American sports are a godsend for lovers of ‘nothing happening’

It’s the Fourth of July, folks, and since American imperialism has always favoured the cultural rather than boots on the ground, for most of us it really is Stars & Stripes all round: except, funnily enough, when it comes to sport.

We’ve snapped up everything else cultural from the US like hungry piranha, but not their sports. And for a very simple reason too – only Americans give a damn about them.

Basketball has established a global niche, although how much public awareness is due to the kit rather than interest in the actual game is an interesting conundrum.

However, despite digital globalisation coming on the back of nearly a century of cultural cues and Pax Americana’s relentless hard-sell, the rest of the world still happily rubs along largely immune to the charms of the USA’s other major contributions to professional sport, American football and baseball.

Now, should anyone suspect some stereotypical anti-Uncle Sam agenda going on here it’s interesting how this diversity of sporting tastes is no one-way street.

The beautiful game mightn’t be US code for commie anymore but much of its white, adult male population continues to remain happily ambivalent, an attitude memorably summed up in one acquaintance’s admirably cautious attitude to contraception – “The 10 seconds it takes to put on a condom beats 10 years of pretending to like soccer.”

In return, our resistance to US sporting hegemony is as reassuring as it is notable, for it speaks of a consistent, clear-eyed determination to dismiss the NFL in particular for what it is – a gargantuan bore.

Fervent touchiness

Yep, Yanqui, I said it; and to our own clutch of domestic gridiron converts, who trail only League of Ireland fans in their fervent touchiness to anything bar dribbling affirmation, all I can say is your weird wannabe fetish is sure to keep you lonely.

The issue the rest of the world has is very simple. For some reason, Americans take very seriously the concept of watching people in fancy dress lined up doing nothing much. It’s like watching soldiers drill, only less fun than that sounds.

There’s nothing new in pointing out how sport is a largely painless substitute for war but only Americans can so enthusiastically dress up as sport what are basically convoluted exercises in the taking, holding and distribution of territory. If baseball contains some retrieving level of nuance that has allowed it to be exported to a tiny number of overseas markets, any amount of adulatory PR has failed to convince the vast majority of us that the NFL is nothing more than a steroid-binged yawn-fest containing massed ranks of padded behemoths interminably rearranging themselves between commercial breaks.

You can see why coaches swoon about it. The whole thing is basically a big game of Battleship.

Far too many players are paid far too much to basically rumble into a position and repeatedly bang into their hulking opposite number for tiny snatches of time before shuffling into yet another staff meeting – sorry huddle – to be told what to do next by puce-faced sideline Generalissimos indulging their inner-Patton.

It’s an obvious oxymoron too to call it football since that’s the one thing it isn’t, apart from the token European import employed for the onerous task of kicking the ball over the bar from straight in front of the posts.

It’s also obvious how the entire game slots in neatly with an American obsession for all things statistical, although since so much of our lives is more and more the consequence of an algorithmic tot maybe that isn’t such a biggie anymore.

Much bigger is how American sports are so incredibly static.

It’s the reason football and baseball movies work and soccer ones don’t. There are constant fixed elements for a camera to focus on, interminable breaks in order to catch up on narrative, which is vital since very little happens for very long periods in the actual games.

The upside is Any Given Sunday and Bull Durham versus the shudderingly awful Escape To Victory.

Ultimately, however, the great international sporting divide is perhaps rooted most of all in ambiguity, or the lack of it when it comes to results.

Ambiguous outcomes

Any nation largely unable to compute how a 0-0 draw isn’t always an exercise in futility is never going to be comfortable with ambiguous outcomes and there’s nothing more unambiguous than the sort of playing at war which is what so much of American sport appears rooted in.

If Pax-Britannica was supposedly built on the playing fields of Eton, even the most braying Hooray would be pushed to make similar proclamations with a straight face these days.

However, some very straight faces indeed continue to argue that America’s football is a reflection of how it likes to see itself: tough, forceful, overwhelming opponents through teamwork and controlled violence, following orders, sticking to the game-plan imposed by the all-knowing, all-seeing sideline coach and his heroic on-field deputy, the quarterback.

Sports-scribbling probably isn’t blameless in this narrative. Few of us in this tawdry profession have ever been able to resist a convenient martial analogy when churning out copy under the deadline guns. And when there’s aggrandising flung into the wind, it’s hard not to hope a tiny bit that might get blown back. We’re only human, after all.

And in many ways this dogged diversity of sporting tastes is a reassuring human kick against an increasingly mono world: each to their own and live and let live, and all that.

It's just that our own appears to include a resolute determination to continue ignoring America's great professional sports, to the extent on this day it's worth bastardising the old Oscar Wilde line – "We really have everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, sport."