Prairie Rose and Jimmy Conrad
While soccer is ever-increasing in popularity in the United States, the traditional game of record, and the one that holds an equivalent place in the cultural identity of the country as "football" does in England, is baseball.
Whether you love it or hate it, it's hard to argue that the history of professional baseball is not over-romanticized; everything was better "back when" (never mind that little problem of latent racism). Times were simpler, the money was smaller, the games meant more, and the players were just doing a job that happened to invoke the passionate fandom of their communities. The passage of time, the lack of widespread television coverage, and the biased judgments of those who were there are all elements in these "Golden Age" characterizations.
One romanticized notion that I've heard throughout my life, particularly in relation to old-time baseball's most romanticized team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, was that baseball was better when the players were approachable, neighborhood guys. Until the big money of the modern age, baseball players lived in the communities in which they played; for Dodgers fans, part of the love they had for their team came from that "regular guy" status the players carried.
As an example, here is an excerpt from the transcript of an NPR piece titled "When 'Next Year' Arrived for Dodger Fans":
Mr. BEN CARRAGIE (Brooklyn, New York, Resident): "Pee Wee lived on 97th, and my aunt owned a liquor store, and he used to come out. A couple of Sundays I used to go and see him--I was about 10 or 11 years old--and he'd say hello to you, you know? He'd wave over when he was going downstairs. The Dodgers were family because they lived in Brooklyn. You know, we loved them dearly."
This type of situation happened all over the country in the first and middle part of the century. My own great-uncle used to tell stories of going to the movies with Philadelphia A's slugger Jimmie Foxx in the 1930s. These players were common folk with famous jobs, not untouchable mega-stars living sheltered lives.
I'm almost certain, without looking for sources, that English football has similar stories from their own "Golden Age", when the game was working class and local.
Money and media have changed all that. In the modern world, money has come to represent value, and not just in financial terms. It seems clear that MLS gets less respect because its players are "underpaid" by modern sports standards; for some American soccer fans, the extreme disparity between the salaries of Europe's biggest stars and the those in MLS makes the domestic league immediately less attractive. For the average American sports fan, for whom soccer is not entirely distasteful, the same applies; how can Major League Soccer be any good when the money its players make is almost nothing compared to the astronomical wages being paid in the NFL, NBA, and Major League Baseball?
It's unfortunate really, especially because MLS players are generally approachable, generally accessible, and generally willing to interact with their fans in ways that athletes from America's biggest sports never would. Passionate MLS fans know this from personal experience; there are fans across the country who wouldn't be out of line calling certain local players their "friends".
Not everyone wishes for days gone by when professional athletes were just regular joes, guys who if you said hello to them walking down the street they'd stop and shake your hand. For some, the riches and exalted status that accompanies big time sports fame is preferable to our heroes being too much like us. But MLS is different, and embodies a culture at odds with the modern sports world; while Alex Rodriguez is chased by paparazzi and protected by hired muscle, America's best soccer players are barely noticed, left to go about their daily lives as so many of us do.
But that also makes them unique. Would Major League Soccer be better off with "overpaid" stars, multimillionaire journeymen, and an average salary closer to seven figures than five? Probably. It would certainly help with the league's credibility, and would help to draw more attention from a resistant majority. Certainly something would be lost, though, and I wonder if MLS fans would actually be better off if their league and the players in it was no longer a unique collection of regular guys but a monstrous cash-rich behemoth like so many other leagues.
Perhaps it's best to make no judgments; what's different, and idealized by some, isn't always better. Like Brooklyn and its Dodgers in the 1950s, MLS and its fans in the 21st Century are likely living through an evolutionary phase that will fade away with time.
Besides, things aren't exactly comparable; our age is more transient, more spread out, and less provincial than ever before. Where Flatbush was an insular community in which the Dodger players both lived and worked and their fans might see them grocery shopping, MLS communities are more concept than reality. The digital age has created a different type of community, one that involves immediate communication across vast distances.
Stuart Holden and fan, from his Twitter feed
Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc., have become our virtual Flatbush, where MLS players (who you still might see out somewhere) are available for a chat to discuss the news of the day or greater soccer world. In the words of Prairie Rose Clayton, American soccer's most famous banner-making superfan:
"American soccer's a well-networked community, and there's a pretty good case to be made that the internet is our neighborhood. It's also no great secret that every single thing the fans joke, gossip, and complain about, the players do, too, as illustrated by any given player who's ever written a blog, particularly one where he talks to his coworkers--Jimmy Conrad, I'm looking in your direction.
So, say, you follow most of the MLS and/or yank abroad guys on twitter, you get to see Twellman complaining about whatever's on SportsCenter that afternoon, or Andy Williams talking about his wife's fight with cancer right after he's just been talking smack to Esky about a video game. Edu, Jozy, and Beas are spending their days off making yo mama so fat jokes at one another. Joe Cannon laments about not getting a date, Brad Knighton's stuck in traffic on I-95, Kei Kamara's eating burritos and watching Heroes. You log into Facebook and get to see Holden or Feilhaber posting questionable party photos just like any other 20something. You wish some player a happy birthday, and he thanks you, even if he may not know you in real life. You start peppering them with stupid questions, they reply with stupid answers. They're all doing the same stuff as us jerks in the cheap seats."
Would all of that disappear if salaries grew and players become more like their big time sports contemporaries? I honestly don't know. Perhaps this is a soccer thing more than a money thing. Maybe we'll always have players who can relate to the fans. Maybe not.
If it's not a soccer thing, and one day we do have megastars populating our domestic soccer league, separated from their fans by money and fame, I'm guessing we'll look back on these halcyon days and romanticize them, just as all of those baseball historians like to do.
