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The name game WUSA may lead women to claim soccer as their sport
Someone looking for a doctoral thesis subject in sports sociology may wish to examine why Americans have so passionately embraced individual sports that developed in the British Isles, but have solidly rejected British team sports. We have accepted prize fighting, horse racing, track and field, tennis and golf without changing a jot or a tittle of the Empire's rules. On the other hand, we have refused to have anything to do with soccer -- and we took rugby and cricket, turned them upside down and created our own football and baseball. We rejected English hockey, which is played on a field, but wholeheartedly welcomed our neighbor Canada's version of the game, which is played on ice. Now, the subsidiary question to all this should especially concern NBC, the network where The Weakest Link appears. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (broadcast on ABC) came from England and is clearly an individual game. No wonder it's been such a hit here. But The Weakest Link sort of starts off team and ends up individual, so we really can't tell whether it's the sort of English import that we Yanks will take to. Hello or ... good-bye. Ah, but the immediate larger question is whether women's soccer will suffer the same dismal spectator reaction in the United States as has men's soccer. A new professional league, the Women's United Soccer Association, has just started up. (In fact, the National Women's Football League is kicking off this spring, too, in case you want to make plans for Mother's Day.) But let us just ponder women's professional soccer. I think there are a lot of reasons why it could succeed. Men's soccer has never enjoyed popular success in the United States because no matter how many boys play soccer in the suburbs, when these blissfully happy offspring of those famous soccer moms grow up, they put aside such foolish things and start taking their own children to baseball games and betting football. I think there are many reasons why soccer has never become a mainstream sport in the U.S., and one of them is that most grown-up guys think of it as a kid's game. But I don't think this computes with the opposite sex. Girls who grow up playing soccer should be much more likely to stay with the sport as adult spectators. They're not so likely to be suctioned off by the glamour of men's professional baseball, football, basketball and hockey leagues. Women's soccer does not start off as a poor cousin to any other established big-time American sport. Rather, it is -- well, it can be, it might be -- perceived as the women's team game. Women's basketball has enjoyed considerable success here, but, still, only men's basketball is known strictly as ... basketball. It's like airplanes. When they fly, they are all flights, but slower planes are qualified. Jet flights are just called flights. Prop flights are called prop flights. Similarly, women's basketball is always qualified as ... women's basketball. But I believe that in the United States women's soccer has a chance to be the dominant species. Someday, in fact, we may even call women's soccer just plain soccer and men's soccer ... men's soccer. That's pretty much the way it is in gymnastics. After all: Women's soccer doesn't seem as if it came from England. It seems very indigenous, very American. Unlike men's soccer, women's soccer may not be the weakest link. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer
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