When is a football not a football?
Answer..
When it's a football.
One of the first skills that I learned as a child...somewhere between brushing my teeth and fastening my cuff buttons with one hand, was the art of blowing up a soccer ball bladder and then lacing the outer casing closed without puncturing the swelled bladder inside the supple leather.
As I recall, I only had to repair or replace two such fragile balloons before my dexterity grew sufficient to the task. I doubt whether these soccer balls are even still produced today, certainly I haven't seen one in years. But then again, there are other reasons for that. In 1967, having spent years acquiring such potentially valuable skills as lacing up soccer balls and getting grass stains out of cricket whites I emigrated to America...land of the dollar paved streets.. bright lights, fast women.. all the things that a barely weaned Yorkshire Moors lad yearns for in between Latin lessons and grammar school prefect's tasks.
And I found those things in the maelstrom that was Sixties North America... found 'em easily.. didn't even have to look. But I didn't find any soccer or cricket. They had baseball, which in many ways was similar and in some ways even superior to cricket, and occasionally one would run across a section of town where sufficient recent immigrants had smuggled in a soccer ball and taught the odd curious local the rudiments... but no more "Match of the Day" for me. All those long Saturdays of my youth spent paying rapt attention to the stats and standings among the assorted shifting leagues were to no avail. I had spent years preventing my parents from having friendly neighbours by kicking my ball against the outside of their lounge wall from five 'til bedtime and now this magnificent dexterity and ball control was suddenly made cruelly redundant. In America, they had something called football... but it's not football. For one thing, the ball hardly ever touched a foot and in most cases when it does it's a foul. For another thing, they wear armour... stiff neoprene and plastic padding that would protect Lancelot his own self... but they aren't allowed to really hit each other. They can tackle and push and grunt and fall down on one another and rumor has it that they occasionally bite and gouge and scratch while they are unpiling. But, although it sounds like Rugby, it's not even close. American football players look upon rugby players with a combination of awe, respect, fear and disbelief. The average National Football League player is actually only on the field for a couple of minutes at a time and they all have two or three backups in case they twist an ankle or wrench a shoulder. Although it's true that they are indeed superb physical specimens for the most part and good athletes in their own right they are almost inhumanly deformed with massive upper body strength with which they call lift ten thousand men, but they can't open a tight jam jar lid because they don't need hand or wrist strength too much. They are ungodly big and menacing looking and they have turned the simple game of "Queenie, Queenie, who's got the ball" into a capture and defeat marathon worthy of Macarthur and Monty.
It's an odd game and it was quite some time before it made any sense to me at all. What simply looked like twenty two men engaged in run-around wrestling with a ball tossed in for no apparent reason, gradually crystallized into a ballet of some grace. There actually is a method to the chaos and a purpose to the brutality. NFL football, when well played and coached is a thoroughly exciting game and the men who are the skill players and who naturally make all the money are a rare breed of athlete indeed. They have to combine brawn and brain, muscle and mentality, strength and savvy with some kind of strange innate sixth sense of where the other fourty three players are on the field at all times.. they have to perform their particular task in only a couple of seconds and if they fail or even do so incorrectly they risk great physical damage to themselves or worse, to their teammates.
I gradually became a casual watcher, and then a fan, and then an afficianado and finally an expert... not in the dry statistics and crumbly minutia of the teams, players and histories but rather in the more intangible and ethereal sense of the game and it's players. I began to notice the differences in styles of play and the idiosyncracies of the individual coaches.
After thirty years, I have recently returned to my mother land. It is interesting to me that, despite all the efforts and marketing and promotion, soccer has still not caught on in America and conversely NFL style football has not caught on in Britain.
And I think that I finally understand why.
In America, when they try to play or teach or coach soccer, they do so as though it were simply NFL style football with a different shaped ball and less padding. It's still very much a game of offense and defence.. of territory captured and held.. of position and individual battles and skirmishes. There is little or no sense of appreciation simply for the flow of the game... that magical thrust and parry that allows one to watch and thoroughly enjoy a goalless tie in Soccer. A game where no-one scores and no-one wins is poison to the American sportsman, since theirs is a culture where only winning counts, where victory is the sole measure and sportsmanship is for losers and whiners. Only in America would they have invented the "Shoot-Out" as a means of ending tied games. It is an ugly aberration, an insult to the very essence of the game and I was mortified when I first witnessed it.
It is tempting to see these comments as negative, as some sort of judgement against the American sensibilities and even to suggest shortcomings of character and attitude which we British have in spades... and then some.
But that's not what's intended.
You see, there is that same sense of magical flow in U.S. football, but instead of it taking place over a ninety minute game...each individual play in NFL style football has it's own meter...it's own small movement within the overall symphony. There's a lot happening on that hundred yard field, and much of it is difficult to see and follow. Only when one has watched enough of it does one begin to realise and appreciate the smaller nuances of skill and accomplishment which tend to take place away from the ball. In soccer, almost all the action is around the ball, rarely does one focus elsewhere. But in the NFL, how one gets to the ball, and how the ball gets to it's destination is often a combination of the movements, fakes, speed and agility of several players in combination with the mistakes, flaws or shortcomings of the opposition players. Soccer is a game of time and space whereas NFL is a game of strategy and execution. neither game can be played with the attitude brought to the other, nor should it be watched that way. It is fitting that America, for all it's diversity... for all of it's attempts to assimilate and merge every divergent culture which it embraces has found soccer to be virtually unsaleble to it's own people. And just as fitting that Englishmen have found American football to be as indecipherable and unenjoyable as to not merit the effort necessary to understand it.
It's been fun trying to point out to you just what it is about the NFL style of football which bears making such an effort and to hopefully do so in a manner which will allow and encourage the most casual of sports fans to see this wonderful game as something more than fourty odd idiots plowing senselessly into one another for little visible reason and no apparent reward.
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