You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will

by Cowherd, Colin

Too many members of the media value their work more than consumers do. Who says your column or four-part series is vital? Interesting and important can be two separate things.

  There’s long been an argument in journalism: Do we give them what they want or what they need? The problem with the question is obvious: Who decides? It shouldn’t surprise anyone that those who consider journalism a calling are often—you guessed it—journalists. I can think of several professions, from the Peace Corps to law enforcement to teaching to health care to the military and the clergy, that are more inspiring and selfless.

  No doubt journalism plays a vital role in our society. That’s one of the reasons I decided to pursue it. Keeping an eye on powerful corporations, politicians, and government entities is integral to a strong democracy. Nobody ever said it wasn’t, but who ever said we want or need twenty-four inches of news type to dissect a city council meeting or a zoning issue? The inability of newspapers to attract large audiences for paid online content means the information was never as relevant as they might have suspected. Meanwhile, USA Today—the ultimate in news pith—is a fixture of the culture.

  It should be noted, as many old-media types lament the brevity of modern news dissemination, that NPR—with its depth of thought and witty analysis—is the most listened-to radio network in the country. There are still many long-form, old-school programs thriving on network and cable television. There’s Frontline and The Charlie Rose Show and 60 Minutes. Would that be possible in a country full of nitwits?

  We’ve seen an absolute explosion in analysis/opinion pieces. They’ve gone a long way toward replacing straight news reporting. Everyone has an opinion, and it’s the consumer’s job to figure out which ones are reliable and educated and which are not. Choose wisely and you get perspective along with your nuts and bolts. Why is that a bad thing?

  When my stockbroker informs me of a trend, I simultaneously seek other opinions. I want a broad range of opinions, whether it’s from a financial analyst or a barista. I’ll figure out which ones are valuable and which aren’t. So why can’t a reporter, in the midst of reporting a breaking story, be able to voice an opinion on it?

  The bottom line: you have been empowered. You have become your own gatekeeper, and this is a threatening development to many in the old media.

  You may not always be right, but you’re speaking loudly and clearly and with one voice. On the whole, your track record for making the right choice is awfully good.

  I trust you, because I’m one of you.

  The Long Invasion

  Failure is such an intrinsic part of the business world that it’s almost become a badge of honor. At the very least it’s an understood and accepted rest stop on the bumpy and competitive road to success. Nobody hits it out of the park on the first swing—not even the most mythical figures.

  Bill Gates’s first company was not Microsoft. It was Traf-O-Data, which went Belly-O-Up. Henry David Sanders, aka Colonel Sanders, had his secret recipe rejected 1,009 times, which makes you wonder how it ever remained so damned secret.

  Failure becomes just another chapter in the legend, a momentary but necessary battle with adversity that can be used as motivation or instruction to avoid pitfalls in the next venture. There are examples everywhere. Facebook is one of America’s most revered companies, but would you believe it owes some of its success to a spectacular failure? Before it became a favorite target of late-night comedians, Myspace.com was a similar social-networking site. Facebook became a staple of society—and Myspace was relegated to the tech dustbin—because it made one simple yet important change to the formula by permitting only designated “friends” to have access to your information. This eliminated Myspace.com’s primary weakness and removed the “creeper” factor. Sometimes a revolution is only a slight tweak removed from failure.

  This brief history lesson is intended for anybody who might doubt the future of soccer in America. Despite the sport’s previous missteps, you will be proven wrong. Really, really wrong—as wrong as those 1,009 doubters who rejected the Colonel.

  Soccer is here to stay. Count on it.

  How can I be so sure? How can I predict the sustainability of a sport that so many football-loving, Bud-drinking folks in the heartland consider boring, stupid, and anti-American?

  You’ve heard it before. Soccer’s cult leaders have predicted a soccer revolution in this country several times. It was going to happen in the ’70s, when youth leagues sprouted and kids by the thousands started chasing the ball around on Saturday mornings.

  When I was a kid we were force-fed the idea that Kyle Rote Jr. was America’s great soccer hope. This was the best we had to offer? Damn, talk about making it tough to love soccer. No wonder there was such a reflexive backlash against the game.

  Rote was nobody’s idea of a transcendent figure. He was wooden in all phases of the game—on the pitch and in his personality. He looked like a football player who took up soccer late in life, and he seemed as natural with a ball on his foot as Paris Hilton at a homeless shelter.

  Rote didn’t make the soccer evangelists lose their religion, though. Every decade brought a new proclamation. It was either the World Cup or Freddy Adu or someone or something else, but The Great Soccer Revolution was always around the corner.

  You could be forgiven if, by the fourth or fifth time, you stopped listening.

  This time is different, and here’s why:

  For a sport to occupy a spot in our national psyche, it has to develop a deep connection with its fan base. This can’t be done overnight. It can’t be done on the backs of one or two great players. It can’t be done solely on the power of media attention or the words of the bug-eyed zealots.

  It has to strike somewhere beneath the surface for it to connect with people, to get them to invite it in and let it stay awhile. It has to be visceral, and right now we are entering an era where soccer has developed a visceral connection with the American sports fan.

