Here’s a little intermission from my genocide memorial posts, which you can anticipate more of this week…
For the record, I realize that with this, I’ll be fulfilling age-old gender stereotypes that smart women as far back as my grandmother have been fighting, but I’ve always preferred honesty to -isms, even the good ones. And so I share with you my feeling of utter incomprehensibility upon encountering the sports page.
The reading of which must begin, like any preternaturally stupid idea, with a reasonable justification.
Mine is Africa–yes, the whole, big, one-hipped block of it. Soccer is perhaps the one thing where generalizing about an entire continent reasonably approaches true. Africans–men, anyway–love soccer. Er, football. Decals, logos, and team shirts are everywhere, and after awhile, you kind of start to feel that if you don’t know the latest football news, or at least know that it is called a ‘goal’ and not a ‘point,’ there’s an entire swath of society you can’t interact with.
Now, I’m pretty practiced at that swath. During that Year of Aimless Searching after college, I put in a real effort to learn about football–American football–and at least keep up with the Mountaineers’ record in my mind. I never carried a database of player stats or kick off times in my brain like proper West Virginians, but I did figure out how to talk about downs without sounding like I was trying to be cool. It only took about 10 months. I did all this because there were people I couldn’t talk to–about things otherthan football–if I couldn’t at do the Mountaineer small talk.
Here, the spectrum of people I feel cut off from is a little more narrow, simply because the spectrum of people I can talk to, in my too-barely-there-to-even-be-broken French and my virtually non-existent Kinyarwanda, is already so small. But I keep critical company who must be pacified, and soccer…football…is easier to speak than anything else.
The members of that company are cab drivers, and I like to keep them as my friends, because I always find myself needing one suddenly, and because they are generally nice people. So for them, and because there was nothing else to do while I waited for a friend, when I finished reading everything else in the paper today, I turned to the sports page.
Like the rest of the paper, it was written in English–not even local English. It was a story from Reuters, the Wire Service in the Land that Invented WASPs, Pubs, and the King’s English. Here is the first graph:
- Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool switch their attention away from European glory and back to the English title race this weekend.
Before I began my question to understand all things soccer, I would’ve told you that Manchester United is probably a mining union agitating for fairer wages, Arsenals should unquestionably be heavily regulated by international treaties, and there’s absolutely no reason to race, by foot or in potato sacks or otherwise, to be called “Duke” or “Squire.”
Now that I have begun a thorough football education, however, I can tell you that those are four soccer teams, and they are playing to…win. To win something distinctly English. Not European.
I can also tell you that, were every person who does actually understand this, all over the world, to raise his beer at the same time, the rotation of the earth would change by exactly the angle at which they all hold their pints.
