport in the world if you use that logic, so nay again. I submit to you, Saw*Kick viewer/listener, that the value of a sport is reflected in popular culture’s interpretation of it. I ask you, (I really enjoy these rhetorical questions), is there a better symbol of pop culture than movies (moving pictures for you hicks out there)?
That being said, can you name ONE good soccer movie that doesn’t involve a dog? The only three soccer movies ever to be released outside of Brazil are “Air Bud: Soccer Mutt”, “Lady Bugs”, and “Bend it like Beckham.” All of these are absolute treasures of cinematic history. Where is the passion? Why a dog? Just about every other sport has a few movies that reflect the passion of its fan base, and soccer gets a fucking dog. Basketball has “Hoosiers”, Football has “Rudy”, Hockey has “Slapshot”, hell, even bowling has “The Big Lebowski” and NASCAR has “Talladega Nights”. Meanwhile, soccer gets cross dressing, a 15 year old broad, and a three legged dog. This is how America views your sport, as some kind of side show. Frankly, we don’t give a damn what the rest of the world is playing.
Which brings me to my next point, few sports movies capture the aura of a game better than baseball movies. “Field of Dreams”, “The Natural”, and even a flick like “The Scout” shows how deep seeded baseball is in the American psyche. If you can watch the final scene in “Field of Dreams” without getting a little misty, you should question the validity of your life. If you can watch “Lady Bugs” without getting an errection (whoops, Freudian slip) you’re probably still normal.
I know that there are some soccer fans out there that will probably come up with a few movies I didn’t mention, but that doesn’t detract from your sport sucking. Having shot down any other method of measuring the greatness of a sport, I must conclude that soccer will always be on the American back burner, next to sugar free chocolate and compact cars. It’s just the way it’s gotta be, WAR, BETTER MOVIES FOR ALL, OUT!
Amen. Think about it, Soccer’s most memorable moment in the US involves a chick ripping her shirt off after scoring a goal causing the male america to say, “hey, if this shit happens regularly, id check it out from time to time.” This led to womens FIFA rankings to skyrocket only until the males realized it was a freak occurrence after being let down. That is all soccer has.
I get that soccer players have to run around a lot and baseball players, to the unintelligent observer, just stand there and get fat, but there is definitely a lot more going on. There are, if I remember correctly, 8 basic athletic traits. Endurance and agility are only two of them. Hand-eye coordination is an athletic trait as well. So is power and speed. These are traits more closely associated with baseball in certain ways. Well, speed is coveted in soccer as well I suppose. The main point being, you cannot only break down a sport based on who runs around more. That’s ridiculous. However, none of this analysis does anything but show one thing: They are both legitimate sports. Period. They are both athletic, but just in different ways. I see no reason to have beef with either of them.
All that being said, I agree with Ian. The deciding factor in which sport is better should come down to which has the better movies. And indeed, baseball movies shit on the back of soccer movies. I’d argue the list is as follows:
Baseball
Boxing - (The Rocky series alone destroys soccer movies)
Golf - (caddyshack is heavily weighted here)
All-Valley Karate
Football
Basketball
Wrestling - (No Holds Barred, mostly)
Bowling
Poker
Hockey
Dodgeball
Fight Club
NASCAR
Soccer
I put about 8 seconds of thought into that list, so feel free to hold it completely illegitimate. But whatever. Soccer is last. (Although I hear the movie Victory is really awesome.)
Wait? What? GOLF??? GOLF is number three? But it’s not even a sport! It’s a hobby. I mean, come on. How can it be sport when the goal is to get a negative score, there’s no time limit (even baseball has innings), and the players ride in electric powered cars between shots. What is is?
Is Hollywood really the determining factor here? WOW. I guess fact isn’t stranger than fiction, it IS fiction.
In terms of a sport movie index, golf, in my view, is one of the best. Caddyshack– being transcendant beyond the label sports movie, Tin Cup, Happy Gilmore and A Stroke of Genius: The Bobby Jones Story. It’s a pretty good lineup, with Caddyshack bearing the brunt of the awesomeness.
In terms of actual athleticness of a sport, obviously golf doesn’t rank that high. Golf does require high quality skill to play at a high level– maybe more so than any other sport. In some sports an athlete can rely on his or her speed or strength, or one particular attribute to really carry them and perhaps hide certain other deficiencies. Golf needs a more polished, high caliber mastery to be a pro. What hacks do on the weekend when they ride in carts and drink beer is clearly not a sport. But what the golfers on tour do is definitely a highly specialized sport. No amount of steroids or HGH or anything can get you over at a high level. It’s not so much a competition between people as it is within yourself. It takes an insane amount of focus, hand eye coordination, balance and mental toughness to REALLY play golf. It is the most self-defeating game there is–well, in my view, and it takes a highly determined and focused athlete to master it (even though it cannot be mastered). The hardest basic thing to do in sports may be to hit a fastball, but in golf you have to play your foul balls. But then again, golfers may have warped perceptions on life. When you get to a certain level of golf addiction, it’s impossible to obejective. I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore. Anyhow, Caddyshack kicks ass.
