“Coulter fouls World Cup fandom with politics”, Ellis Henican Column, Newsday, June 29, 2014
Does everything have to become instantly partisan — everything?
Forgive my naivete. I just hadn’t realized I was undermining American values by rooting for scrappy Team USA as it powered and lucked its way through the Group of Death and into the knockout round of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Turns out my enthusiasm is a threat to all we stand for.
So says conservative performance artist Ann Coulter: “Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.”
Soccer, she writes, is anti-individual and pro-immigrant. “I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time.”
Oh, really? Try telling that to the hordes of Long Island children — native-born and otherwise — for whom soccer is now organized sport No. 1, bordering at times on secular religion. Try telling their parents, whose entire weekends are now consumed by soccer schedules and who in some extremes have confronted the two most life-altering words in the American suburban vocabulary: “travel team.”
Try telling them.
Coulter isn’t the only right-leaning pundit on an anti-soccer tirade. “I’m a little suspicious of yet another bread-and-circus routine,” says Fox News medical analyst — and forensic psychiatrist! — Keith Ablow. “This is a way to distract people. This is like Rome. I can see why Obama would love the World Cup.”
Citing data from the Experian Marketing Services, The Wall Street Journal’s Dante Chinni notes the “World Cup’s Blue Base.” Liberals, he finds, “are more likely to say they’ve watched the World Cup soccer matches than conservatives.”
That, right there, may be the real mistake these soccer-bashers make. Yes, the world gave soccer to America, not the other way around. But in this great nation of immigrants, strengthened for centuries by its diversity, soccer is becoming irreversibly embedded in the national DNA. What could be more American than that?
Plus, as any 8-year-old boy or girl on Long Island will tell you immediately, it’s a really fun game, even if it does require Mom and Dad to get up super-early on Saturday morning and drive you everywhere. USA! USA! USA!
KEY POSITIONS
1. Striker
2. Defender
3. Midfielder
4. Goalkeeper
5. Bloviating Slanderer
ASKED AND UNANSWERED
Now that 631 is getting too crowded, what’s your choice for LI’s next area code? Did someone just suggest, “666”? . . . Has Jay Jadeja just out-Bloomberg’ed Mike Bloomberg? All soda has been yanked from the menu at his health-conscious West East All Natural Bistro and Bar in Hicksville! . . . Why did bail forfeitures and criminal fines come in so much higher than Port Jeff budgeted for? Is that a sign of trouble or a good $32,000 problem to have? . . . Is Jose Offerman hiding in the Dominican Republic — or just busy down there? Attorney J. Craig Smith says the ex-LI Ducks slugger is ducking questions in a $4.8 million lawsuit over a bat-wielding 2007 attack on Bridgeport Bluefish Matt Meech and John Nathans . . . Did anyone notice that the $2,975, three-bedroom, family-sized apartments were the first to lease at Patchogue’s $80 million New Village complex? What’s the message? That LI families are sick of mowing lawns? . . . Coincidence? LI gas prices top $4 a gallon just in time for the first week of summer? . . . What was Richard Ortiz thinking — or was he? Cops say the 45-year-old car salesman from East Meadow drove his teenage daughter and three friends to Abe Levitt Park in Hicksville to fight another girl, then assaulted a 17-year-old boy with a crowbar for stepping in? Ortiz can explain in court.
THE NEWS IN SONG
One fight, whole world, one night
“We Are One”
by
Pitbull