Review of chess titans game::What Happens If in Chess a King Can Not Move except into ...
Review of chess titans game::What Happens If in Chess a King Can Not Move except into ...
There are twenty-two athletes sprinting with a blur of athleticism. The starting eleven on each side exhibit why they are some of the highest paid (and watched) athletes in the world. The moments of adrenaline-pumping action unfold in dramatic flair and excitement. The stadium is a festival of jubilant cheers and sporting of team colors. When the battle between athletic titans comes to an end, the winning side never tasted a victory so sweet; the defeated fill with an anguish of the lost opportunity, often with salty tears on their faces. This is the sport of football -- this is the sport that Americans call soccer. Now, just like many of you skeptics out there, I never understood why anybody in the United States would willingly watch soccer when we have football, or what other nations call American Football. American Football (football for the rest of the article) has violent hitting, stars that children aspire to be, a chess-like strategy, and rose to prominence through the idea of the blue-collar American worker. Beginning to gain momentum in the 1970s as the sport of America, slowly overtaking baseball as "America's Pastime," football has shown no sign of playing second fiddle to any other sport. Well, that is until recently, but I will get back to that in a due course -- Coming from Western Pennsylvania, you will be hard pressed to find a region in this country more "blue-collar" than the steel belt. This is the area of the Polish miners, the German steel worker, the Italian butcher, the Irish laborer. This is the area of the classic European immigrant who came to this great land and through hard work, made a better life for their children. These are the people who looked to the gridiron to see heroes like Lambert, Blanda, and Namath lead their teams every Sunday. These are the people who sent their children to college, becoming the first from their lineage to receive an advanced degree. While many of these children have entered white-collar society, they continue to carry the weight of growing up in a blue-collar household. Football carries a certain nostalgia of sitting on the couch with your father and uncle as snow began to pile up outside, with the smell of log burning in the fireplace. That nostalgia will never die, nor will it ever be replaced. That is rightfully so. Now, this first generation of white-collar workers are having their own children, who are beginning to play soccer in record numbers. Still, soccer is seen as just that: a sport for children. In this blue-collar society, soccer and football have a distinct rivalry. I played football for eleven years and remember arguing with soccer players about which sport was "better." I was not alone that saw soccer as, "a sport of the yuppie, one to be played by Europeans, suburbanites, and anyone else who was afraid of a real man's sport." Conversely, these yuppies argued back stating, "Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. And, football is nothing but barbaric as idiots hit heads against one another." Nobody would ever truly win these arguments, though both sides would walk away frustrated yet filled with a false sense of superiority. What we failed to understand during these heated discussions was that each sport is its own. We failed to take football or soccer for what it is. The same principle applies to one's preference between grilled salmon or steak. Both can be exceptional cuts of meat. Both have a myriad of ways to prepare and cook. Yet, to argue one is better than the other takes only an individual's perspective and tastes without understanding that both are equally tasty, albeit very different in flavor. If you take a bite of fresh Alaskan Salmon and wished it was New York Strip, you fail to appreciate the salmon. If you are watching soccer wishing it was football, you will miss the subtle flavors that make this international sport great. Now, many of the folks in this country make many of the same arguments. For one, people say the game is too slow and not enough action. While there are indeed long periods between goals, sometimes going two full hours of play with a 0-0 tie, this can add to the excitement. In the NBA, a combined final score over 250 points is not a rarity. Offenses in the NFL, and now officiating, now favor explosive quarterbacks like Peyton Manning and Tom Brady throwing dozens of touchdowns every season. Scoring is exciting. However, our society has developed into one with an undiagnosed form of attention deficit disorder when it comes to entertainment. We have become so accustomed to the era of Michael Bay explosions and sex appeal in our movies that we fail to catch the everyday moments of excellence in an actor's performance. In sports, we care only about those moments of scoring, not about the athleticism on display for our enjoyment. Yes, soccer is a low-scoring sport. However, the 90 minutes of athleticism is something of subtle beauty. And when a team does score, it is something of pure excitement. A goal means so much more to a player, to a team, and to the fans when it is something special. Another problem people have is "stoppage time." For those of you completely unfamiliar with the sport, soccer has a continuous clock. The teams play for 45 minutes, take a 15 minute break for halftime, and play for another 45 minutes. If an injury occurs, the referee does his or her best to keep track of lost time, only to tack on the cumulative total to the end of the half. While in ways it would be more accurate and make sense to stop the clock, the current rule system allows for a couple of things very foreign to American sports. First and foremost, there are no commercials during the half. That also means there are no "TV Timeouts." Have we reached a point in our society that we cannot watch an event for 45 minutes straight without taking a break to go to the refrigerator for more bean dip? Further, the final two minutes of a football game can drag on for a half an hour depending on time-outs, commercial breaks, booth reviews, and whatever else might come up. In soccer, once the 90th minute rolls around, the referee announces the stoppage time. From this point, the game will last that length of time. If it is four minutes, the match will end in four minutes. The second thing about