Local Colour
If I have discovered one thing in my international travels it is that I will be mocked for my sporting loyaltis. Not my loyalties to the Sox or Pats or anything like that, but actually for the sports themselves, particularly baseball and moreso for football. Some of the criticisms are quite fair -- that we call our teams 'world champions' without actually bothering to invite the world to join in (though in a sense we do let the world play baseball, which is whay the major leagues are nearly half non-Americans) is an example. Most of the rest of the world simply does not get baseball. But then anyone who has wrestled with trying to get to know cricket is well aware of the fact that cricket is about as esoteric as a sporting event can get. I nonetheless very much enjoy the game.
And if I enjoy cricket, I absolutely love rugby, largely because I played for Rhodes University in South Africa in 1997 and got an inside view from one of the best rugby-playing nations in the world. But rugby fans are relentless in their criticisms of American football. There are two (realistically three) main reasons for this. The first is that they criticize the padding and helmets that our football players wear. This reveals a fundamental inability to grasp the explosiveness of football. Rugby is an explosive game as well, but the constant motion means you do not get the kind of straight-ahead speed collisions that you get in football. Guys would die without pads in our football, and we know this because pads evolved at the turn of the century because guys were dying. And at the turn of the century there were no guys built like NFL linebackers who could run like decent college sprinters. I played high school football. I played rugby in South Africa. The games are simply different. The second main criticism of football is the stop-start nature of the game. It does not help whenever a guy is shown on the screen sucking oxygen because they just ran 50 yards. But again, the games are just different. It requires a phenomenal athlete in incredible shape to play high-level rugby, there is no doubt about that. But NFL players are strong and fast and are in amazing shape themselves, but it is more anaerobic shape than rugby requires. This brings us to the third main issue: Football just seems complicated to Europeans, as rugby seems complicated to most Americans. This complexity breeds misunderstandings.
In any case, I should probably be going. My guess is that it will take the better part of the remainder of the day to get to Oxford, if that indeed is where I find myself tonight.