Football, Soccer and War
Steven Wells’ latest missive in The Guardian seeks to connect America’s war since the 1960s with the war-like metaphors of America’s version of football, which has become “America’s game” in the past few decades.
Given that the Pentagon is packed with officers brought up on American football; given that generations of American football coaches have bombarded their charges with war metaphors; given that Mel Gibson is incapable of making a war movie without a climactic battlefield scene in which Mel scores a touchdown after he shoots, stabs or impales the opposing quarterback; and given that gridiron writer Marke Mask called his new book War Without Death (“It’s about grand acquisition and aerial attack. It’s about covert intelligence”). Given all this, is it really that ridiculous to argue that the disastrous invasions of Vietnam and Iraq were at least partly the fault of the games that America plays?
This is hardly new territory, but he then goes on to discuss a very strange sounding movie from 1977 that introduced soccer to the war metaphors-mix, The Boys in Company C, “a lousy war movie and a rotten sports movie but quite possibly best film ever made about the war/sports metaphor. Released in 1977 – two years after the fall of Saigon and the same year Pele joined the New York Cosmos and sparked America’s first great soccer frenzy – Boys is a “skintight” low-budget peacenik ‘Namsploitation film made by the same Hong Kong production company that churned out the Bruce Lee flicks.”
The rest of the article then rather loses me as Wells outlines the plot in considerable detail. It turns out America’s Operation Linebacker strategies had been beaten by the Vietnamese’ cunning soccer-like counter-attacks. Captain Collins of Company C explains the situation to his troops.
“Now, our thinking is shaped by the games we grow up with. The VC don’t play by our rules because they grew up with a game that demands constant movement and fluid, shifting strategy. Now while you’re on this ship, you will learn to play their game. And, gentlemen, their game is soccer.”
“Soccer!” gasps a private.
“Kiss my ass!” growls another.
It turns out that “America’s losing the war because it insists on playing American football while Charlie plays soccer. Like some days he mines the roads, and other days he mines the paddy fields. The crazy-like-a-fox soccer-playing bastard.”
Unfortunately, Captain Collins turns out to be a poor soccer strategist, and things then get even more complicated with a homoerotic climax as “Escape to Victory meets The Longest Yard”. I’m not sure whether the movie or Wells’ description of it is more bonkers, but there are some interesting points in this somewhere.
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Thomas Dunmore
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Too bad Wells looks to a second rate movie no one has ever heard of to make his point. The subject of how national sports could influence military decisions is an interesting one. Not sure how Wells would explain American military success in WW II.
The gridiron meme was actually quite popular during the Vietnam Era, with Nixon’s hawkishness seen as being reflected in his near-worship of George Allen’s Washington Redskins and perceived nterference in the process of declaring college national champions after a Texas-Oklahoma game. It also tends to get trotted out whenever ESPN starts to go overboard on the “pageantry and patriotism” of the Army-Navy game.
Though surely one massive difference in this case is that gridiron coaches are obsessed with planning and preparation, whereas this administration couldn’t be arsed to watch 90 seconds of film.
I find Wells to be as annoying as he is unoriginal.
Speak for yourself Bob…I’ve seen that movie at least 5 times.
The thing with Wells is that his rantings do occasionally hit an interesting vein, though I suppose if you fire wildly enough often enough, that’s bound to happen.
I’m glad someone else found the article obtuse. I thought it was just me on a Monday morning.
There’s a good article, maybe even a book to be written on american sport and how they influence and explain america as a nation.
That wasn’t it.
As someone in the comments there says, football people in britain come out with all sorts of bollocks about players you’d want beside you in the trenches and so on, so it’s hardly a solely american thing.