Ten Things About American Sports We English Just Don't Understand

Ten Things About American Sports We English Just Don't Understand
by Ian Wigley

As a youngster, I was practically obsessed with the New York Yankees, not because I was a frontrunner—they’d won nothing for years—but simply because they fascinated me. I was baseball mad from a tender age, kind of strange for someone from England. There were very few of us around; most people this side of the pond were more interested in Manchester United and cricket.

Further down the line I became more interested in American sports. My interest in the NFL grew, as did my fascination with the NBA, college football, and finally, college hoops. I was a mutant! People of my age and nationality should be following footy teams around the country, not being obsessed with Michael Vick!

Anyway, I digress. I'm fast moving away from the point I'm trying to make, which is this: us English folk just don’t understand the American way of sports. Despite my vast knowledge, I just don’t get it. I could hark on about this for hours, but instead I’ll highlight it in ten relatively concise points.

1. Things Last Too Long
Granted, our cricket games last for five days, but the majority of our other sporting events last quite a short amount of time—for example, football (90 minutes), boxing (47 minutes, count ‘em!) and tennis (couple of hours, tops). But the American way of life dictates their sporting events last a matter of hours, bottom line. American Football (3 hours), baseball (3 hours before extra innings), basketball (3 hours).

How? The games are scheduled for 60 minutes in the NFL and NBA, so why the expansive playing times? Here, we kick the football off at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon, and at 4.50pm we’re all sitting in the pub celebrating our victories or mourning our losses. You blokes, you play for hours! God help that lot that sit out in Lambeau Field on an icy December Sunday afternoon!

2. Stop-Start-Stop-Start
I adore the game of football (U.S. football), but why the devil does the game keep stopping and starting so often? Fair enough, the game’s staccato to begin with, what with the 4 tries to get 10 yards rule, but what’s all this about getting down on one knee, throwing the ball here there and everywhere to stop the clock, running into the ESPN camera-guy to get another two-second play?

And as for basketball, it’s even crazier! You have to take a guy’s head off to get the clock stopped! How strange is that? In football, our football, you might get 3 minutes extra at a push, and that’s only if some poor guy’s got his leg broken or his teeth kicked in? But not in the U.S., oh no, stop it every three or so…seconds.

3. Quarters, Not Halves
Now that’s just hopeless. Didn’t Dan Marino’s heaven-knows-how-many-million-dollars-each-year not allow him to play a game without having three rests? In 1994 when the U.S. hosted the World Cup, they tried to split the games four ways. Laugh? The whole of Europe almost wet themselves.

4. Those Advertisements
“Today’s game is brought to you in conjunction with Dick’s Automotive, Mr. Woo’s Chinese Laundry, and Fletcher’s Bakery”; “This action replay is proudly brought to you by Clarks’ Bike Store and Roger’s Barber’s,” to mention a few. Well, actually the sponsors are more corporate, and from companies I wouldn’t give the time of day to, but you get the gist. Fair enough, we stick sponsorships on our football and cricket shirts, and our tennis players flaunt the makes of the rackets they use by means of symbols on their hats and shirts, but I can honestly say the games over here aren’t brought to you ‘in conjunction with a whole cornucopia of large companies’. Why?

5. The Team
I refer not to the team on the pitch, but to the other team—namely John Madden, Greg Gumbel, Armen Keteyan, that lad from the Bowden family, and the rest. There are usually three or four people reporting on a football match over here: the commentator, his sidekick, the presenter in the studio, and (tops) two in the studio giving comment. You folk in the U.S. have a whole slew of guys in there.

Two different sets of commentators, a host of about five in the studio giving comment, a half-time team, two or so folk down on the sidelines talking to the coach and the quarterback, and people marauding the crowd for comments. Man! No wonder the execs at ESPN complain that profits aren’t big enough! They’re spending all the money on an army of reporters!

