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Paul Sparks,
Sino-Canadian International College, Guangxi University, Online English Lesson Plans, Lesson Material and Ideas
for Semester 2 Reading Lessons...
Lesson Objectives:
To understand how conjunctions are used in essays.
Instructions:
Read the essay then read it again underlining the conjunctions.
Soccer: Why It Can't Make the Big Time in
the U.S.A.
by Dewey Cheatham
Soccer - or football (or
foosball or futbol), as it is called by the rest of the world outside the
United States - is surely the most popular sport in the world. Every four
years, the world championship of soccer, the World Cup, is watched by
literally billions all over the world, beating out the United States
professional football's Superbowl by far. It is estimated that 1.7 billion
television viewers watched the World Cup final between France and Brazil in
July of 1998. And it is also a genuine world championship, involving teams
from 32 countries in the final rounds, unlike the much more parochial and
misnamed World Series in American baseball (that doesn't even involve Japan
or Cuba, two baseball hotbeds). But although soccer has become an important
sport in the American sports scene, it will never make inroads into the
hearts and markets of American sports the way that football, basketball,
hockey, baseball, and even tennis and golf have done. There are many reasons
for this.
Recently the New England
Revolution beat the Tampa Bay Mutiny in a game played during a horrid
rainstorm. Nearly 5000 fans showed up, which shows that soccer is, indeed,
popular in the United States. However, the story of the game was buried near
the back of the newspaper's sports section, and there was certainly no
television coverage. In fact, the biggest reason for soccer's failure as a
mass appeal sport in the United States is that it doesn't conform easily to
the demands of television. Basketball succeeds enormously in America because
it regularly schedules what it calls "television time-outs" as
well as the time-outs that the teams themselves call to re-group, not to
mention half-times and, on the professional level, quarter breaks. Those
time-outs in the action are ideally made for television commercials. And
television coverage is the lifeblood of American sports. College basketball
lives for a game scheduled on CBS or ESPN (highly recruited high school
players are more likely to go to a team that regularly gets national
television exposure), and we could even say that television coverage has
dictated the pace and feel of American football. Anyone who has attended a
live football game knows how commercial time-outs slow the game and
sometimes, at its most exciting moments, disrupt the flow of events. There
is no serious objection, however, because without television, football knows
that it simply wouldn't remain in the homes and hearts of Americans. Also,
without those advertising dollars, the teams couldn't afford the sky-high
salaries of their high-priced superstars.
Soccer, on the other
hand, except for its half-time break, has no time-outs; except for
half-time, it is constant run, run, run, run, back and forth, back and
forth, relentlessly, with only a few seconds of relaxation when a goal is
scored, and that can happen seldom, sometimes never. The best that
commercial television coverage can hope for is an injury time-out, and in
soccer that happens only with decapitation or disembowelment.
Second, Americans love
their violence, and soccer doesn't deliver on this score the way that
American football and hockey do. There are brief moments, spurts of
violence, yes, but fans can't expect the full-time menu of bone-crushing
carnage that American football and hockey can deliver minute after minute,
game after game. In soccer, players are actually singled out and warned -
shamed, with embarrassingly silly "yellow cards," for acts of
violence and duplicity that would be smiled at in most American sports other
than tennis and golf.
Third, it is just too
difficult to score in soccer. America loves its football games with scores
like 49 to 35 and a professional basketball game with scores below 100 is
regarded as a defensive bore. In soccer, on the other hand, scores like 2 to
1, even 1 to 0, are commonplace and apparently desirable; games scoreless at
the end of regulation time happen all the time. (In the 515 games played in
the final phase in the history of the World Cup games through 1994, only
1584 goals have been scored. That's three a game!) And if there is no
resolution at the end of overtime, the teams resort to a shoot-out that has
more to do with luck than with real soccer skills. Worse yet, it is possible
for a team to dominate in terms of sheer talent and
"shots-on-goal" and still lose the game by virtue of a momentary
lapse in defensive attention, a stroke of bad luck, and the opponent's
break-away goal. Things like that can happen, too, in baseball, but the
problem somehow evens out over baseball's very long season of daily games.
In soccer, it just isn't fair. Soccer authorities should consider making the
goal smaller and doing away with the goalie to make scoring easier. And the
business of starting over after each goal, in the middle of the field, has
to be reconsidered. It's too much like the center-jump after each goal in
the basketball game of yesteryear.
It seems unlikely that
Americans will ever fully comprehend or appreciate a sport in which players
are not allowed to use their arms and hands. Although the footwork of soccer
players is a magnificent skill to behold, most American fans are perplexed
by straitjacketed soccer players' inability and unwillingness to "pick
up the darn ball and run with it!" The inability to use substitutes
(unless the player to be substituted for is lying dead or maimed on the
field of play) is also bewildering to Americans, who glorify the "sixth
man" in basketball and a baseball game in which virtually the entire
roster (including an otherwise unemployable old man called "the
designated hitter") is deployed on the field at one time or another.
Finally, the field in
soccer is enormous. Considerably larger than the American football field,
the soccer field could contain at least a dozen basketball courts. Americans
like their action condensed, in a small field of vision - ten enormous
sweaty people bouncing off one another and moving rapidly through a space
the size of a medium-sized bedroom, twenty-two even larger people in bulky
uniforms converging on a small, oddly shaped ball. In soccer, on the other
hand, there is a premium on "spreading out," not infringing upon
the force field occupied by a team-mate, so that fancy foot-passing is
possible. This spreading out across the vast meadow of the soccer playing
field does not lend itself, again, to close get-down-and-dirty television
scrutiny.
Soccer is a great sport
and it certainly deserves the increased attention and popularity it is
getting on all levels. But - primarily, again, because it does not lend
itself to television - it will never make it big in the United States the
way these other sports have, not until it changes some of its fundamental
strategies.
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