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Why America Never Fell in Love with Soccer (Football)

It is still regarded as one of the greatest upsets in World Cup history; the day the U.S. shocked the world.
In the group stages of the 1950 World Cup finals in Brazil, center back Walter Bahr marshaled his collection of semi-professionals (mainly postmen and miners) to a 1-0 victory against arguably the best team in the world: England.
The victory over America's former colonial masters created headlines around the world, but one of Bahr's over-riding memories of the event was the lack of interest it caused back home.
"The only person who met me at the airport when we flew [back] was my wife," recalls Bahr, who was a high school teacher in his home city of Philadelphia at the time.
"England was the king of soccer, everyone thought they would be in the final but the papers had nothing in there. The Philadelphia paper, I still have a copy of it, it has a two inch column. I don't think I did a single interview about the World Cup until 25 years later."
While the rest of the world reacted with stunned disbelief -- legend has it several British newspapers didn't report the score at first, fearing that it had been mistyped and England had really won 10-0 -- back home Team USA's exploits had been met with almost complete indifference.
A clear illustration of the long, and not always happy relationship the U.S. has had with soccer.
As almost every nation on earth embraced its rapid spread around the globe, the U.S. remained one of the few, resolute outposts of abstention. But why has it been so difficult for Americans to take soccer to their hearts?


Colonial Legacy
Part of the answer can be found in soccer's parentage. Whilst the British were using its colonial missionaries to spread soccer, the U.S. chose instead to invent its own national pastimes, in a bid to aid nation building.
So when the newly codified version of association football, or soccer, arrived on America's shores, a different type of football was already evolving. The U.S. universities of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and Columbia each played their own versions of the game, some using their hands, others using their feet."In the 1880s and 1890s the game was being exported by English missionaries, or mercenaries as some would see it, to the U.S.," explains David Wangerin, author of "Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game."
"Soccer was pushed out by the rugby variation [of the game], Americans thought it was their destiny to devise games on their own without relying on the old country. There was no interest in games that were seen as un-American. That persisted right up to the 1970s."
But it was Harvard's rugby-based rules that largely won out in a historic meeting between the colleges in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1876, rules which would eventually lead to the game's distinctly "American" character with its touchdowns, snaps and lines of scrimmage.


Immigrant Initiative
"There was a desire amongst immigrants to fit in," says Wangerin. "Multiculturalism wasn't high up on the American agenda back then. You wanted to fit in so you played American football."
By the turn of the twentieth century, soccer was being kept alive by immigrant communities in pockets along the east coast, concentrated in cities like New York, Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Teams were usually attached to big factories, like the successful but short lived Bethlehem Steel FC, and by 1921 a small professional league -- the American Soccer League -- had been set up. For a young Walter Bahr growing up in Philadelphia, and at a time when the American national team finished third at the very first World Cup in 1930, there was only one path to follow.
"In my neighborhood, Kensington, only two sports were played baseball and soccer, and baseball was for the summer," recalls Bahr. "Philadelphia was divided by ethnic groups and a lot of it was based on what work was available. My neighborhood was a textiles area, so we had a big British influence, Scotch and Irish too. St. Louis had a lot of soccer through the Catholic Church because they had an order of Irish priests and kept the game going in their parish."


Part-Time Passion
At 15 he joined the Philadelphia Nationals and, after the interruptions of the Second World War, won three league titles with them before being selected for the World Cup squad destined for Brazil. But the part-timers found it difficult getting any kind of playing time before the tournament.
"In 1950 we played Besiktas of Istanbul, in St. Louis. They beat us badly, 5-nothing. It was a tryout as much as anything, and then we faced an English select team with Stanley Matthews playing, in New York, and they won 1-0. Those were the first times the World Cup team played together. The next day we left for Brazil. It took us two and a half days to get down there!"
After the team's shock victory against England, Bahr went on to enjoy a long career as both a player and a coach, but the victory against the old rivals failed to seer soccer into the public consciousness.
"We never had our own stadiums so we played on baseball fields like Ebbests field," says Bahr. "In 1953 we played an English select team. It was only three years after the World Cup, the same teams that played in Brazil, at Yankee Stadium on a Sunday. But the Yankees had final say on the games; if it was bad weather they had the right to call it off in case we ruined the field. There was a torrential downpour that morning and they postponed it until Monday. Only 7,000 turned up in the end."


