American soccer's Anglophilia always has and always will confuse me. Take one listen to ESPN analyst and former U.S.-team star John Harkes, and you'll hear it in his lilt; that weird accent of his wasn't cultivated in his childhood home near Newark, New Jersey. Now, don't get me wrong, it's delightful to listen to, but it's peculiar for its reliance on British English for inflection and explication. And it's not just Harkes who casts his eyes fondly upon some Merseyside muse. To gin up Anglo-American antagonism before Saturday's USA-England game, then, U.S. Soccer necessarily required some truly convoluted rebels-versus-lobsterbacks retro-fitting. ESPN's promotions featured minutemen, drum corps, and even a call to arms by the great pamphleteer himself, Thomas Paine. Banners waved, and someone even unfurled the old rattlesnake Gadsden Flag. We trembled. Could we possibly pull off a Yorktown? A New Orleans?
Yet the ad played into a crucial fallacy of American soccer. As long as American soccer looks across the pond for cultural direction (this is different from tactical direction), it will remain a second-tier sport here. We Americanized cricket into baseball; We Americanized Grand Prix into Talladega, rugby union into the New England Patriots. These sports took root because we made them our own and, at times, unrecognizable as descendants of their Old World ancestors. They became ubiquitous, popular, part of society. We don't bother to compare NASCAR with F1 -- we're confident (and chauvinistic) in our perceived superiority. Michael Schumacher, seven-time F1 World Champion and driver of that circuit's #3 car, is considered the greatest driver in world history -- but in this country, of course, "3" begins and ends with The Intimidator. Not surprisingly, we have to do it our way. American kids don't play baseball and futilely wish that they might have been born in, say, Mysore, earning scores of test centuries against the hated Pakistanis as the next Salchin Tendulkar.
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