Sports Biblio Digest 6.10.18: FIFA, Russia and the World Cup
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
In This Issue: American Soccer Politics; The Icelandic Men Cometh; Zinedine Zidane; Alexander Ovechkin; Ted Williams Documentary; Roberto Clemente Mural; British Sports Book Awards; Remembering Dwight Clark, C.M. Newton, Red Schoendienst and Maria Bueno
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This Digest issue No. 127, published June 10, 2018. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website.
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For those who love to “play at” the “intersection” of sports, politics and global affairs, the World Cup is on the same level with the Olympics for all kinds of nefarious international intrigue.
This has been the case for sometime, but the breathtaking 2015 arrests of FIFA executive committee members in Zurich finally blew the lid off what had been a badly held secret.
The corruption in international soccer’s governing body was thorough, a fish rotting from the head down, starting with former FIFA chief Sepp Blatter. The putrid methods of awarding the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments were more rife than ever with bribes and alleged criminal activity.
Nailing the lords of FIFA, as well as the IOC, has been the longtime work of British journalist Andrew Jennings, who’s as self-serving as he is laser-sharp at exposing what’s been ailing these seemingly unaccountable bodies for decades.
But Jennings must also get much of the credit for inspiring not only a new wave of muckrakers, but the attention of the U.S. Justice Department. How American federal investigators finally pieced together enough evidence of bribes, kickbacks, fraud, and money laundering, and traced it to Chuck Blazer, an American on the FIFA executive committee, is being told in book form by BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger.
“Red Card,” published last week by Simon & Schuster, is the latest account to dig deeply in the American investigation and the exploits of Blazer, who died last July, but not before he became an informant for his government.
Ever since those arrests, the question has been obvious: Why is America policing the international game? Can it? What started out as a tax case has spun into something unprecedented. Whatever your level of comfort with this sort of thing―frankly, I’d rather my government go after those responsible for the Wall Street travesty a decade ago―it’s hard to argue that the exploits of FIFA aren’t going to be glossed over, as though nothing can be done.
Yet nothing more has really happened. Russia, the recipient of that 2018 FIFA decision, opens as the World Cup host on Thursday in Moscow. The nation whose athletes were banished from the PyeongChang Olympics earlier this year in a massive doping scandal now sits in the spotlight of another major international sporting event.
An ESPN.com report this week detailed how Russian president Vladimir Putin’s imprints are all over this World Cup, much to chagrin of a new FIFA regime that is as impotent as its predecessor was accomplished as a cabal of grifters. His desire to revive the supremacy of Russian sports, apparently at any cost, now culminates with being the head of state for the host nation in the largest sporting event in the world.
The distaste is certainly being expressed in Western media, and government officials in Britain and Australia, who have teams competing in the World Cup, will not be traveling to Russia.
Ditto for Poland, which is sending no delegation for the opening ceremonies. Human Rights Watch is using the occasion to highlight what it’s calling the worst human rights crisis in Russia since the Soviet era.
None of this figures to bother Putin all that much. And FIFA has plenty of other struggles of its own just enacting basic reforms. The stench of the corrupt 2022 World Cup award to Qatar is still strong, and will linger well after the finals in Moscow on July 15.
Once the games start, the players will command the attention. Germany’s got a legitimate shot to repeat. Cristiano Ronaldo, coming off a dazzling European Champions League crown for Real Madrid, is back for Portugal. Leo Messi headlines Argentina’s ambitions.
The upstarts from Iceland and Egypt (see below) will well be worth watching, and Brazil, the only nation to compete in every World Cup, also is a strong favorite.
Yet the game and the best players in the world make it so hard to look directly at what surrounds this spectacle, and who governs the sport, or rather, ill-serves it. As Nick Cohen wrote in The Guardian:
“The looting of the Russian economy, the downing of civilian airliners, the murder of journalists, the sheer brazenness of Fifa’s decision to stage a World Cup in a country that has invaded and occupied another country are powerful arguments to boycott the circus. But their power is nothing before the power of the fans’ gaze that fixes your eyes on your team.”
