Not at all. He doesn’t want to go to America to get by. He wants to go to America to change it. He wants to put “sah-kurr” up there with the Super Bowl and the World Series and the NBA finals. He wants to change the face of American sport, he wants to alter the balance of power in world football.
Oh, my America! My new found land! I was once a part of an exhibition to change the balance of power in world sport myself. It was a decade and a half back. We were missionaries bringing civilisation to the far-flung places of the Earth; we ended up in the cooking pot.
You know how America has been longing for cricket all these years? Well, we satisfied that need. An entrepreneur signed up most of the England and West Indies players and invited the press along as well. We were to spread the word of America’s capitulation to the charms of cricket.
The first game was in the Toronto SkyDome, of all places, home of the Toronto Blue Jays. The venue contains an hotel, with views of the game from your room and, as was discovered by a couple celebrating their friendship not wisely but too well during a baseball game, views of your room from the game.
It was a fabulous occasion. Not that anybody turned up. The best part was the expression on David Gower’s face when the press walked into the England dressing-room after the match. He was unaware that, in North America, the press has “locker-room access”. I asked him if Curtly was sending down fastballs or change-ups. “Mostly curves,” he replied, regaining his cool with a jolt.
On, then, to New York. If cricket could make it there, it could make it anywhere. The match took place on a Sunday afternoon on that funny little island you can see from the Triborough Bridge. The dinky stadium was maybe a third full: Caribbean emigrants eating curry goat and drinking Red Stripe. It was great, actually.
I think the match made a few lines in the New York Post, maybe even The New York Times. They reported what is known in the trade as “colour”. Meanwhile, the NFL season had just begun and the baseball season was bracing itself for its climax. We flew home, America unconquered, but we had all had a nice time.
Our failure did not surprise me. America had already tried to conquer England by means of sport. England, you may recall, was going to give up football and take up gridiron in a big way. The NFL sent top teams to play exhibition matches at Wembley, and Wembley was packed.
Channel 4 brought us hour-long weekly highlights and gridiron was the new sporting craze. We are less resistant than Americans to cultural innovation. We watched, we thrilled, we went to the annual exhibition games. Dan Marino! The Fridge! Such larks!
Sah-kurr was at the lowest point in its existence. After Liverpool fans had caused 39 deaths at the Heysel Stadium in 1985, football had become a pariah sport. English teams were banned from Europe; every domestic game was a tale of hooliganism.
Suddenly, America — that glittering eldorado — offered us sport that was fun. Everything that football wasn’t, gridiron was: cheerful, safe, colourful, rich, well run, full of charming, eloquent players and intelligent, knowledgeable commentators. Sport was jolly again; American football just couldn’t lose. All Britain — all Europe — was ready. And do you know what happened? Nothing. They tried, all right. The NFL even founded a sort of second division, a Europe-wide league of fourth-stringers.
Eventually, the players were airlifted out, as it became sport’s equivalent to Vietnam: the London Monarchs gone, the Scottish Claymores gone, the Barcelona Dragons gone.
The league still exists as NFL Europa, with a team in Amsterdam and five in Germany. But the American conquest of Europe went the same way as the American conquest of South-East Asia: it foundered on the rock of cultural resistance.
All of which shows that sporting loyalties are not easily shifted, no matter which continent you are trying to conquer. America was tremendously fashionable in the 1980s; football was terribly unfashionable. Result? England is full of young fellers wearing Nike trainers and baseball caps and drinking American-style: cold, fizzy lager from the bottle. And do they talk about the advantages of a scrambling quarterback, or the importance of the RBI numbers for any major league batter, or the rebounding prowess of Shaquille O’Neal? No, they talk football. Conclusion: drinks and clothes are subject to the whims of fashion, but sport is part of a nation’s culture.
Cultures change; change is an ineluctable aspect of every living culture as it is of every living language, but with culture, changes are slow and measured. Fashion is what you put on and if you don’t like it, you throw it away. Culture is what you are.
Funny. I was quite convinced at the time that American football would become a big thing in Britain. I didn’t see how football could recover. But it did and in doing so, it changed almost — but not quite — beyond recognition. Lord Justice Taylor and Luciano Pavarotti did it between them, with a little help from Paul Gascoigne. Football embraced the change to all-seat stadiums, took on Nessun Dorma as the theme music to the BBC coverage of the World Cup of 1990 and Gascoigne led England to the semi-finals and a novel conclusion: defeat on penalties.
Football didn’t come back. Football had never gone away. Football was merely sleeping, to be joyously reawakened by Gazza’s kiss. Football was still a part of our culture. And football, now quite insufferable in its self-conceit, has never been more deeply embedded in our daily lives.
But Beckham can kiss all he likes and football will not awake in America. That is because football is not actually present in American culture and is therefore unavailable for the kissing. Sah-kurr is a game for children, women and Hispanics and Beckham will not change that perception.
Sport matters to us, English, Americans and all. It is part of national and personal identity. Baseball is a wonderful game, but no English person would swap a victorious England baseball team for the team who lost the Ashes. Better to lose with cricket than win with baseball. We’re English, after all.
America is a self-loving, insular nation and its self-created sports are part of its understanding of itself. In America, sport’s highest achievements are domestic. The United States is its own Brazil, its own Australia, its own All Blacks. The thing that America admires most in the world is America and it will take more than an agreeable 31-year-old Real Madrid reserve to change all that. Despite his snake-hipped wife.
