The crying game

Americans don’t really see the purpose of letting your whole world slip through your fingers just because your team blew a penalty kick.

It has come to my attention that American football fans are the subject of mockery; that we are the brash, fair-weather World Cup fans who just show up in face paint, brandishing our flags and colors, and embarrassing everybody else, the “real” fans.

Websites have cropped up, jeering us “Amurikans” for our seeming lack of gravity — the fact that we turn every sporting event, even around the globe, into our own chest-thumping tailgate party.

Well, I say, “Ha.”

I say, “Why so serious?”

Tom Hanks made this observation in the movie, A League of Their Own: “There’s no crying in baseball.” And this kind of explains why Americans — most of us, anyway — don’t get all blubbery about the World Cup.

Watching the fans (and players) do their usual shriek and tear these past weeks — faces lifted to the heavens in Delphic despair, rending their own garments as though to appease the Football Gods — I could only shrug.

That’s because, for Americans, crying is reserved for the locker rooms. In private. After the game is over.

But during the game? Yup. It’s an excuse to party.

It’s true: you won’t see a lot of Americans going all watery during the NBA Finals, or the World Series, or the Super Bowl. Some do, sure. The players, too, are allowed to express their emotions on occasion. (Usually these are sublimated into back pats, glares at the camera, and slow, downcast strides.)

But let’s face it: tearing up when your team loses is not really an American tradition.

Which makes us no less passionate about our sports. Hell, the US invented several major ones (we stole the rest). We endure lives of quiet desperation when it comes to our home baseball teams. We bite our fingernails to the quick during the final seconds of Game 7 in the NBA Finals. We scream and swear and arm-jab strangers during the Stanley Cup Finals. We take it seriously, but we take it all inside: we feel the pain, but we use our “indoor” voices instead of breaking down in public.

Sports does produce an existential gnawing in American fans. We do have our hearts broken, quietly, every time our team falls by the wayside. But crying? Except when you’re a baby, when does crying ever get you what you want?

Maybe Americans just don’t really see the point of letting your whole world slip through your fingers just because your team blew a penalty kick. We’re not going to drop to our knees and rend the earth and wail and assail the heavens. It didn’t really work much for the Ancient Greeks, did it? (Who, by the way, kind of started the whole “football” craze. Look it up.) When you allow yourself to pin your mental health on a four-year cycle that ends in a 1-0 spread, how are you going to deal with the real problems of life?

Now, I won’t slam football the way certain American critics do — namely conservative writer Anne Coulter and rock scribe Chuck Klosterman, who both see it as an “un-American” sport because it doesn’t encourage individual greatness and instead rewards mediocrity. Because, “individual greatness”? Ever heard of Pelé, Messi or Ronaldo, you guys? And it doesn’t necessarily reward mediocrity; it’s just that Americans haven’t embraced soccer with the same zeal or for as long as other sports, so of course, we admittedly aren’t world-beaters when it comes to the World Cup. (Though Round of 16 is certainly an improvement.)

The target of both US critics, it seems, are the soccer moms who avidly cheer on their sons (and daughters) at games where most kids basically do very little passing or scoring. The kids get credit for just “showing up.” But really, it’s often the same thing in Little League Baseball.

No, the bellyaching of Klosterman and Coulter sounds a little too much like sour-graping: “Oh, that game doesn’t really matter to us anyway.” That’s what people in denial say. Especially when they dominate so many other sports. 

And it’s not like Americans are intolerant of sports imported from distant shores. Hell, it’s not unusual to see a bunch of guys getting together a pick-up cricket match in the middle of a New Jersey public park. We’ll give any weird-ass sport a chance to take root. Whether it does or not is up to the people.

Still, when I watched Brazil go down in flaming defeat and the ensuing public cry-fest, like it’s the third act of a Nora Ephron movie with all the hankies out, I thought about how I felt when I heard America had been knocked out in the second round this year. I basically felt: Okay. Good luck next year. I felt not much, in truth. I was not that invested in the US winning on any level. In fact, a quick Spock-like sifting of the odds had pretty much prepared me for the inevitable defeat to… whoever. Eventually. Tough luck, but there you go.

But when your team does win? It’s sublime. When I watched the Red Sox finally take a World Series again in 2004, after an 86-year drought, it was like the heavens suddenly parted, allowing an angelic choir to chant “Boston, Boston, Boston…” with feet stomping, Queen-style. But for all those years (and decades) before that victory, when I watched the Red Sox fold before a pennant race or let ground balls slip through their legs? Did I blame the heavens? No. I blamed Bill Buckner. I blamed the team for not pulling it out. Then I moved on to watching Knight Rider.

But “real” football fans don’t think like that. They don’t seem to accept the reality that their team has only a 50/50 chance of proceeding to the next round. They blot that very real statistical possibility from their minds. And then when the inevitable happens, they cry — oh, how they cry.

This was another thing that ticked off the online community, which posted pictures of “Amurikans” yucking it up, flaunting their war paint like it was a hockey game. We were supposedly the obnoxious guests who crashed the decorous party that is the World Cup. (Ahem.) Well, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do at the World Cup?

But crying? Leave it for later. It’s true, there isn’t much crying in baseball. (Some yawning and arm-stretching at times, granted.) Americans are stoic about sports. It might have to do with our sense of renewal, the belief that tomorrow is another day. (And another, and another.)

Seriously. Look around. There are plenty of things to cry over. In the bigger scheme of things — unless you’re a degenerate gambler betting on an impossible spread — there’s really no reason to bust a wet one over soccer.