Japan is in the grip of 2014 World Cup fever and I’m under pressure to keep up with it for the sake of professional conversation. That’s right, I’m a professional conversation coach. The average English student here knows their basic grammar well enough. They simply lack the gift of the gab, which this old Irish American has in spades and is paid to impart. But sadly I couldn’t care less about the only thing most people have on their minds this summer. Well, that’s inaccurate. While soccer’s down there toward the bottom, I certainly care less about golf. I’m happy to play most sports, even if I couldn’t be bothered to watch them. Not the “sport” of golf.
About the only sport I find even remotely interesting is ice hockey, but outside of North America I might as well be a fan of jousting.
I’m really not a sports guy to begin with, but in the interest of social versatility and professional development, I think I make a respectable effort.
I can appreciate America’s bafflingly-named sport of football. I can even watch a bit from time to time; the Super Bowl at least. Explosive bursts of sumo-esque action. Twenty-two behemoths crushing through each other. Elegant strategy. And when eleven guys are chasing one guy with a ball, the tension can really mount, waiting to see if they’ll bring him down or if he’ll escape to keep going, yard after yard. lots of surprises and unpredictable plays. The game never stops for long, the cheerleaders are easy on the eyes, and the three-plus hours fly by. Bonus points for presentation and good commercials.
As much as I like hockey, I should also like the fast-paced sport of basketball. But it’s too hard to follow. The uniforms are too similar and the view of the action isn’t clear; usually all I see are a bunch of arms and legs. There doesn’t seem to be much more strategy than helping the team’s superstar slam dunk the ball repeatedly, effortlessly. Kinetic, dynamic, physical, but hard to follow and lacking in sophistication. Maybe I should try a live game.
When I look at soccer, I see ten guys chasing a little ball around a field for ninety long minutes. Scoring isn’t any higher than in hockey, but at least hockey has plenty of breathless, heart-stopping scoring attempts. And half the blocked shots on goal don’t bring the action to a crashing halt; the goalie just pops the puck back into play without missing a beat.
The soccer field itself is huge. If the ball is on one end, it’s probably going to be there for a while. There aren’t that many surprises. And watching people run around on a field that large gives the illusion they’re moving slower. Ants may be able to run 70km/hr (if they were human-sized), but from way up where my eyes are they seem to be barely moving. In hockey the ice skates keep everyone whirling around like stick-wielding electrons around a neon atom. No one’s ever just standing around waiting or catching their breath (except the goalies, who loom like Jason Voorhees, and can spring out into play or switch out for an extra player at any minute (usually the last two, for the hail Mary of hail Mary nail-biters).
The wind-resistant soccer ball lazily floats from kick to kick around that sprawling meadow, while a puck can move from one goal to the other in seconds and a strong lead can flip in minutes.
The ice in a hockey arena is large enough that the players don’t form a visually impenetrable mob like in basketball, and not so big that action is diluted.
Soccer halves drag on for over forty-five minutes whereas in hockey they have twenty minutes before the buzzer sounds and the DJ cranks up the best rock of any sporting event.
Once you learn how to follow that little puck’s movement, the game makes for a gripping sixty minutes. Players can’t let up for a moment. It’s intense and relentless.
Neither soccer or hockey display much strategy the way football does. But at least in hockey you have clear formations and some clever, coordinated assaults. In soccer they just seem to keep passing the ball around until someone takes a shot, or someone falls down holding their shin, or the ball gets kicked out of bounds, which seems to happen alot. Hockey padding reduces injuries and adds boldness to the assaults (and blood shows up so well on ice).
Surprisingly, I’d even care more about baseball. It’s slow and pastoral, but it’s unpredictable and has an interesting rhythm. Some guy’s gonna throw a ball toward a guy with a stick. What’s going to happen? Will the guy with the stick hit it? That ball’s gonna be going really fast. And if he does hit it, where’ll it go? And will anyone catch it? And while they’re trying to catch it, what will the runners be doing? It’s a bit like a circus. If only they could quicken the overall pace a bit.
There are other sports, like tennis and yachting. But I think you’d have to have some deep, personal investment in those to start watching.
So here I am in Japan, teaching conversational English as a profession, where I have to keep up on the daily news and progress of one of the most unwatchably boring sports in order to pay the rent. Hey, gotta play to the customer’s interests, right? I just wish more people liked watching Fringe and old movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment