Life As Professional Soccer - Whining, Whingeing, And Running With Little To Show For It

The World Cup of 2022 is on! Despite the efforts to deny Qatar its opportunity to host the games – too hot, too sandy - the country was given its due. 

Soccer to its aficionados is ‘The Beautiful Game’, a fluid matrix of balletic moves, subtle strategy, and endurance.  To its detractors and to most of the non-sporting world, it is boring ninety-minute Punch and Judy show of pushing, shoving, histrionic flops, endless running, and scoreless draws.

Yet the popular gladiatorial carnage of American football, or the over-the rim circus act of basketball are ideals, not reality.  The fakery, endless running to no avail, draw after draw of missed kicks, errant opportunities, and vaudevillian stunts of professional soccer is real.  It is very much how life is led -  boring, seemingly endless effort without much to show for it.  

The frantic streaks down the sidelines, the perpetual back-and-forth cavalcade, the frantic tries at goal, and the deflections mean something beyond the field.  

Bureaucrats pound away at office ellipticals, retreading idea after idea, insisting, cajoling, muscling others in order to gain purchase and advantage.  The whistle blows, home, and back again to the same pitch the next morning. There may be moments of clarity, a newish idea proposed, some spark of ingenuity, but most hours are no different from the tireless and tiresome running and jumping of soccer.

Whining, whingeing, and faux claims of injury are part and parcel of a day at the office.  Workers take umbrage, crow when slighted, roll around and grab their legs when tackled – when they have been thrown off course over a budget move, pushed and shoved from sensible reorganization, dressed down by a supervisor, chaste education for indiscipline.

Life, like soccer, is no more than grand guignol – histrionics, fakery, shows of stamina and persistence, harmless banging and bunking, howling, and bald-faced denials of wrongdoing.  The thing of it all is that we put up with it.  It is one thing to laugh at the side show on the soccer pitch; another altogether to go through life’s transparent ambition.

There are, however, some small pockets of America that do not suffer from such soccer folly.  Political progressives have no interest either in soccer or the endlessly running, hopelessly scoreless draws of the pitch and the office.  They are in a different league. Theirs is a playing field with thoughtful, deliberate, calculated moves – the game is without spontaneity or moments of insight; without goalless give-and-take, and without running.  They have the nation’s health and well-being at stake, and the fate of the world is in their hands.

They do not trip and bump, whinge and whine. Righteousness and moral honor are at stake.  Sniping, pettiness, and trivial fakery have no place in the struggle to restore the black man to his rightful place in society, to replace heterosexuality with transgenderism, to save the planet, and to replace exploitive capitalism with a kinder, gentler, more inclusive economic system.

Imagine a group of progressives running back and forth up and down the pitch, tripping and tackling, yelling foul. You can’t.  Serious people don’t run, they march.  They don’t cry, they shout in unison for justice.  They don’t settle for a draw, they look beyond winning and losing to a greater good, a greater goal.

Bob Musette was a progressive.  He never watched television let alone a soccer match.  He had a peep at Bay Watch when he was younger, still had an eye for the women; but if he were to be completely honest, the roughneck lesbians with whom he demonstrated for equal sexual rights held absolutely no appeal.  Republican women were his dream – lithe, blonde, blue-eyed beauties like Ivanka Trump – but whenever he caught himself lingering over a picture of her, he slapped himself on the wrist and turned his mind to reform.

Soccer to Bob was an expression of the worst of Western society. It was a sport of hooliganism, racism, misogyny, and lower-class thuggery.  There was nothing beautiful about the beautiful game, just stadiums filled with drunken louts watching a pointless affair.  Most importantly the game itself – one of fakery, histrionics, and exaggeration – was a depressing metaphor for the moral myopia of the times.

Like Baywatch, Bob – with the cover of flipping channels to find C-Span – watched bits and pieces of American football, which the Left considered another expression of the conservative philosophy of individual combat, gladiatorial prowess, manlike battle, and winning at all costs.

Bob was in many  ways a closeted conservative, but he had spent too many years in the trenches to abjure progressivism at this late date; and so he bought, incorporated, and promoted the party line.  Soccer was for the mindless, the uninspired, the morally destitute, and the bored.

Other than Bob and his clutch of progressive friends, Americans either never bothered with the World Cup or gave the American side passing interest.  Yet they were the office midfielders, strikers, and defenders of life’s pitch. 

Professional soccer is good as a metaphor while Barnum & Bailey is still on the road, a little sideshow, big top fun.