  There are four main reasons soccer is carving out a permanent piece of the American sports pie:

  1. SHARED EXPERIENCE Fathers and mothers have played, which means kids can have a conversation about soccer on their way to the game, during the game, and afterward. This conversation takes place on a different level than it did in earlier generations, when parents didn’t fully understand the game because they hadn’t played. Sports are nothing more than emotional connections, and the biggest emotional connection is between kids and their parents.

  2. INCREASED EXPOSURE The kid who played a soccer game on Saturday morning can now come home and watch a game on television. This extends the emotional connection.

  3. VICARIOUS ENJOYMENT FIFA soccer is a huge hit in the video game world. FIFA ’12 was the highest-selling sports video game of all time until FIFA ’13 came along and topped it. It was the top seller in forty countries. Kids love this game, and it provides another link in the chain of emotional connection. Through the power of this one video game, like it or not, soccer has become part of everyday life in millions of households.

  4. GEAR CONQUERING ALL There is now soccer merchandise. For many kids, wearing a Man U jersey or a Liverpool jersey is as natural as wearing a Red Sox jersey. This is a hugely significant point, because the increase in kids wearing soccer merchandise makes it part of the lifestyle.

  These four visceral connections with the sport ensure that it’s going to increase in popularity. It’s not going to be a capital-R Revolution. It’s never going to overtake any of the major sports. And it hasn’t exploded on the scene the way the zealots and cult leaders told you it would. Instead, it gradually but persistently wedged itself into the national sports psyche through a series of cultural and sociological shifts.

  In the ’80, ’90s, and 2000s, the experience was limited to playing the sport. Once the game was over, the experience was over.

  You’d come home and resume normal programming.

  The old soccer experience used to be like going on a date and not talking until the n
ext date. See you in three weeks. There was no texting/Twitter/Facebook. Soccer in the ’80s was like communications in the ’40s: limited and sporadic. You might love it, but it’s hard to fall in love with anything if you don’t have a deep and consistent connection.

  Now soccer is a much bigger part of a deeper and more consistent conversation. How do cultural barriers get knocked down? From the ground up. How does McDonald’s make customers for life? Get them hooked on Happy Meals at a young age.

  The TV/video game/merchandising is soccer’s texting/Twitter/Facebook. It’s a revolution in a minor key.

  Soccer has forged a gateway into the lives of teenage boys. Young people—and especially American young people—are the most voracious consumers of technology. They’ve grown up with it, and it has created a certain amount of impatience. I want it, and I want it now.

  They’re the caffeinated generation.

  What does soccer provide them? Continuous play, forty-five-minute halves, over in two hours. Baseball is a far bigger commitment: three, three-and-a-half hours.

  Soccer’s resonance grows with every connection.

  I’m not the only one seeing this. When every network is simultaneously competing for a property, it’s a pretty good indication that it’s offering something of value. The people making those decisions aren’t guessing—they have the demographics and projections on their side, and they’re seeing these growing connections. They get it.

  Soccer has limitations, no question about it. It lacks that jingoistic quality that we as American sports fans love. We didn’t invent it, so it’s not woven into our DNA. Soccer isn’t ours the way football, baseball, and basketball are ours. It doesn’t have the high school and college connection that make football and basketball feel so uniquely ours, or the history of baseball.

  Sports fans are like everyone else: protective and provincial and a little bit scared of something that feels like it comes from a different culture. Forty percent of Americans never move more than twenty miles from where they were born. Soccer takes a more open, exploratory mind than most of those people possess.

  Remember: I’m not predicting soccer will overtake the NFL. We’ll never gamble on Arsenal or the L.A. Galaxy the way we gamble on the Steelers and Cowboys.

  But it’s here, it’s real, and it’s not going anywhere.

  To me, it’s kind of like margaritas: an occasional, and welcome, change of pace. It’s not an everyday thing, which means I’m not watching the inferior domestic leagues like the MLS, but the English Premier League or the World Cup? Yes, please. And judging by the ratings of ESPN’s World Cup coverage, I’m not alone.

  Many of the criticisms of soccer always sounded just a little unfair. They were reflexive rather than well considered. If you didn’t know any better, you might even think the critics were making cultural statements rather than athletic ones.

  Take the whole “flopping” thing. The red-blooded American sports fan recoils every time he sees some skinny Spanish guy brush past a defender and fall to the ground like he’s been tasered by airport security.

  Excuse me, but have you watched the NBA in the past decade? That’s the same NBA that had to institute a policy of heavy fines for players who flop. It became such an issue in the NBA that the league deemed it a threat to the integrity of the sport. Tough, nonsoccer guys like Dwyane Wade and Tyson Chandler throw themselves to the floor with impunity if they’re so much as bumped in the late moments of a crucial game. And yet, they’re worshipped as heroes while the soccer players are ridiculed.

  And, of course, there’s never enough scoring or action in soccer. It’s boring. Somehow soccer is boring but a late-season Padres game—with all the energy of a soybean harvest—is a sacred part of the national pastime? And I hate to break it to every beer-swilling football-and-NASCAR fan, but the average NFL game has somewhere between twelve and sixteen minutes of action, and half of every big NASCAR race seems to roll past on a yellow caution flag. So let’s not pretend every minute of every American-made sport is a testosterone-laced beehive of activity.

