Strikes back

[cosmolinguist]

So a couple of days ago we had a Super Bowl and my twitter feed was full of British people saying "they wear armour!" "they don't play on grass!" (?) "they wear shiny trousers!" "that one's so fat he looks pregnant!" (which pissed me off in about three separate ways at once) "the game stops every five seconds!"

...Okay, that one's fair. I still can't get used to the way, in rugby, when the ball hits the ground and a bunch of people pile on it, they just get up and keep going eventually. Handegg is annoyingly stop-starty, especially towards the end.

So I'll grant you that. But can we please shut the fuck up about all the rest of this? And it being called "ponce rugby" and everything (I'll be getting back to the homophobic slurs, though).

But let's talk about rugby for a minute. I love watching rugby. I love a lot of things about rugby. I've got notes for what might be an opus of an article about rugby for Andrew's magazine. I am enjoying the Six Nations and looking forward to the World Cup. I come here to praise rugby, not to bury it.

But!

Yes they share certain commonalities but American football is not rugby. You can't notice how huge the players are ("he's eating for two," hur hur, "when's the due date?") without also admitting that it might suck pretty bad to get hit by him if you were standing there in your jeans and t-shirt. Rugby players are strong and brave and prone to unbelieveable amounts of injury in their game. But you know what? So are American football players. It scales up. The effort that's put into a scrum that you can watch develop over at least a few seconds in a rugby game is all directed one-on-one across the line of scrimmage in football in a fraction of a second. Even as it is there are a dangerous amount of concussions and bodily injuries in football. But this doesn't mean handegg players are "soft" or "weak". It doesn't mean they're effeminate or gay versions of rugby players. (Not least because there are bound to be effeminate and gay rugby players already, who manage to play rugby just fine! there is nothing inherent in heterosexuality or a certain kind of gender presentation that makes you better able to play the game.)

For fuck's sake. It's 2011; we're living in the future by now, we're supposed to have flying cars and Martian colonies; can we get past this hang-up over what other people do with their bodies for fun? Whether it be which sports they like to play or who they like to shag. And one should be of no more importance than the other to people who aren't involved.

There are three ways (no: four -- no one likes the Spanish Inquisition!) that I have heardd people -- mostly English, mostly sports fans, and by no means all English people or all sports fans -- particularly denigrate North American sports. The first as you've already heard is homophobia.

The second, not unrelatedly, is misogyny.

"Basketball? Oh that's just netball. A game played by girls."

I have heard this since I first visited the UK (my brother-in-law was a wannabe young-urban-American type person at the time, so had basketball jerseys and the like, and thus provided lots of opportunity for me to hear about netball), but I still don't know a lot about netball. "During general play, a player with the ball can take no more than one step before passing it, and must pass the ball or shoot for goal within three seconds. Goals can only be scored by the assigned shooting players," Wikipedia tells me. Yeah, that's nothing like basketball. Sure it derives from an early form of women's basketball, yes there is a basket, and a ball, but if I was dropped onto a netball court I'd be utterly useless, because I'm used to moving with the ball!

It also tells me "Senda Berenson, a teacher at a nearby women's college, developed women's basketball the following year, with modified rules designed to accommodate the social norms regarding appropriate conduct and attire for women, and contemporary notions on their limited physical capacity." So clearly basketball isn't "just" netball; it was designedto be a different thing, for women. With this in mind it makes sense that the players are not allowed to run around as much as you do in basketball. Which, in my experience, can involve a lot of pushing, hair-pulling, shouting, tripping people... and yes I was playing with girls!

I also learn it is an internationally-played game, with Test matches and everything, and can be played in the Olympics. And even without that, forgive me if I remain unconvinced as to why I shouldn't like something just because girls do it.

As misogyny is present in criticism of both football and basketball, the third kind of critique -- that something is childish or "just for kids" applies to both basketball and baseball.

Because baseball, of course, is just rounders: a game played by schoolchildren.

Again I don't know a lot about rounders, so again let's see what Wikipedia can tell me. "The bowler (or "feeder") bowls the ball with an underarm pendulum action to the batter. It is deemed a "good" ball if it passes within reach on the striking side between the batter's knees and the top of the head." Uh, yeah, no. That's not how you pitch in baseball, and throwing the ball at the level of the batter's head is not a good thing.