I’m usually disdainful of a blame-the-fans approach, and Cohen’s argument isn’t a new one. Even though the shenanigans at FIFA may not be completely beyond the reach of the law any longer, Russia’s international impunity rages on.
Unless there’s stronger action by participating nations than unctuous diplomatic boycotts, autocrats will win the day, aided and abetted by autocratic organizations that stubbornly fancy themselves as existing beyond any accountability.
American Anxieties
The U.S. failure to qualify for the World Cup for the first time in 38 years has set off a firestorm of outrage and calls for organizational overhaul. U.S. Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati decided not to run again, but that hasn’t stopped critics, like former women’s goalkeeper Hope Solo, from charging that it’s still shrouded in insularity.
Many of the calls to blow up the whole enterprise are coming as a generation raised on nothing but American appearances in the World Cup is struggling to cope. Navel-gazing, like this at Bleacher Report, make very broad, sweeping, almost breathless claims:
“The failure to qualify for the World Cup was a collective failure of the entire American soccer community.”
For those whose American soccer memory doesn’t predate 1990, this can seem like a catastrophe. Then consider this: When a young group of U.S. amateurs and low-level pros reached Italia ‘90, they were the first Yanks to take part in a World Cup in 40 years.
That was after the demise of the North American Soccer League. There was no Major League Soccer, nor an accelerated development program, nor much of a fan base or media presence.
Certainly the inability to qualify from one of the weakest regions in the world is unacceptable, and former coach Jürgen Klinsmann bears much, if not all, of the blame. Imagine how things might have been different if Klinsmann had been replaced earlier by former U.S. coach Bruce Arena, which as the latter claims in a new memoir, almost happened.
Those who want to tear everything down need to calm down. Not even Arena could prevent the fiasco that’s reached into the American sporting culture deeply enough for two British ex-pats to serve up a sardonic podcast series on the whole matter.
For a nation where soccer will never be the premier sport, it’s grown by exceptional measures since 1990. Also consider who also isn’t going to be in Russia: Italy (four-time World Cup champion), Holland (the best nation never to have won the World Cup) and Chile, a revelation in 2016 but which couldn’t get out of a brutal South American qualifying tournament.
Arena certainly could be accused of being defensive for this suggestion, given his long background in the U.S. scheme of things:
"It's not like you've got to have a clean sweep of everything and make all radical changes. You just need the right leadership with the right ideas and get going."
He’s as clear-headed and realistic as anyone I came across in my years, roughly from 1995-2005, covering this sport. It’s been 16 years since he took the Americans to their best modern-day World Cup finish, to the 2002 quarterfinals in South Korea, when American soccer’s fortunes were looking up with the likes of Landon Donovan.
Like many other more powerful soccer nations, however, they had a downturn in talent as much as anything. Mishandling at the managerial and administrative ranks also is not unique to the U.S. hierarchy.
What American fans have been grasping, whether they’re conscious of it or not, are the disappointments of not living up to growing expectations that at times border on the unrealistic. If you want to get a taste of what it was like being an American soccer fan in the 1980s, listen to this, about the real dark ages.
It was 1994 U.S. World Cup icon Alexi Lalas who tweeted out some badly needed historical perspective this week, someone who grew up without anything that young players and fans today take for granted:
“Yes, I've said it before. System isn't perfect and certainly needs change, but it's not why we failed to qualify and doesn't need to be torn down. The players and coaches failed and we are looking for something bigger to blame because our insecurity demands something bigger. . .
“Show me a country whose soccer infrastructure, supporters' culture, professional leagues, media, global relevancy, domestic relevancy, youth development, women's game, men's game, marketing, sponsorship and television has grown more in the last 30 years than USA."