I agree with chris b/c i feel golf is more adaptable to the real world. A perso n who hits a fast ball isnt able to succeed in stuff other than baseball. SOmeone with mental toughness has a ton going. PLus when things are bad in baseball, you can blame others, golf there is no one to take the rap
To be fair though, you need mental toughness maybe the second most in baseball. The game is thoroughly built on failure. The best hitters in the game fail about 6 every ten at bats. There’s even a category for errors–telling you how many times you individually screwed up. Even during a season, look how many times a team loses. Baseball is determined by a willingness to accept and then overcome a lot of failure because you cannot succeed a majority of the time. You just cant. But, you still need more of it in golf because there is only a max of like 5 at bats every game, and if you pitch you’re out on the field only every few days or so. In golf, whether it’s a drive over a pond or a one foot putt, you need to stay focused for every single shot and then accept all the failure that will no doubt happen whether you focused or not–because most likely you still suck at it.
I guess caddyshack is a good movie because it takes something boring and makes it entertaining. Yeah America’s pastime and favortie sports are Baseball and Football.
Somebody talked about the odds involved with baseball and hitting. I feel the odds in boxing are underappreciated. It takes only one or two well placed hits to knock someone out, which is the point of boxing. Yet, how many punches are thrown? About half of those thrown punches are actually landed and a very small amount of those are considered “solid” hits. With as many rounds as there is in boxing, the goal (a knockout) is still not always achieved.
You want to talk about hard? Try knocking someone else out while they are trying to knock you out. Sure, in some sports you have to defend your goal, basket, homebase, endzone, etc… Try defending your face.
Hmmmm, well, movies considered I can see the point Double C is making. Caddy Shack is on my “to see” list, and Happy Gilmore is a classic. Good call.
However, still not convinced Golf is a sport. See, I’ve always figured a sport is where one person is directly pitted against another. Like a pitcher verses a batter, a boxer vs a boxer, etc. Golf, while it does indeed take a lot of skill and people do take it seriously, doesn’t have that. It’s all about who can hit the ball closer to a hole. It’s skill verses skill, not man vs man. Where’s the sport in that? I’ve never seen a golfer dive in front of another golfer’s swing, or making a long run to intercept a flying ball. Hell, even the audience is told to hush up to allow the golfer to be free of distraction. There’s no pressure except for what the golfer puts on himself.
It’s hard to really defend golf for its sports validity to those that really don’t get it. Mainly, my argument would be that the sport is more man v nature. Each golfer is playing against the course and the conditions of the course. The cold, the heat, the green speed, the rough, the trees, the traps, the pin placements– everything. It is the golfer that can conquer all of that with his mind, shot-making and nerves under pressure that wins. Who in the competition can take that day’s challenge and prove to be better than the other? Plus there are match play competitions that directly pit one golfer v another, althought it’s not the standard tour setup. And also, I think the crowd noise thing is invalid. For one, in golf there isn’t a home team. Even though most root for Tiger to win, there is not a traditional rabid rooting interest. It’s a gentleman’s game, the crowd is there to observe and appreciate, not be a “Sixth Man” or whatever. It’s like watching a painter paint, you don’t want to fuck him up, especially when what he is doing requires extreme focus. Maybe if there was constant cheering it wouldn’t be too bad, but a sudden clap or yell at the right time–at such a close close distance like golf fans are to golfers, would throw even the best players off. In other sports the sound is too muddled and in the distance. No doubt it plays an important factor, especially in football and basketball, and can affect the weaker athletes, but like we’ve said, golf is just a different animal entirely. Now ,whether one considers that animal to be boring because of how it is played and whatever…that’s completely subjective. It is what it is. But, I still make a case that professional golf is a sport. It’s one of the first sports really…so can’t it just stay one?
I do agree that boxing is probably the hardest sport. I also so think that gymnastics has to be considered one of the hardest. I’ve always had problems calling judeged competitions sports, but you have to admit that what gymnasts do is impressive. It is an extremely specialized and difficult athletic skill to master and it entirely based on unnatural movements. I don’t know, don’t know a whole lot about it, just throwing that out there
Well shucks, pig wrangling must be a sport then!
In all seriousness, I like the points Double C is making except one: Golf is NOT man v nature.