A batter need not run on a hit. They can be out if they drop the bat when running. You can have as few as six fielders, and no limit to the number of batters. There is some resemblence to the design of the game -- four bases -- but all these rules sound a lot more like cricket to me. It does seem to have a lot of the features of cricket with the fiendish complication reduced enough for schoolchildren to enjoy it. I definitely think, if I played that as a kid, it would be cricket rather than baseball that would seem to make most intuitive sense to me. Of course this game is neither; they are branches on the same evolutionary tree, but that is all.

The last reason, slightly less related than the other three which are all about how inferior it is to be various kinds of people (queer, a woman, or a kid), is also about baseball. I could not count the number of times somebody, probably thinking he (it is almost always a he) is the first to have thought of this, points out what a rubbish name the World Series is for baseball's championship series. "They call it the World Series but America wins every time, funny that."

My problems with this are manifold.

First among them the fact that I love baseball so much I feel like someone is kicking my puppy. But, getting past that, I must next point out (lest Dan my pedantic Torontonian baseball fan friend beat me to it) that the U.S. has not won the World Series every year, because there are Canadian teams. The Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993 (and Dan is still bitter that they didn't get a chance to win it in 1994, when the season ended early thanks to a strike).

The next thing is that I can't believe that English people, aware of or fans of English football, don't recognize multiculturalism in a team that may be located in one city made up of players (and coaches/managers) from all over the world. This is what baseball is. It's so popular in Japan that when one of the first games in the last World Baseball Classic was played there, the fans were so loud it could've been an FA Cup final. Baseball is an aspiration and a way out for lots of people in the Caribbean and Central and South America. During that last World Baseball Classic almost if not all the teams participating (Australia, Canada, China, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Panama, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Taipei, USA and Venezuela) featured players from MLB teams.

Thinking about this while watching a Six Nations game last weekend, I wondered if the reason baseball's international nature is ignored by the British people who talk this way is because we don't have countries playing each other. Like they do in rugby... or football or cricket... Hm. All games that the English invented, and exported to their then-colonies. Taught to their public school boys to make them good leaders; taught to the other boys to make them willing to sacrifice for their teams, taught to Indian princes to get them fighting amongst themselves rather than against the Raj...

Yeah, that presentation I did on Sports and Empire in college is still coloring my thoughts there. The English privilege international tournaments; the North Americans want to subsume the international into their tournaments. As my friend Plok (you don't mind if I steal your ideas and lovely turn of phrase quote you, do you dear?) said when I mentioned this to him: Very interesting opposing methods of putting nationalism into sports -- "all these countries are playing our game and speaking in our accent" vs. "our game's bigger than other peoples' nationalisms".

Of course he's Canadian too and we might be spinning these things in a way favorable to us. I don't think so, but then of course I wouldn't, would I?

Still, it all comes down to this English tendency to say "oh, that X is just our Y," like the Romans when they nicked all of Greek mythology. complexicon had, in an earlier incarnation, a brilliant story about gruff blokes, construction workers or something, at a canteen confronting a rather middle-class description of a menu item with comments like "bleedin' fish pie, innit." Which no, it wasn't, but this is perhaps understandable as naming things gives you a lot of control over them.

There's a lot of lack-of-control implicit in moving to another country; you have to adapt, you have to be flexible, and it can be a lot of work sometimes. It gets tiring. Sometimes you just want things to adapt to you a bit instead. I don't think writing this will make that any more likely, but it has made me feel better for articulating it.

Comments

[sfred]

I'm not very articulate today, so, briefly:
- Brilliant piece. Thank you.
- Basketball is nothing like netball At All at all at all. (I can see more similarities between rounders and baseball, but can still see that they're very different).

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad you liked it! I was hoping not to end up sounding humorless or English-hating; it can be a delicate balance :)

I am actually surprised, after having heard for years that rounders = baseball but never investigating it, how much more like cricket than baseball it seems to be. The laziness of these insults is practically an insult in itself! ;)

[sfred]

I was hoping not to end up sounding humorless ...
It is a noted feature of me that I really don't like humour consisting of insults or intended insults, even if it's clear they're not meant seriously, so I think I'm a good audience for you here. :)

[cosmolinguist]

Excellent :) You're the best kind: thoughtful and observant.

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Of course, the fact that baseball is probably based on rounders... (I cite wikipedia too! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_baseball)

I think that's the crux of it, really. We had sports before you had a country, you young whippersnappers, call that an old building? my SHED is older than that! etc.

