What's Not to Love?
Three Reasons Basketball is Better Than Soccer: A Tribute to a Friend (and Devoted Soccer Fan) on his 34th Birthday
1) No Ties
Ties are unsporting, maddening, and un-American. They run contrary to the spirit of human nature and natural evolution. They deny spectators the visceral satisfaction owed to them as lifelong loyalists and merchandise-purchasers.
Sports are all about heightened emotional and physical states, and the whole point of competition is to determine superiority, even if only for one day. Victories carry the possibility for glory and jubilation, states the average human rarely gets to experience during the course of a lifetime spent moaning back and forth between bars, boardrooms, bedrooms, and other bars. Losses, meanwhile, allow people to get a taste of tragedy, a privilege usually reserved for ancient Greeks and the Kennedy family.
To declare a game a tie is to deny what people watch sports for in the first place: immersion in the theatrical back and forth of epic success and public failure. The thrill of victory; the agony of defeat: These are the realities athletes and fans should be drawn to and repelled by. Giving them a third option, especially one as irredeemably polite as tying, Is denying the human drive for experience and the human need for closure and the human want to feel something, anything, even pain.
In professional basketball, no game is allowed to end in a tie, no matter how agonizingly dull it is. Unlike soccer (which has designs on elegance for elegance’s sake), basketball is a game motivated entirely by the desire to win. Sure, soccer games don’t end in ties when something like the World Cup is on the line, but why those games and not others? In basketball, all games are created equal, insofar as each requires an honest ending. It’s a very Jeffersonian sport, basketball. If a game goes 12 overtime periods and three hours long, so be it; that is the price you pay for caring. Sports are for winning and losing; games, on the other hand, are for fun and exercise. Real sports fans suffer through endless overtimes in the quest for something resembling transcendence. And ties belong in little league.
(Side note: Have you ever sat through a 0-0 draw? It is an excruciating 90-minute exercise in masochism, with light monastic overtones: Hair-shirts this way, gentleman; whips that. 0-0 draws between Watford and Tottenham Hotspur can be found just down the hall.
(Side note 2: American sports fans would never riot after a draw. America sports fans don’t even riot after a loss. It seems the only time we take to the streets is after our team wins, making us the strangest group of morons the world, perhaps, has ever known.)
2) Playoffs
I should clarify something: After reading the above entry, a reader might be fooled into believing that in basketball all games are created equal. But that’s only true to a point. In professional basketball certain games are created very much unequal. These are called playoff games, and good luck getting a soccer fan to appreciate their value.
In club soccer (meaning league play rather than tournament play), the standings of a particular league are determined by the aggregate number of points each team in the league has scored by the end of a season. The points system breaks down like this:
Win – 3 points
Loss – 0 points
Tie – 1 point
Whichever team has the most points at the end of a season wins the league championship. Meaning more often than not, the winner of a soccer league has been determined long before the end of a season. If Team A (let’s say, Stesny-Upon-Herfordshire-By-Mossly-Upon-Bose FC), for example, has four games left in its season and is up 10 points on second-place Team B (Weesley-Beetleberry United), which also has four games left, chances are extremely good that Team A has already won the championship, despite the fact that there are still four games left to play. The only way Team B could win is if it wins all of its remaining four games and Team A fails to win any of theirs, which is unlikely considering Team A has already proven itself the best team in the league. Since games are played approximately once a week, that means that the last month of the season is essentially meaningless. Sure, you could watch those games to see which team gets second or third place (and thereby earns a spot in the coveted Europe-wide Champions League club tournament; though I don’t understand where second- and third-place teams get off calling themselves “champions”) or to see which team comes in last or second-to-last or third-to-last (and thereby gets tossed down into the outer darkness of a lower league, while the three best teams from that lower league get the opportunity to rise up – a quirky system of “promotions” and “relegations” that, I must admit, is a stroke of genius designed to keep teams honest and hard-working. (Are you reading, David Stern? I’m just saying consider it. After all, who wouldn’t want to see the minor-league Fort Wayne Mad Ants promoted to the NBA while the Memphis Grizzlies are forced to travel the Plains States in a converted mini-van?).
But regardless of the sinister joy of watching teams get relegated, what you get in club soccer is a system in which the best teams in a league rarely have to face off in crucial, high-stakes, high-pressure games designed to separate the wheat from the slightly less good wheat.
Compare this system to the NBA, where every year the team with the best regular-season record still has to fight its ways through four different opponents in best-of-seven series in order to rightfully call itself King of the League. Meaning fans of the game are guaranteed to see the best teams square off under extremely hot lights and in front of enormous national audiences to see not just who has the stuff to win when very little is on the line but who has the temerity, the gall, and the moxie to make plays when they really matter. The playoffs offer the chance to see which teams are regular-season good and which teams are playoff, high-stakes, for-real, vitamin-drink-commercial good. There are plenty of athletes and teams out there that are technically brilliant and physically gifted but that don’t have the heart to win when it matters (see the Dallas Mavericks here and here … and everywhere, really). Then there are those teams and players who simply refuse to accept the possibility of defeat and overcome overwhelming odds and commonly accepted expectations to become champions.
Like elections, debates, county fairs, and sex scandals, playoffs represent American democracy at its purest: the chance to see overpaid celebrities in the primes of their lives either rise to the challenge of extreme pressure or wilt under it like flowers in Texas in July in my yard. And every spring provides basketball fans another chance at hero worship and schadenfreude. Just as God intended.
3) Shot clocks
This is a big one for those of us not blessed with the patience to watch grown men pass a ball back and forth with their feet for 20 minutes in order to “take time off the clock” and hold on to a 1-0 lead. I say that if a soccer team doesn’t shoot the ball at least once every two minutes, every man on the field should be forced to watch one full pre-shot-clock-era NBA basketball game, when teams often scored fewer than 40 points and fans often attacked players on the court in fits of boredom-induced psychosis. (Click here for a fascinating story about the man who devised the 24-second system that saved professional basketball from itself and obscurity.) If they can survive that without coming to the conclusion that maybe a shot clock might be a way to keep soccer engaging, they can go back to dribbling the ball into the corner, turning their back to their opponent, and running (or rather “walking,” or rather “strolling”) out the clock.
4) Honorable Mentions (in No Particular order):
Alley-oops, behind-the-back passes, Tracy McGrady scoring 13 points in 35 seconds, cheerleaders, Michael Jordan, trash-talking, tiger-print leather jackets, leaping over enormous Frenchmen, the Sacramento Kings 2000-2002, the Phoenix Suns 2004-2006, flopping instead of diving, “Ball don’t lie,” “shambling gigantism,” and cheerleaders