The Awkward Alien
Normal service had been restored, England winning 6-3 in front of a half empty stadium. The American Soccer League limped on in various incarnations until the 1980s, briefly tussling with the superstars of the North American Soccer League for supremacy. But soccer could never quite shake off its tag of being an alien, foreign game.
"Soccer won't ever reach the height of baseball or [American] football and it probably won't be as popular as ice hockey," suggests Wangerin. "But it will find its place. One analogy I've read is that soccer will be more like a boutique coffee shop, rather than a massive supermarket."
For now, though, Bahr and the handful of surviving teammates must manage the many interview requests from U.S. magazines, newspapers and TV networks eager for their story ahead of June's World Cup finals in South Africa, where the USA. will once again face England. Was he surprised by all the attention he now gets from the media?
"You can say victory has a thousand fathers," laughs Bahr, paraphrasing former U.S. President John F. Kennedy. "But defeat is a bastard. That's an old one for you."

The Case for Global Warming Stronger Than Ever

One of the many crimes that climate scientists have been accused of lately is that they claim absolute certainty in a field of research fraught with uncertainty. Sure, the planet is warming, say skeptics, but that's happened throughout Earth's history, long before humans were burning fossil fuels. So, how can we be sure this isn't just a natural phenomenon?

Yet a search through the much vilified Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports shows that absolute certainty is notably absent. In the most recent document, for example, published in 2007, the authors write: "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG [that is, human-generated greenhouse gas] concentrations."

If that doesn't sound definitive, it's because, as the authors freely admit, it isn't: climate science continues to evolve as new evidence comes in. Indeed, back in 2006, even before the latest IPCC report was complete, researchers in Britain were already planning to launch an update. Helmed by the U.K.'s Met Office (formerly known as the Meteorological Office), the update, published March 5 in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is based on more than 100 peer-reviewed post-IPCC studies. The new data may shift the evidence for climate change, but none of it weakens what the IPCC said three years ago.

By looking at a wide range of observations from all over the world, the Met Office study concludes that the fingerprint of human influence on climate is stronger than ever. "We can say with a very high significance level that the effects we see in the climate cannot be attributed to any other forcings [factors that push the climate in one direction or another]," says study co-author Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

Plenty of these climate effects had already been observed at the time of the 2007 IPCC report, including warming temperatures, shifts in rainfall (wet regions getting wetter, dry regions getting drier) and the increase in summer meltback of Arctic sea ice. Those patterns have continued, and in some cases gotten worse.

Some entirely new observations have been recorded as well. In its 2007 report, the IPCC did not include the impact of Greenland's or Antarctica's melting glaciers in its estimate of future sea-level rise, saying it lacked sufficient data. But now the speed-up of flow from these glaciers has been documented. And while the IPCC noted in 2007 that every continent had warmed throughout the 20th century except Antarctica, that continent has now been shown to be warming as well — very likely due to man-made influences, says Hegerl.

There's plenty more evidence in the Met Office report to support global warming. But the question from critics remains: how can we be sure this isn't just a natural phenomenon? Scientists haven't done a good enough job of communicating how they distinguish human versus natural influences, says Hegerl. The answer lies in climate models — massive computer simulations that allow the scientists to project climate effects in various scenarios, including those in which humans do not emit any greenhouses at all. "We go out of our way to check out other explanations — by assuming it's all explained by solar activity, or by solar activity plus volcanoes, or by combinations of any of the other natural forcings known to affect climate," says Hegerl.

According to the models, none of those combinations can produce the climate patterns currently being observed in the real world. Add the greenhouse gases that we know humans are generating (and which we've known since the 1800s tend to warm the Earth, all other things being equal), and the simulations finally come close to matching the real world. Its possible, albeit far-fetched, that the simulations are defective. It is even less possible that all of them (and there are many) are defective in the direction of overstating humanity's contribution to warming.

Again, none of the evidence adds up to absolute certainty, a rare commodity in any field of science. The U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced recently that an independent panel of scientists, representing national science academies from around the world, would review the IPCC's research procedures — an effort to account for the 2007 report's mistakes, for which the IPCC has come under hard criticism. But while the U.N. group may benefit publicly from more transparency, it won't change the fact that more than 99% of the scientific details in the 2007 report have already withstood the most intense scrutiny. The fact that climate change evidence that was "very likely" a few years ago has now been declared likelier still by the comprehensive Met Office report suggests that the evidence for human-caused climate change is getting better all the time.

