All week the ball sat there on just the other side of the chainlink fencing. You could reach through and touch the damn thing. Aching temptation to steal it filled my bones.
From the fourth floor window where I am staying I could plot ways to pull off the heist. One bright, shiny, World Cup standard soccer ball would be mine. You know the feeling. From the high window here in Chicago we overlook a soccer pitch. A bumpy and rutted rag of a pitch but marked and lined and equipped with dazzling white posts and pristine blue nets which beg to be billowed by thumped footballs. You know the longing. The ball just lying there teasing you with its possibilities. The sense you get in the park when kids are playing ball and you are hoping in your kiddish heart that their ball will spill your way. The lovely weight of it as you kill it, the glorious spin of it as you oh so casually stroke it back. Sending the pathetic message: You could play. When you were younger and lighter and free you could play. When you see a football coming your way, you get the old itch. Forget the seismic wobble of your gut, the grey locks and the sparse breath. A football makes you a kid again. Yet there for a week in the Chicago sun and rain the football lay unkicked until the clumsy whiteboy team who sometimes come to train on the pitch turned up on Friday and carelessly resumed custody. "You don't deserve it," I cried from the fourth floor, prissy and bitter like James Stewart in Hitchcock. You wonder how soccer is getting on in the United States? If the wild fire delirium of the Women's World Cup has led to anything? Nope. The tiny corner of the American imagination which soccer owns, atrophies and swells but never threatens the status quo. Major League Soccer, the ungainly child of the 1994 World Cup, tootles along blithely. Here in Chicago, The Fire (named with characteristic touch after the city's greatest disaster) draw passionless crowds averaging 16,000. That's about 2000 or so less than the Chicago White Sox baseball outfit average for the home half of their 162-game season. Well less than half of what Sammy Sosa's Chicago Cubs average. The Fire, one of three soccer franchises owned by the same suit, go about their business in virtual anonymity, though the same 16,000 preppy diehards turning up week after week as a form of community service.
The local media dismiss soccer as an endless series of scoreless draws attended in the US by soccer Moms and elsewhere by dangerous hooligans. Lacrosse gets more coverage.
And so a brand new soccer ball can sit in a field for a week. Unfilched. Triggering no kickabouts. Schoolkids, workmen, groundsmen stream past. Nada. No other place else in the world could the ball have gone unkicked, undribbled, unjuggled for more than an hour, not with a net standing expectantly by. American childhood is different though.
When the team that owned the ball finally come back, you would know it. Mid teens, all white, all gawky, mostly wearing English or Italian soccer jerseys. They line out in the correct positions. Their patient coach, radiant in what appears to be tennis gear, shouts a lot. "Come on guys. Go Guys. Neat." The games, alas, are comical. They have the first touch of fidgety elephants, everyone passes ponderously. The game has the pace of the Monty Python sketch where the philosophers team play soccer. Where is the selfish divilment of tricky kids who feel they haven't participated unless they beat five or six players while commentating on their own genius. Beats one, beats two, has a ging . . . ooooooooh.
Where are all the lithe black kids who fill this city's vibrantly competitive (American) football and basketball teams. This lot play the game apparently because their mothers have asked that they be excused from rough sports. Soccer in America hasn't rooted. Kids don't play three-and-in, or dawn-to-dusk games of 10th-winner, don't use the tar seams on the road for football tennis, don't have juggling competitions, don't do head tennis, don't challenge each other to penos, don't play kerbs, don't have a reel of commentators guff running through their imaginations everytime they touch the ball. They don't even have a wardrobe worth of heroes whose clothes they can slip into when they want to imagine their soccer selves. The game peeks timidly out from the scheduling on ESPN and Fox and is there in mystifyingly beautiful Spanish further along the dial but it makes up no part of the mainstream average American TV diet.
The Women's World Cup was a welcome blip, but with fewer topclass women's players available, it has already been conceded that the States won't have a professional women's league, even one like the MLS any time soon.
Soccer won't succeed because the Americans aren't quite as dumb as we like to think. The immigrant communities who make up swathes of the populace in major cities, play out passionately contested soccer leagues in the fields below the skyline but will never be sold on America's soccer product. Back where they came from there is a more meaningful more authentic product. On Saturday mornings you can see the Brits and the Irish for instance streaming to the pubs to watch the Premiership being pumped in by Setanta Sport. This is the constituency the MLS should have gathered in but didn't.
And Americans know it, too. The Women's World Cup was glorious because, in a young branch of the sport, they were able to compete. In the men's game they get their whitey asses amusingly whupped by teams like Iran. It doesn't help the illusion of global superiority. They like to be the best. Even if the World Series is about as meaningfully global in scope as a TileWorld shop, they know they are watching the best. With little exceptions like the town of Kearney, New Jersey, soccer is a pleasant middleclass game here which doesn't offer much earning potential, much glory or much hope of being the best.
And why should soccer succeed in America anyway? The natives sports are among the best in the world. How sad it would be if they were to succumb or if the whole world suffered the same addiction. Baseball is a cultural treasure as distinctive as hurling or Gaelic football. The pale gawky kids took their ball home with them this week. They seemed to resent the responsibility. Next week I may offer to mind it for them. For cultural reasons.
