Apparently tennis has its own hooligans.
I’m not going to get into the political, social or cultural analysis (just as most U.S. media who “cover” soccer riots fail to). I’ll just say it’s a shame tennis spurs such violence.
Isn’t that what the soccer naysayers always report?
Apparently, there were signs this violence was coming. Delic posted a message on his blog before the match pleading for peace.
There has been violence at basketball games worldwide, and there are fights all the time at football games.
Yet soccer is always singled out as supposedly being violence prone.
Soccer has far more number of games than football, tennis or basketball worldwide (probably combined). It also spans every culture — from First World (with the most advanced stadiums) to Third World (where a game might be played in crumbling stadiums, or with no seats at all).
Soccer is so popular worldwide, it often draws together opposing political groups, bringing citizens who hate one another into one place. That can be a recipe for ugliness.
Most of the time, soccer comes through it unscathed (the lack of violence rarely makes headlines). Sometimes, it doesn’t.
American sports mostly avoid such culture clashes. Browns and Steelers fans might not like each other, but they will never bring in the same racial and historical tension as Serbia and Bosnia. Thankfully.
On Friday, for a rare moment, tennis faced the wrath of gangsters ruining the party for everyone else.
Of course, there also was a streaker. Very soccer-like.
Super Bowl audience a tall tale
For so many years, American media have exaggerated the TV audience for the Super Bowl.
For years, I would read numbers anywhere between 500 million and 1 billion TV viewers each year for a Super Bowl game. I highly doubted it.
First of all, while it’s true the game is available on TV to many countries throughout the world, is the average person in Russia really staying up in the middle of the night on a Monday morning just to watch our Super Bowl?
Very unlikely.
I mean, we get the Australian Rules Football final on American TV, too. But does anyone here watch?
The 1 billion number is probably how many TVs the game is available on. But most people outside the U.S. who are watching the game are U.S. citizens or military, anyway.
Most people around the world consider our football boring.
In England, our Super Bowl is treated mostly with a passing curiosity. Any Brit who turns an interested eye stateside wakes up to a report of who won the game. That's usually good enough for them.
Britain's Sky Sports runs scrolls of U.S. sports scores. ESPN is now running Italian and Spanish soccer scores on its Bottom Line.
Now that our sports culture has become more internationalized, such as with the popularity of World Cup soccer, the Super Bowl’s estimated TV audience has been downsized in recent years to more like 250 million to 300 million.
That’s about more like it, considering the U.S. population totals about 300 million.
Of course, the World Cup likely has been exaggerated, as well. 1 billion people watching the final? Maybe not. Some skeptics have downsized that number, as well, estimating that the number is probably more realistically upward of 500 million, about 1/12th the world’s population.
Steelers making new memories
The Steelers go for their second Super Bowl title in four years on Sunday. After so many years of Steelers fans being accused of living in the past, it’s nice for a new generation of Steelers fans who never saw the great 70s teams to witness their own football memories.