I'm doing well with my comments on that post. I got caught out in sexism too. I don't think I like the person I turn into when I get all into sporting things, because I almost found myself commiting the cardinal sin of saying it's all just good-natured banter...

Sorry.

[lurpak.livejournal.com]

Cuh. I like watching some sport but I hate the bone-headed comments it attracts. Can't these people at least think up something original? I remember the 'basketball is like netball, ie, a game for girls!' comments when I was at school many years ago. zzz. For one thing, they have very different rules. It's a bit like comparing squash to tennis. For another, netball's a fast and physical game and not a soft 'girlie' option by any means.

Great post.

[cosmolinguist]

Can't these people at least think up something original?

Exactly! I'd be a lot less fed up if I didn't hear the same few things all the time :)

netball's a fast and physical game and not a soft 'girlie' option by any means

I think the fact that the people most likely to make derogatory comments about stuff like this are men, and thus don't know what it's like to play something like netball, and thus don't know what they're talking about, have that much more reason not to be listened to :)

[po8crg]

Netball is great, too. When the Commonwealth Games next comes around (next year, I think), I suggest you watch/listen some - I expect you'd enjoy it.

[cosmolinguist]

I would definitely be interested in that. :)

[rocketeddy.livejournal.com]

You make some good points, but I cannot agree with a lot of what you said.

Cricket is not fiendishly complicated - as a child it was my favourite sport and very easy to understand. I also find your idea that it's closer to rounders than baseball quite peculiar. Perhaps you could expand on that a little for me?

We Brits are notoriously scathing of others' activities. Any sport that isn't played by us, is deemed rubbish by default. This applies equally to the games of other nations (baseball, basketball, etc) as it does to the games of choice of other Brits (rugby fans vs footy fans etc). In short, we're a bunch of elitist pricks with a superiority complex.*

Having said that, I would like to challenge some of your views.

Most sports have a hierarchy that follows a form of geographical escalation. From "local" leagues of casual and semi-professional players who play against their neighbours, to "regional/state" and then "national" teams, who compete against other nations. This distinction is made more complicated these days by the introduction of international players in the professional leagues, but the escalation of skill/prestige from these teams to the national teams remains.

For us, the idea of a "world competition" is defined as the best sportsmen of each country competing against each other for national prestige. This is true of the Football/Rugby world cups, but also of the Olympics. It's also true of ice hockey, which is also decidedly not a UK sport.

To create a competition, call it a "world" competition and go against this definition (no national teams), strikes us as appallingly arrogant. If there were teams from London, Manchester etc competing, we would still not consider it to be a WORLD competition any more than the European Cup-winner's Cup is.

*I use "we" loosely. I generally lump overly enthused sports-fans into the "stupid Fanboy" category alongside biebermaniacs and girls who want to marry Prince William. Just because somebody is a talented sportsman does not make him (or her) your BFF, any more than somebody's skill at directing movies means he shouldn't be prosecuted for pedophilia.

[cosmolinguist]

I do, totally, understand your point about the World Series not being as much like a World Cup as it sounds like it should be. I am not saying it's the best name for the tournament :) It's what we've got, it was chosen in the very early years of the 20th century, a time when America was if anything even more convinced now that it is the world. This is not great. But in the end, it's just the name of a thing, we baseball fans have no control over it (and indeed my dad and other Americans I know have pointed out how silly a name it is; it's not like Americans don't notice), so leave us alone :)

I think rounders is more like cricket than like baseball based on things I have learned in a cursory reading of rounders on the internet this morning, so I may well be wrong! But I adore baseball and am fairly well-informed on (and very fond of!) cricket. The rounders rules I pointed out ("A batter need not run on a hit. They can be out if they drop the bat when running. You can have as few as six fielders, and no limit to the number of batters") are all things that cricket has that baseball doesn't. It honestly seems to me like it'd be more accurate (not completely! but closer to being accurate) to say this is cricket with more bases and only one batter at a time, than to say it's baseball with no gloves, different pitching, no walks or strikeouts, different numbers of fielders and batters, different ways of being/not being out, etc. Maybe this reflects my more nuanced knowledge of baseball than cricket, but it does seem like it is a smaller jump from rounders to cricket (or vice versa) than rounders to baseball.

