Go ahead, jump on the bandwagon
By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com
First things first: We're not Italy. We do not collapse in spasms of shame and fits of finger-pointing when our futbol team coughs up a hairball in an important global match, this for two very good reasons:
1) We do not care for and cannot correctly use in a sentence the word "futbol."
2) Ain't no big thing.
In other words, if the U.S. men had bombed out of the World Cup in the first round, they would have returned to the States to deal with a level of blame and bitter recrimination that would be, let's see here, something very close to completely undetectable in the national sports dialogue.
As it is, they've been advancing like crazy, to the point of meeting world soccer legend Germany in the Cup quarterfinals Friday, where they finally lost 1-0. And so they can expect upon returning to be welcomed and celebrated and feted on "Letterman" and, if they're incredibly lucky, brought one at a time onto the set of "Mohr Sports" to revisit their moments of glory. There may even be a People magazine profile in their collective future.
What can you say? We're Americans. Jumping on the bandwagon is what we do.
And here's the inherent problem with that: Nothing.
Let us rise today in staunch defense of the 'wagon. It's the best thing going. We are American sports geeks, after all. We go from baseball to football to hockey and basketball without losing a single day from the calendar. There is no off-season. It's a big, wide sporting landscape out there, and the bandwagon is the only mode of transportation that ultimately makes sense.
We're straight across the board in the major team sports, and still we find time to send the U.S. Open telecast into Nielsen heaven -- but only if Tiger Woods has a chance to win. If that's frontrunning, then all hail the lead dog.
The bandwagon approach has several things going for it. Foremost among them is that it is not necessary, strictly speaking, to understand the game in question, and since this is American sports and not the Middle East peace talks, being not entirely clued in doesn't strike you as the worst thing you could say about a recent convert.
This phenomenon is not limited to sports, by the way. Anybody think Kenneth Lay gets millions of dollars to the good without the unbridled enthusiasm of a bandwagon market of stock-buyers who did not, and do not now, understand what Enron's business actually was? The man could've delivered his company's reports in Senegalese and not been questioned.
An article about the upcoming U.S.-Germany match in Thursday's Los Angeles Times contained the following sentence: "The battle probably will be won and lost in midfield, which should be quite crowded because both teams favor a 3-5-2 formation."
I think I speak for bandwagon-jumpers everywhere when I say, "Ah, the old 3-5-2. My locker combination in junior high." But what is important, here and now, is that it doesn't matter in the slightest whether or not we catch the specifics. If full knowledge of soccer's intricacies might enhance our viewing pleasure somewhat, basic ignorance is no disqualifier on the 'wagon. We're talking soccer, not the solution to world hunger. They get a ball close to the goal, you lean forward in your seat. They score, you pump a clenched fist. We can do that.
Rooting for a hot U.S. team on a world stage is the easiest thing imaginable. It takes no specialized area of sports knowledge. There were people who celebrated Bruce Jenner in the decathlon despite being unsure, at their core, just exactly how many events the thing entailed, not to mention the difference between track and field. No big whoop.
Olympians like Jenner (or Mark Spitz, Carl Lewis, Michael Johnson or Marion Jones) provide the useful comparison here. Generally speaking, they can go years between American public acknowledgements, years of unsung training and of being celebrated at meets on the European continent while being almost wholly ignored at home. Then they pop up as the favorites in Atlanta or Sydney or Athens, and the U.S. collectively rides them like Secretariat down the home stretch.
And that is exactly what is great about being a sports fan here: having the luxury to so casually and occasionally indulge the emotion in any one area. If France goes out of the World Cup ignobly and prematurely, it is very accurately characterized as a national disgrace, because soccer is the sport of the nation. The same goes for Italy, for Brazil, for Mexico, for England -- look, it's soccer or bust on whole sections of the planet.
Americans get pummeled every few years for knowing and caring so little about the "world's game," but that's the world's problem, not ours. We're the nation with an embarrassing array of options, and that is a blessing that will never be confused with a curse. The U.S. loses to Germany on Friday, we'll get up from the table, walk across the room and check the box scores to see if Luis Castillo kept that hit streak going for the Marlins.
And if the U.S. would have won? We'd have done exactly as the universe would have expected us to: with full-force fawning, lionize a group of players about whom we know not a heck of a lot (see: Women's World Cup, circa 1999) and wonder which American will be the one tapped for the guest shot on "Alias" next fall.
If that's the bandwagon effect, we'll be right up front with the foam finger and the spray-painted faux Statue of Liberty crown. It doesn't have to work for any other country. It works for us.
What do the rest of you Americans think? Pretty much on or no?
