The spirit of American sport which shames the Premier League

The spirit of American sport which shames the Premier League

by Oliver Holt, Daily Mirror

18/01/2012






I WAS at Lambeau Field on Saturday, watching fans having their
picture taken beneath the statue of Vince Lombardi that guards the
entrance to the magnificent old stadium, when I heard Richard
Scudamore’s blanket dismissal of American sport.

“I envy America their equality but theirs is an incestuous,
contained, domestic world,” the Premier League chief executive said in
the course of an otherwise cogent interview.

“They have pulled off a trick of putting on a lot of meaningless
sport, with nothing to play for, no promotion or relegation, yet still
having people watch.

“The World Series isn’t really. It’s America and one team from Canada. I wouldn’t swap our global appeal.”

That’s them told, then. The NFL, the NBA, the NHL and Major League
Baseball, all damned in the sweep of a Little Englander’s hand.

Incestuous and meaningless? That’ll teach American sports to try to
ensure a wealthy elite doesn’t establish a stranglehold on their
leagues.

Incestuous and meaningless, says the bloke who runs a league that’s
only been won by four teams since its inception nearly 20 years ago.

In the same period of time, the Super Bowl has been won by 12
different teams, the NBA by eight different teams, the Stanley Cup by 12
different teams and the World Series by 11 different teams.

Incestuous and meaningless? The day after Scudamore’s comments, I
got a message from an Aston Villa fan who said he felt 90 per cent of
his club’s games in the last 10 years had been meaningless.

The supporters of a lot of teams who know with absolute certainty
they have zero chance of winning the Premier League might say the same.
Scudamore (below) is a fiercely intelligent man who deserves much of the
credit for the success of the Premier League but his attack was
puzzling, not to mention lacking class.

It was also spectacularly mistimed because it came on one of those weekends when American sport was at its best.

I spent most of Saturday driving around Green Bay on the northern
shores of Lake Michigan, a town of little more than 100,000 people where
the heart of American sport beats.

In the late afternoon, I went to a bar to watch one of the best NFL
play-off games in recent memory as the San Francisco 49ers won a
thrilling victory over the New Orleans Saints.

In the evening, Tom Brady, the playboy quarterback of the New
England Patriots, handed out a lesson to the Denver Broncos’ Tim Tebow,
the kid who has transfixed America these past couple of months.

And then on Sunday, it was Green Bay’s moment in the spotlight.
American sports lovers call it Titletown because of the success of the
Green Bay Packers who dominated the NFL in the 1960s and won the Super
Bowl again last year.

It is a resolutely blue collar town, an industrial community
dominated by meat-packing firms and paper plants and chimneys belching
smoke.

The residents here are battered by the bitterly cold winters. The
people are known for their hospitality but the landscape is bleak.

The lake is frozen and last week the son of one of the Packers’ coaches died when he fell through thin ice on the Fox River.

This is old-school America, the kind of mid-western community that
makes you realise how resilient the people were who settled in this part
of the country.

And their team? Well, the Packers are the kind of club anyone would
be proud to support. Every game at their 72,000-capacity stadium since
1960 has been a sell-out.

The Packers are the last survivors of the small-town teams that
dominated the NFL in the 1920s and 1930s and they are also the only
community-owned team in major American sport.

“One of our biggest advantages as an organisation,” Packers’ chief
executive Mark Murphy says, “is the tremendous loyalty our fans have to
the team.

“A major reason for that is the ownership structure.

“A lot of the fans are our shareholders. It gives them a much stronger tie to the team.

“That emotional tie, that pride, has really helped us over the years.”

You want another idea of the place the team holds in American sport?
Well, each year the two teams who contest the Super Bowl do so to try
to win the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

Lombardi was the coach who led the Packers to the first two Super
Bowl triumphs in 1967 and 1968 and whose tenets on attitudes to winning
are still revered and repeated daily.

The closest equivalent in English football, a man similarly idolised
and held in almost universal affection, would ­probably be Bill
Shankly. It wasn’t Green Bay’s turn this year, though.

Their fans were optimistic as they defied the pre-game sub-zero
temperatures to take part in the traditional tailgate parties, sip their
beers and eat their fried cheese curd and butter burgers outside
Kroll’s West restaurant.

Inside, they took their places on the simple wooden benches made white by permafrost. No prawn sandwiches here.

They had won 15 of their 16 regular season games and were clear
favourites to beat the New York Giants in their divisional play-off.

But to the dismay of their supporters they made a series of uncharacteristic and crucial errors and lost 37-20.

Quite why Scudamore feels the need to label sport like that
incestuous and meaningless is beyond me, especially when we are in the
midst of such a compelling Premier League season.

Then again, there’s no equivalent of the Green Bay Packers in the Premier League. Maybe he’s just jealous.



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