[diffrentcolours]

I'm not convinced that an international competition necessarily needs to consist of national teams rather than teams of many nationalities. After all, the UEFA cup is played by individual sub-national teams, and I've not heard anybody complain that it's not "properly European".

[rocketeddy.livejournal.com]

"International" is not the same as "world".

UEFA is difficult, because football today has become an international industry as much as it is a sport. However, the cup is essentially a league which allows teams from different nations to compete, and the name "European" accurately defines the area from which those teams can compete. Although the nature of football today means the players within those teams can be from anywhere, a team from Brazil cannot compete in the cup.

If UEFA said teams from e.g. Poland cannot compete, then Polish people would be perfectly justified in complaining that it's not "properly European".

[mammadibiba.livejournal.com]

I really enjoyed this post.

L used to play American football and judging by the damage it has done to his back (prosthetic discs or lose 10% neck and some arm function), I know it isn't a soft form of rugby.
I can't claim to understand it rules wise, so I can't say anything about it, except that it looks nothing like rugby to me!

Still, I live in a country where if it ain't football (soccer) or motor-related, and there is a lack of very sucessful Italians, then it just ain't sport and they don't really care!

There's a lot of lack-of-control implicit in moving to another country; you have to adapt, you have to be flexible, and it can be a lot of work sometimes. It gets tiring. Sometimes you just want things to adapt to you a bit instead.

This is so true.

[cosmolinguist]

L used to play American football and judging by the damage it has done to his back...

Yeah, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, when we were learning about anatomy, showing us a little plastic bag in which was some of the cartilage from his knee, torn loose in playing football when he was not much older than we were then. It was awesome for us ten-year-olds to see, of course, but sheesh... you need that cartilage!

Still, I live in a country where if it ain't football (soccer) or motor-related, and there is a lack of very sucessful Italians, then it just ain't sport and they don't really care!

I watched Italy's rugby game last weekend and the rugby fan I was watching with said that Italy's doing really well comparatively quickly (when France joined the tournament, making it the Five Nations, it took them a lot longer to gain the success they have now) but Italians don't seem to notice; your comment bears this out.

This is really a lot like the American attitude to sports (though of course they mean a different kind of football and things other than motor sports, but the attitude is the same even if the particulars are different) so very familiar to me.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Italian-American baseball players, of course, don't count for this. ;)

[cosmolinguist]

They are often more of the latter than the former though :) I remember in the 2009 World Baseball Classic a guy who was then playing for "my" team played for Italy in that series. He was born in California, had lived all his life in the US, but identifies as Italian-American. I can't blame Italians if they don't care that much in such a case -- I don't feel like I'm from the same planet as California, much less the same country!

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Joe DiMaggio was a major reason why Italian enemy aliens weren't interned during WWII in the U.S. the way all people of Japanese descent were, regardless of citizenship. Baseball evidently makes everyone American, or it used to. Sort of.

<-- is a California native.

[cosmolinguist]

Yes, but I was thinking in the context of Italy caring about Italian-American players.

I hope you didn't take offense at what I said about California; certainly none was intended. It is just one of the things people often ask me about when they find out I'm from America, and I've never been there, grew up thousands of miles from there, on a farm on the Central Plains, so have never felt associated in any way with California.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

No lasting harm.

I got what you meant about Italians...I just find it darkly amusing given the history. And there's the whole thing about what sourcelanders think vs. immigrant-descendants.

As far as California? It's pretty much the reverse of the flyover-state pricklies, I think. Amusing tie-in story: When I was in Indiana, I had a moment of, "ZOMG, this looks just like a movie set!" - this is how you can tell that Trinker is an L.A. native.

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, this is always the impression I got too, that it was mutual between California and I; we both agreed we live on separate planes of existence :)

Totally with you on the dark amusement (I'm not Italian, so I don't think what they think about Italian-American baseball players :) )

[trinker.livejournal.com]

*laugh*

I like to visit the rest of the world. It's fascinating.

[emma-b79.livejournal.com]

I actually agree with most of if not all of the points you raised and can totally see why it annoys you. That won't however stop me from saying that football is wusses rugby, after all....how else am I going to wind you up if i stop that? *hugs*

[cosmolinguist]

As I told Daz, I know some things my friends say are different -- and would miss them if they didn't happen :)

[xianrex.livejournal.com]

Some great points. I would also point out that that 300 pound man on the football field can run twenty yards in less than three seconds and do a broad jump of over eight feet. They're big because Newton's laws of motion make them impressive juggernauts and suitable defenses.