A Few Good Football Reads
A World Cup books preview from The New York Times notes lots of bad timing around the U.S. qualification fiasco and publishers’ deadlines;
Some terrific World Cup preview sections from The Guardian and These Football Times, which has some good historical pieces, including this one about Fritz Walter, a former Wehrmacht prisoner of war who led West Germany to its first World Cup championship in 1954;
Sport Illustrated’s Grant Wahl on Iceland, the smallest nation ever to reach the World Cup in 2014, and which proved its worth with a respectable Euro 2016 showing. They’re back at the World Cup, as Sean Gregory writes in a cover piece for Time, and are by-products of a thriving, sports-for-all culture that's emerging. More on Iceland from The Guardian in 2016, and how the Minnesota Vikings have adopted Iceland’s thunderclap celebration that’s sort of a Nordic counter to the Haka dance;
Liverpool sensation Mohamed Salah is leading Egypt to the World Cup for the first time since 1990, and his image is plastered all over walls in Cairo and his home village of Nagrig. Fans just hope he’s overcome injuries that may rule him out for Egypt’s opener on Friday against Uruguay;
After becoming the first manager to win three consecutive UEFA Champions League titles, French former World Cup star Zinedine Zidane abruptly resigned at Real Madrid, and as the cornerstones of the dream team he led may be breaking up, at least in part;
The English Football League has ruled that clubs will no longer be required to print matchday programs, with sales down and costs up in the digital age.
A Few More Good Reads
Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star on Alexander Ovechkin, the Capitals’ captain and long-time talisman, finally raising the Stanley Cup;
For sports fans in D.C., it’s the first major sports championship in 26 years, and the celebrations out on the streets were surreal, and (happy) tear-inducing;
At The New York Daily News, Kevin Armstrong writes about Bill Nack and Secretariat, revealing that the recently passed sportswriter’s ashes will be spread at the Saratoga track;
PBS is airing a new episode of its fine “American Masters” series on July 23, featuring Ted Williams, and here’s a trailer;
Joe Posnanski looks into the math that added up 715 homeruns for Babe Ruth, and the stathead controversy that once surrounded that claim, even involving the Baseball Writers Association of America;
At The Philadelphia Inquirer, Frank Fitzpatrick recalls a seemingly innocuous baseball painting that launched a culture war in the 1950s;
In Pittsburgh, local artist Jeremy Raymer is finishing up a mural to honor Robert Clemente on the side wall of a bar in town;
Ruth Richard, a catcher in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, has died at the age of 89. As Paul Muschick writes at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., there aren’t many living members remaining from that World War II-era experiment that contemporary audiences know via the 1992 film “A League of Their Own.” Not long ago 75th anniversary observances of the Rockford Peaches took place in the Illinois town, including a celebrity softball game;
In Milan, Ind., the municipal water tower that’s heralded the immortal accomplishments of that town’s 1954 state basketball championship is getting a long-overdue facelift;
Bill Littlefield is calling time on his 25 years as host of “Only A Game,” NPR’s weekly national sports program produced at WBUR in Boston. The show will go on, and Littlefield, who was kind to have me on once or twice to discuss the Women’s Final Four and other women’s sports, signs off July 28.
Sports Book News
The British Sports Book Award winners for 2018 were named this week. Voting for the overall winner is underway through June 15. The recipient of Outstanding Contribution to Sports Writing is John Woodcock, former editor of the Wisden Cricket Almanack.
Passings
Dwight Clark, 61, was the charismatic tight end who won five Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers and made “The Catch” that’s one of the iconic photos in NFL and modern American sports history. Later the GM for the 49ers and the Cleveland Browns, he announced his diagnosis with ALS in 2017;
C.M. Newton, 88, was a pioneering basketball coach at Vanderbilt and Alabama and later was athletics director at Kentucky, helping usher in integrated intercollegiate athletics in the Deep South;
Red Schoendienst, 95, was the oldest living member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, and inducted both as a player and a manager. “Mr. Cardinal” wore the club uniform longer than anyone else, and only Tony LaRussa won more games as manager in St. Louis;
Maria Bueno, 78, was one of the top female tennis players in the 1950s and 1960s, winning three Wimbledon titles and four U.S. Open crowns. Injuries shortened her career, but Billie Jean King credited “The Tennis Ballerina” with aiding the growth of the women’s game at the dawn of the Open era.