  Here’s another thing about soccer: it’s got demographics on its side. The “Browning of America” is a huge boon to soccer. The Hispanic population is becoming a larger and larger segment of our population, and soccer is in its cultural bloodstream. Soccer is their NFL.

  It kills me when people treat soccer like it’s an infestation. We’re a country of excess. The Kardashians are okay but soccer is un-American? People get territorial. We can’t even call it football like the rest of the world because we have our own football, so that stuff they play with their feet is soccer.

  Again, it won’t be the NFL, but it’s not going anywhere, either.

  Over the past few decades, Soccer Guy has stepped away from the pulpit. He no longer needs to evangelize because he’s no longer defensive. He sees the traction his sport has gained and he knows it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. He doesn’t feel the constant, nagging need to defend his sport.

  Anti–Soccer Guy has softened some, too. He sees soccer everywhere—on ESPN, on Fox Sports. It’s better than he thought, or he doesn’t really see it as a threat anymore. It’s not taking away his NFL or NBA. He can still watch his Cowboys on Sundays, so he’s reached a sort of angle of repose with the whole deal.

  And that’s where we stand, with soccer making inroads quietly, persistently, and on its own merits. It’s not some sleeper cell intent on taking over our God-given right to football, basketball, and baseball. It’s a great sport that deserves its spot in the buffet line of sport.

  The only major seismic shift left for soccer is the emergence of Soccer Jordan, a transcendent American player who makes even the most hardened Anti–Soccer Guy grudgingly flip on the TV to see what all the fuss is about.

  And in a twisted way, one of those all-American sports might unwittingly help soccer move toward that moment. If more and more parents steer their sons away from football because of long-term health concerns, more and more athletes will turn to soccer as an alternative.

  That’s all right. We can share. There’s room for everybody and plenty to go around. And for the first time, that’s soccer over there in the corner, ready to make itself comfortable. It might as well pull up a chair and order a drink.

  For Us, Bias

  What I’m about to tell you is not a revelation on the level of Watergate or Clinton-Lewinsky, but it needs to be said: everyone in the media—whether it’s politics or business or fashion or sports—has favorites.

  It’s that word again: bias. When it comes to the media, it’s gone from being a buzzword to being the worst insult possible. You’re just biased, people say when they want to discount a story or an opinion they don’t like. It’s almost too easy.

  Well, of course we’re biased. Everybody has favorites, and nobody is completely impartial. Do you have a favorite niece or nephew? Do you like one or two of your kid’s friends better than the others?

  With that out of the way, I admit I’ve always been more concerned with a different word. This word allows me to overlook your bias.

  Access.

  Do you have it?

  If you have it, I want it.

  And the more you have, the more bias I will tolerate.

  Former Dallas Cowboy star quarterback Troy Aikman is now a star announcer on Fox. In my opinion, he’s the best football analyst in the business today. When I listen to Aikman, I don’t hear his bias, but I understand that his current and former employers leave him open to that charge.

  No matter what Aikman says, an Eagles or Giants fan is going to interpret it in a certain way—a way that takes into account Aikman’s days as a Cowboy and assumes he’s a homer. If Aikman says, “Dez Bryant ran the wrong route,” a Giants fan hears, “If Dez Bryant had run the right route, he would have scored easily on the Giants’ overrated secondary.”

  There’s nothing Aikman can do to combat this. We all understand he’s close to Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and even though he would undoubted
ly love to see Jones rewarded with playoff wins, he’s also smart enough to refrain from openly rooting for him on the air.

  There is something Aikman can provide that few can rival—access to the Cowboys. His history and connections get him behind the rope line. What that means is this: it’s my job to decipher his coded messages during his broadcasts with Joe Buck. If Aikman says, “I think some people in the organization could be getting frustrated with Tony Romo,” I feel confident I can figure out the rest. Troy had lunch with the Cowboys’ owner on Friday or Saturday, and that’s exactly what his old boss told him.

  Aikman’s access more than compensates for any bias—real or perceived—and I’m a more educated viewer because of it.

  What I don’t want is bias without access. Or bias without expertise.

  Which is why I’ve never understood why the sports media have so much damned power when it comes to voting for awards and Halls of Fame.

  It’s one thing to have strong opinions in a column or on a talk show. Neither of those have much staying power; they’re here and gone in an instant in today’s 24/7 sports and news tsunami.

  Hall of Fame voting falls into a different category altogether. It is tied inextricably to a player’s legacy. Seasonal award voting isn’t quite as permanent, but bonus structures have created financial implications for players. These votes help shape and forge legacies and commerce. In the case of the Hall of Fame, the voting creates the closest thing we have to sports immortality.

  To put it bluntly, I want the right people with the right access controlling those votes. The media can be included—in certain situations—but we need to stop treating the media as the overwhelming and often exclusive authorities on such matters.

  It works in other industries. In movies, nearly six thousand people vote on the Oscars, 22 percent of them actual actors. The other votes are cast by directors, producers, animators, composers, executives … you get the idea? Highly qualified people.