stoppage time is that it can add an unbelievable amount of tension, excitement, and heartache to the match. If you doubt this, just watch Landon Donovan's 91st minute goal needed to advance the United States into the final 16 of the World Cup in South Africa. (If the above video did not excite you, see what fans all over the world experienced at that moment) An additional grievance people have in the United States is that it is unnatural, even inhuman to exclude the use of hands in a sport. I made this same argument to a friend of mine in college. He played soccer as long as I had played football. "How can you even call it a sport if you take away a human's greatest gift: OUR HANDS!" I stated with a level of credulousness. Paul replied, "That's one of the beautiful things about this sport. You have to play it without one of your greatest tools. Now THAT requires athleticism." I stood there, dumfounded and without being able to counter his statement. Would I consider wheelchair basketball any less of a sport because the athletes cannot use their legs? What about offensive linemen in football? They are not allowed to use their hands except as blunt force objects as "holding" is against the rules. How could I consider soccer any less of a sport that challenges its athletes in such a way? Another gripe from Americans is born from the confusion of the leagues. This takes some time to understand. However, if you are able to differentiate which leagues are the best in their respective country, you can begin to appreciate what it means to be in the top competition. In the United States, it is easy to determine which football or basketball teams are the best in the country. They are the ones in the NFL or NBA. Pretty simple, right? Soccer leagues in nations throughout the world tend to have multiple tiers, much like baseball in the United States has the MLB and various farm leagues. One major difference in soccer is the mobility of teams. Let us use the English leagues as an example. The Barclay's Premier League is comprised of the twenty best teams in England. Right below that is the Football League Championship (football in this sense is soccer). Now, the worst three teams in Barclay's Premier get demoted to the Football League Championships while the top two (and teams three through six compete for the third slot) are eligible for promotion to Barclay's Premier. Similar set-ups are in each subsequent league, thus allowing for complete mobility among the teams. Now, having grown up and lived in Western Pennsylvania, by default I am a Pirates fan. I use the term "fan" very lightly largely because they have not had a winning season in the last 19 years. The owners have figured out a way to maximize profits, which just so happens to be through losing. If baseball had the same mobility, that would allow teams like the Columbus Clippers and Tacoma Rainiers to have the chance to move from their AAA Baseball Championship into the Major Leagues, and force teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates into either trying to compete each year, or be forced into the second tier of baseball. This league set-up would force better competition at all levels. This ensures that soccer matches maintain the highest levels of competition and effort on all levels. As I argued with people in both high school and college about how soccer is for Europeans and suburbanites, while true to an extent, this stereotype largely ignores a basic fact. Soccer is played by all nations of the world. It is the only team sport where practice does not require any other equipment besides a ball. Poor children in the streets of Nairobi, Bangkok, or Lima are able to work on the same basic skills for success as the wealthy children of Berlin, New York, or London. While soccer in the United States is still perceived to be largely a game played by suburbanites domestically and European juggernauts such as Germany, Italy, Spain, and others have enjoyed years of dominance on the global scene, soccer is the only sport where money and population size do not equate to victory. As of May 2011, the FIFA Rankings for the world's most populous countries are the United States (24th), China (75th), Indonesia (132nd), and India (147th) respectively. There are 203 national teams in FIFA. On the flip side, Slovenia has a population of a little more than two million people, just a little more than the city of Philadelphia. They are currently ranked 21st overall. This leads me to my final point -- People in the United States have a distinct level of pride. As a nation, we generally view ourselves as a beacon of light for the world. We are the white city on the hill for which many others aspire to be. We have the most powerful military in the history of the world. We helped those "ungrateful Europeans" out of war twice in the last century. Like Charlie Sheen, we are used to "Winning!" For Americans, it is hard to get behind a team that lost two consecutive World Cup matches to Ghana. It is hard for Americans to unify and cheer for a team that, while still among the best in the world, fall far short of being one of the elite nations. It feels un-American to not be dominating this sport as well. Our men's national team struggles against these elite teams, having to play a counter-strike strategy relying more on a breakaway instead of controlling the game (now, this is not the case with our women's national team as they have never finished worse than third in a World Cup. Let us hope this trend does not stop as the face a tough Brazilian team on Saturday). Yet, what is more American? What is more reflective of the history of this great nation and its great people than having to work hard against all odds to get ahead? What is more blue-collar than that? And in this time of uncertain collective labor agreements for the NFL and NBA, where both leagues greedily fight over the record profits between players and owners, why not embrace the athletes who are most blue-collared in this country? While teams like Barcelona, Manchester United, Chelsea, and Real Madrid are some of the most expensive franchises in the world, soccer in the United States has something to prove. Players in the MLS need to roll up their sleeves, put on their hard hats, and get to work. Fans in this great country, let us get behind our two national teams, and make United States soccer a force to reckon with. |
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