Behind Bars®: Smirnoff Flavored Vodkas

Generosity Can Be Contagious

One person's initial generosity can spark a chain reaction of benevolence, according to the latest study from prolific social contagion researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis. The findings, published early online in the March 8 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences add to the duo's previous research into the social contagion effect on everything from obesity and loneliness to happiness, optimism and quitting smoking. In this latest research, James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California San Diego again teamed up with Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociology professor at Harvard Medical School to see if it truly does work to "pay it forward."


To test their theory about the potential spread of cooperation and generosity, Fowler and Christakis recruited volunteers who didn't know one another, and ensured that every individual interacted with each other participant only once, to rule out the possibility that generosity might be the result of increasing familiarity. Subjects participated in games in which they had the opportunity to foster cooperation by contributing money to others (in what the researchers referred to as a "public-goodx game.") They found that, compared with those who hadn't benefited from others' generosity, study participants who received money in an earlier game were more likely to give money in a later game. Ultimately, the initial person's contribution was multiplied up to three times—a result in keeping with earlier findings on social contagion suggesting that this sort of ripple effect continues for three degrees of separation.


Though it may be encouraging to learn that altruism can be passed on through social networks—particularly in light of recent tragedies in Haiti and Chile that left so many people in need of help and kindness—the study also found that selfish, uncooperative behavior tended to spread through groups. That contagion effect was no more pronounced than that of generosity, however.


And while both cooperation—and the lack of it—may spread through social groups, it's more likely that benevolent ripple effect had significant evolutionary benefits. Actions that increased cooperation likely increased a group's ability to survive, the authors suggest. And because generosity can be contagious, one initial altruist may have been all it took to spark cooperation throughout a whole village.


Fowler and Christakis wrote about the influence of the contagion effect through social networks in the 2009 book Connected.

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Amin Maalouf's Dereglement du Monde

Lebanese novelist and writer Amin Maalouf is preoccupied by sectarianism, which he readily left in Lebanon decades ago, and its increasingly hold across the world.

Maalouf’s most recent book “Dereglement du Monde: French for Disorders of the World,” is a candid cry against confessionalism and the resulting loss of collective intelligence in the West and the East.

In his latest book, Maalouf offers a poignant account of the miseries of our world today, urging all to re-evaluate their stances.

Maalouf denounces the political system in Lebanon, and says he has long considered it “subversive.” The writer says his dread of confessionalism was mainly due to his Lebanese origins.

“Lebanon, where I was born, is the typical example of a country divided by confessionalism, that’s why I never sympathize with this subversive regime,” he writes.

Maalouf, adds that while confessionalism might have constituted a remedy for the disease in the past; in the long run it proved to be more harmful than the disease itself.  He compares confessionalism to a drug that the entire country has become addicted to, and which “weakens its body and intelligence day after day.” The 1993 Prix Goncourt laureate for “The Rock of Tanios”, deplores Lebanon’s confessionalism and blames the ancestors for having taken part in it. “Confessionalism was in the end a swamp that our fathers must have never sank in,” he writes. Using elegant language, Maalouf argues that disorder spreads and consequently confessionalism has widened its grip to almost everything. He adds that identity replaced ideology long time ago in the Middle East. “We have moved from a world where rifts were mainly ideological and where debate was incessant, to a world were rifts touch upon identity and where there is little, if no place for debate,” he writes. According to Maalouf, this global trend has had devastating effects in the Middle East. In “Dereglement du Monde”, Maalouf blames the Arab world for lacking “moral consciousness,” and accuses the West of making use of this absence to dominate the world.  “The Western civilization is, first and foremost, the creator of universal values; but it has been incapable to properly transmitting those. Humanity is paying the price for this gap,” he writes, in one of the book’s most powerful passages, which reveals a bitter disappointment in all that he had believed in. Maalouf’s book reveals another facet of the Lebanese author. His mind is a made up of contradictions that yield positive and humanist reasoning. He is a Christian who defends Muslims, he is an Oriental lover of Europe, and last but not least he is a Lebanese who despises confessionalism.

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