1) Golfers typically golf in an ideal setting. A veritable paradise even. People pay big money to go to these golfing locations for the view alone.
2) What with all the golf course maintenance that goes on, there is extremely little left up to nature. Every square inch of the course is landscaped by man. A golf course is about as natural as Pamela Anderson.
That’s true, but the landscaping can a lot of times offer more challeneges than if it was not landscaped. Greens are made a lot faster. Sandtraps are put in. And you know…there’s other stuff. Sure, Man v Nature made it sound like golfers climb mountains and wrestle grizzly bears, and perhaps is an awful overstatement of my point– but I didn’t exactly mean for it to be taken so literal. I also didn’t know how funny it would look in hindsight. Let’s all just move past the letter of my point and get to the spirit of it. Golf Rules! Wooo! (Seriously though, all of this golf back and forth, which came out of absolutely no where, is killing me inside. I need to play golf. Bad. I mean it. This is way too early to get that golf craving. Damn you Scrybe. Damn you.)
look. there are talents and there are sports. Golf is a talent. Golf is not by any means a sport. There is no one blocking the hole, there are not uniforms. No teams. It takes place over days. There is no time clock. Someone carries your equipment for you, you get to drive a cart., man i could go on and on forever. Golf is a mind GAME. It takes an extreme amount of skill to perform well. BUT i will never take it as a sport, especially when John Daly says that he plays his best rounds DRUNK! OH! and YES i a have tried to play golf and i suck. I play hockey, so i thought that i could get the hang of it. I didnt. so i respect it. but i will never consider it a sport.
So what’s a sport? I’ll tell you right now…..they all are. But how do you compare them? By movies? Not for all. Where is horse racing? Anyone remember the movie Seabiscuit? It won 10 Academy Awards (did a little research) And that didn’t even make the initial list. I don’t personally think of horseracing when I think of sports, but then again the horses don’t run around the track all by themselves. Ever seen a jockey fall off? I’d say that’s more traumatic then the best floor check any hockey players ever recieved. however, without a doubt, if your judging the best sports by the number of good movies, soccer is bringing up the rear. (Ladybugs being a major contributor!) In my oppinion….The four most difficult sports are (in order of which came to my mind first) 1) Soccer; 2) Baseballl; 3) Golf; 4) Hockey. I’ll start with soccer. Soccer is an endurance, and skill sport. Professionals (Not including MLS, I’m talking about REAL professionals, not our league of misfit players) run around for an hour and a half straight (halftime not included) with a ball attatched to their foot. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s a constant game of positioning, endurance, and skill, and whether it’s embraced in America or not doesn’t change that. Now baseball….I think it’s misleading to say a fastball is the hardest pitch to hit. It’s the off speed pitches that make baseball so difficult. If you got in a batting cage and took a little bp from Iron Mike, after about a month you’d be tearing the cover off the ball (I know because I did). It’s easy to hit a fastball. It’s the pitch that came before it that makes it difficult. I think golf speaks for itself….anyone who’s played already knows. If your like me, you suck, and you respect those who don’t. I like the point someone made about man vs nature. That’s exactly what it is….as well as man against self, and man vs man. Just not in a physical matchup. As far as Hockey goes, that’s a true sport. And although I’ve never watched a game in it’s entirety until the playoffs role around, I need not be a fan or participant to understand how difficult it is. I’ve been on ice skates 4 times in my life and that was difficult enough. In my opinion (opinions are like ass holes, everyones got one), any activity that mixes ice, a puck, and a stick will forever be considered a sport…… And if you added trampolines, you’d probably find it in the X-Games! (which no one mentions wehen talking about sports)…….Finally, Boxing would get a honorable mention in terms of most difficult sports, make no mistake about it. I do think however for something to be a true sport it has to have some sort of governing body that make everything legitimate, so I’ll leave it out on a technicallity.
Well, for your information, those movies that u named are RETARDED soccer movies! have u seen Goal, Gracie, She’s The Man, Shaolin Soccer (that one is just funny), The Game Of Their Lives, Kicking and Screaming,Once In A Lifetime, A Shot At Glory, and Victory! well all those are GOOD stories about soccer! and non of them involve a DOG! so piss off! soccer ROCKS! and its proved to be the second hardest sport through high school 1st is NOT FOOTBALL! but Wrestling which i agree w/ that! but before u diss soccer! think about the real, cool, movies that are fake and retarded
I love how insecure you yanks get about football or soccer as you derogatorily call it.
You know that it is the most popular sport in the world, most important, most watched, most revenue generating, most discussed and most loved. Your american “football” aka padded rugby is not. And it drives you insane.