News Flash: Soccer’s Huge
If soccer’s not the church you worship at, all this is ecstatic gibberish. Or hilarious overwriting. But let’s be kind. Let’s call it an attempt to cover soccer the way Tocqueville would have covered the World Series for a paper back in France. It’s a love of the game talking, and also maybe a fear of readers who think soccer unadorned is sort of silly and sort of a bore. The Tribune’s been wrestling with that idea at least since 1994, when syndicated columnist Tony Snow, now President Bush’s press secretary, called soccer “titanically dull” and Tribune columnist Jon Margolis, peering more deeply, said yes, “and so are they all, all of the games we love.” Which we love despite the frequent tedium because we forge such powerful emotional bonds with certain teams and players.
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I think the connection’s been made. I think Americans have a good enough grasp of soccer that a paper can get away with covering the World Cup as a sports event. When England met Argentina in recent cups they didn’t renew the war in the Falklands. When Angola plays Portugal Sunday the game won’t recapitulate the history of colonial Africa.
News Bites
Last weekend’s Printers Row Book Fair inspired cultural critic Julia Keller to write a Tribune piece reflecting that “literary events” go on all year long in Chicago. The trouble is, “there’s no general directory, online or off,” that helps us find them. “One of the better spots,” she went on, is the back of the Tribune’s Sunday books section, even though “it in-cludes only paid ads.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Chris Wilkins/AFP/Getty Images.