6. The College Game
If I went to the local pub on a Saturday and said to someone, “University of Sheffield play King’s London at basketball this afternoon, fancy it?,” I’d get looked at like an idiot. Go to any bar in downtown New York on a Saturday and utter the words “Florida State plays Florida this afternoon” and the guy in front of you starts high-fiving you, ordering up beers like there’s no tomorrow, and then foaming at the mouth. Why? I adore the college game—some of the best games of U.S. football I’ve ever seen have come from college team match-ups—but why do they take precedence over the pros? Same goes for hoops (March and April are my favourite months, mind you). We just don’t get it over here.

7. The Single-Man Domination of a Sport
In our sport (read: football), there hasn’t been one player who has dominated the sport in the way, say, Michael Jordan dominated basketball for years, Tiger Woods dominated golf for so long, and to a certain extent Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio took baseball and shook it up. It doesn’t happen.

Pele, famous Brazilian footballer, best ever, never dominated football (simply because 8 or so of his teammates at that time were almost as good as him). George Best, a drunken, Miss World-dating football legend who retired at age 27 (a football player’s prime over here) was streets ahead of most players in the Football League, but he wasn’t anything as close as prolific or as dominating as MJ was in the NBA, or Joe Montana was in the NFL.

We have our heroes and our talents, but they’re never as removed from the rest of the pack as your heroes are—I’ll just list a few more to ram my point home: Alex Rodriguez, Dan Marino, Shaquille O’ Neal, Magic Johnson, Steve Young, Muhammad Ali, Pete Sampras, Ben Hogan, Venus and Serena Williams...do you catch my drift? This syndrome is best highlighted by Michael Jordan, but backed up fully by that lot above.

8. The Tele
We have the U.S. equivalent of cable over here—it’s called Sky. There are four primary sports channels (Sky Sports 1, 2, 3 and Sky Sports Extra) and a couple of offshoots (British Eurosport, and another non-descript offshoot). All carry live games almost daily (Thursday for some reason is a dry day) and all show some highlights. But there’s nothing close to what kind of sports coverage you lot get in the U.S. It’s stupid. Seriously, you guys are spoilt rotten. I’ve done my fair share of time in the States and I was like a kid in a candy store, I was made-up, it’s absolutely phenomenal.

It’s law here that at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon (when 99% of our football program takes place) you cannot watch a live football game on network TV or Sky. It’s illegal. 12pm, 1.45pm, 5pm on a Saturday, fine. 8pm Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, cool. 12pm Sunday, 4pm Sunday, fine. But try getting live football on a British TV screen on a Saturday afternoon at 3 and you might as well get searching for Lord Lucan.

Go to Norway, Germany, Spain, or Denmark and you can see Everton play Manchester City at 3 on a Saturday for free! Not in England. As for you, you get the whole NFL program live (granted it’s regionalized unless you have a special dish), baseball twice daily, NBA, college hoops, college football times 10 on a Saturday, the College World Series, the lot. I can’t get my head around it!

9. Why didn’t it catch on?
I'm talking about football. If the New York Yankees joining forces with Manchester United in terms of friendship and sales figures didn’t finally seal the deal for football in the U.S., nothing will. Why didn’t footy catch on in the U.S.? Every single other continent in the world has it, but you lot just seem to ignore it. Okay, I’m exaggerating a little; ESPN holds it, and if you go to a decent sports bar you might get the odd Newcastle game at 8 in the morning your time, but as a rule, there is very little interest.

I can’t name anyone from the States who’s anyone in footy (Brad Friedel, sorry, but he plays in our league). Another telling sign: if footy in the States was anything big, our lot would be over there. David Beckham would have gone, Michael Owen would be there, Wayne Rooney would be there, and you lot would have poached Alex Ferguson to manage DC United if you cared anything for football. It’s a money thing—you pay better wages, give better exposure to your stars, and give more adulation to your heroes. But not in football, otherwise you’d be sitting down to your dinner watching Rio Ferdinand run rings around the rest of your country's stars. You lot just haven’t got football yet...and it’s something us (and the rest of the world) can’t get.

10. Baseball
I just don’t get it. I love it so much, but I just don’t get it…neither does anyone else over here. Anyone want to explain me the rules? We can make head and tail of NFL and hoops…but baseball, heck, no one understands it.

Long live Derek Jeter!

Ian can be reached at ian@babblog.com.