Yeah, it’s someone other than GC doing a post on soccer/football. I’m as surprised as you are. Probably more so, actually since I, myself, know that I, myself, don’t care much for or about the sport. I’ve watched a few games, but usually because I’m with friends who really care about the sport or their team (their Arsenal, if you must know). I dig the World Cup, but mostly from a kind of anthropological “this really matters an incredible amount to other people” remove. I can see the beauty in the game, is what I’m saying, but it doesn’t move me the way it moves others. Including, of course, our host.
But I like good writing, and hate bad writing and ignorance, and so I’m just going to come out and say it: if I read a worse article this year than Gene Wojciechowski’s corny-as-hell piece on David Beckham at ESPN I will be 1) surprised and 2) very unfortunate. Clicking the link is recommended only to those who like to be reminded that, despite whatever intellect or pretensions we might bring to our sports-enjoying lives, there are still a lot of people writing about sports who either think that sports fans are just like the meatball jingos beefing it up in Bud Light commercials or are in fact themselves said meatball jingo beef machines. Look, I don’t know what most of what I just typed means, or if “jingo” is a noun. Or a word. But I do know that an article that begins like this:
It’s not that I’m anti-soccer, I’m just anti-dull. To me, soccer is hockey on a Valium overdose, but with no glove dropping or board checking.
Yes, I’m aware it’s called “The Beautiful Game” — and I’m sure it is, much in the same way folding your laundry is “The Beautiful Chore.”
…and then actually gets dumber is kind of disrespectful of its audience. I don’t care about soccer one way or the other. And in a sense, I even sympathize with Wojcetera: he’s a senior writer at ESPN and makes more money for his writing than I probably ever will, but he has deadlines and assignments and stresses, and presumably some editor assigned Gene an article on David Beckham even though he — and I gather this is the correct response at this point — doesn’t give a shit about David Beckham. That’s a tough break. But, look:
I can’t name you a half dozen active soccer players — and I’m not alone. I’m not sure I can name you six soccer players, dead or alive. Let’s see: Pele, Freddy Adu, that French dude who headbutted that Italian dude, Mia Hamm, Sylvester Stallone and Keira Knightley?
This will upset some soccer snobs, who tend to go all hooligan on you if you don’t “get” the game. Look, I’ve got no problem with a Brit lad telling me he’d rather eat English food than watch a Royals-Pirates interleague game or, worse yet, the Raiders against anybody. But don’t jump me just because I yawn at the mention of the Premiership. I’m trying to understand, I really am, why Beckham should matter to sweat-sport Americans hardwired for the NFL, MLB, the NBA and, just to be polite, the NHL.
That’s not acceptable, dude. Not because the jokes are off-the-rack, thick with the mothbally reek of old Sporting News “Caught on the Fly” columns. I mean, they are, but not every article is going to be good. And, to be fair, the rest of the article is more boring than bad: an attempt, through quotes from L.A. Times sportswriter Christine Daniels, to let Americans — people Wojvowels assumes are in the same boat as he — in on who David Beckham is and why they should care. If you don’t know the first thing about Beckham, you are a part of a slim demographic of U.S. sports fans, but you might even learn something.
My problem is that everything in Woj’s tone says that it’s not worth it, that bothering to learn about this is somehow not just wrong but somehow, like, kinda foreign and weird. And if it is or isn’t doesn’t so much matter here: I’m just tired of writers, be they tired old guys at ESPN or once-hotshot political writers at the Washington Post, not bothering to display any respect for or interest in what they’re being paid to write about. I don’t demand reverence, but baseline care and competence would be nice. I wonder: to whom, and why, is it somehow not just acceptable but preferable to be smirkingly, proudly ignorant than to make a good faith effort at doing one’s job, even if that job is writing about a washed-up, overpaid Chav with an orange, Gollem-looking wife? It strikes me as a uniquely good way to write something useless, and an ugly irony besides: all that knowingness of tone, in celebration of the greater glory of knowing nothing.
I really have a hard time believing an editor assigned him to write a soccer column; if so, it speaks volumes about the editor that he would have allowed that to be published.
Woj would have been better off just not writing that column, period.
That’s where my inexperience shows, I guess: I haven’t been a staff member of any publication since my college newspaper. Still, somewhere along the line an editor fucked up, because waving something that useless, unhelpful and snarky into print is a bad, bad idea.
There was no assignment here. Wojo selected his own target, pinned it to the wall at a distance of his choosing, and blammo. Of course, I say that with a degree of factual support inversely proportional to the degree of certitude I say it with, but that’s why God made blogs. (Best guess: in the post-Benoit and NBA draft/pre-Barry at the All-Star Game interstice, it was quietly suggested to Gene that in his role as ESPN columnist, he address the impending arrival of Beckham to the sometime-ESPN product of MLS.)
Seriously, though, expecting any qualitative consideration of the subject from one of these dudes is beyond the point. This is editorializing qua editorializing; the news has already been made and pretty well commented upon so rather than trying to present insights he can redirect the conversation to a mean and tangential point where usefulness doesn’t matter. The assumption on the face of it – that ESPN’s columnists plumb their subjects to a murkier depth than their print counterparts because they [generally – I’m looking at you, Scoop] don’t employ the one-word-paragraph style of modern sports columns – overlooks the fact that these are straight utility guys, subject squatters. They don’t need to respect their subject because they won’t be back to it until there’s a reason to be and then they can make all their clever counter-counter-intuitive hay.
When’s Gregg Easterbrook get back?
Wojo’s been doing bad columns for awhile now – being a native self – loathing Chicagoan, he ripped the Bears for being a terrible team all last year during their progression to the Super Bowl. In May he told us that the Cubs were the de facto “worst team in the league.” Granted, they did indeed suck at the time, but at the end of the year his powers of prognostication are due to look about the same as previously noted.