The athletes in each sport are trained specifically for that sport, so it's apples and oranges to compare them. A US footballer wouldn't do well on a rugby team, and vice versa.

Rugby, with its fast pace, reminds me of soccer as well.

[starbrow.livejournal.com]

I am not a sports person at all, but just wanted to comment on this:

(Not least because there are bound to be effeminate and gay rugby players already, who manage to play rugby just fine! there is nothing inherent in heterosexuality or a certain kind of gender presentation that makes you better able to play the game.)

Gareth Thomas, Welsh rugby player, still playing rugby, and came out in December 2009. An incredible man with an amazing story. I've met him a couple of times in the course of my work-related activism and it was a real privilege to hear his story. He is currently the only out rugby player ever who came out while he was still playing.

[cosmolinguist]

This is what I get for writing early in the morning before the coffee has kicked in! Yes, with a thinks-he's-Welsh rugby-obsessed bisexual boyfriend, I know all about Gareth Thomas :)

[haggis.livejournal.com]

There's also the Village Spartans but they are not a professional team.

(I got into an argument with someone at work about Gareth Thomas and whether it was possible to be gay and play rugby. Well, I say argument. You can't really argue with someone who just keeps asserting "It's not natural".)

[cosmolinguist]

Or indeed that things which exist are not possible. It's like I usually say about evolution: it doesn't care if you believe in it or not. But surely it's even more difficult to refute the existence of Gareth Thomas!

[rocketeddy.livejournal.com]

Sadly, it's very easy to refute - not his existence, but you can claim his "outing" was a publicity stunt to "sell his story to the papers" or some other such nonsense

[cosmolinguist]

I'd think anyone saying that would have to be very stupid indeed, considering the homophobia that's rife in sports. I am just reading over a Stonewall report about people's perceptions of homophobia in football (which I know is not what Gareth Thomas plays, but I see no reason it wouldn't hold true for rugby as well) where fans and industry executives all say that it would be tantamount to career suicide for a player to come out: one player said he had a mate in League One who was gay and terrified of anyone finding out lest it affect his transfer fees. The first people who do come out in professional sports (and this is as true in the US as in the UK) will have to be very talented, so even homophobes would struggle to "blame"their sexuality for anything, and very brave.

[tdaschel.livejournal.com]

a passionate - and unexpected - post. nice!

when i drive into work, i usually listen to the BBC World Service and .. what surprises me most in their Sports Roundup is the close attention to NBA scores. on the basketball front, i stick to college ball .. but how to explain this? at the risk of enforcing Popular English Stereotypes, is the sport so.closely monitored on account of betting? (nothing wrong with that, mind you / i simply haven't the knack for it)

[cosmolinguist]

Might seem surprising from the outside, but it's clearly a logical progression from the inside of my head :)

As an above commenter says, "We Brits are notoriously scathing of others' activities. Any sport that isn't played by us, is deemed rubbish by default"... and it applies to a lot more than just sports. Ludicrously well-known and popular TV presenters are in trouble for saying Mexican food is "sick with cheese on top".

It's not the arrogance that gets me, it's the overarching pride in it, and the fact that if you don't like it you have no sense of humor, you're the one with the problem. It wears on one, after a while.

I don't know how much of what is on the World Service is actually intended for English listeners :) I've never heard a word about basketball on the regular BBC. But I do know it's a very popular game in Europe and Russia; perhaps they're more interested in the NBA scores?

[spinningtoofast.livejournal.com]

The World Series is called that because it was originally sponsored by the Chicago Newspaper 'The World'. So, there's not really supposed to be a pretense that the series involves teams from the entire world. It could have just as easily been called 'The Gazette' Series. The opposite happened with ice hockey - the World Cup used to be called the Canada Cup until the rest of the world pointed out that Canada wasn't the only country that played hockey.

That being said, I find baseball to be truly the most boring sport ever in the history of the world, with American football a close second. And I grew up with both of them.

[cosmolinguist]

You're the second person in as many days to mention the thing about The World newspaper, but unfortunately (as it's such a brilliant story and makes a great comeback), it appears to be a myth.

Also, hello! Haven't heard from you in ages; it's nice to again.