Ok after going too long in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting Part 11 yesterday, I promise, this is the last piece of background and next week I will move on to look at American sports domination, a couple of odd exceptions and then into Olympic lifting.  Today I will finish with my broad stroke generalizations about American sports as a whole by moving from the sports level to the athlete level.  Because just as our sports have to fulfill certain requirements, so do our athletes.

I finished yesterday by pointing out why we don’t like soccer and mentioned that one of the biggest reasons (along with the others) was that soccer can end in a tie.  This goes against American mentality and especially American sports mentality.  The point of sports is to establish who’s the best, who’s the worst, who’s the winner and who’s the loser.  But in America it goes further than that.  And today is longer than I want but I just have to move on from this topic so bear with me.

If You’re Not First, You’re Last

In addition to all of the other general factors I talked about regarding sports in the US, there’s another critical one: in the US, the only player or team that matters is the winner which is why our sports have to determine a winner (and hence a loser).  This is why we won’t accept ties (and thus soccer).  Ties allow that there is no singular winner (and hence no losers) and sports where this happens irritate us (sometimes it’s unavoidable, you have to give two people the gold medal or something).

Quick note: someone pointed out to me that you can tie in college football (which is somewhat outside of the professional sports issue I’m talking about and you have to let the players get back to drinking and having sex with sorority girls) as well as in the NFL (National Football League for my non-American readers).  But a tie is only allowed AFTER two overtimes.  That is, after both teams have completely exhausted themselves trying to determine a winner (baseball players don’t get exhausted because standing in a field picking your nose is not tiring so the game will go on forever until someone wins).  I still think it’s Un-American and any team that can’t pull ahead in that time frame should be taken out back and shot as a warning to the others: Win or DIE!

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 12