Wine and Soccer

Last weekend I took a bus from Boston to New York to stay with a friend in Brooklyn. He’d invited me down to watch the New England Revolution play the first leg of the MLS Eastern Conference championship series against New York in Red Bull Arena. My friend’s been a fan of Thierry Henry since Henry’s first days at Arsenal, and he wanted to see the French striker’s last game in New York, maybe one of his last games ever.

Shortly after I arrived on Saturday night, and with zero fanfare, my friend opened a bottle of 1963 Dow port and poured glasses for us and his wife. How he came to have a bottle of 1963 Dow sitting on his kitchen counter is not to be gone into here, but something should be said of the wine itself. The great British critic Jancis Robinson has described the 1963 Dow as “majestic,” and that it is “one of the top four or five vintage ports of the 20th century by anyone's reckoning.” The particular bottle I tasted last Saturday was one of the best wines I’ve ever had, despite its having been stored indifferently on multiple kitchen counters for more than a decade (after, it’s true, three decades of impeccable storage in a London cellar).

Since there can’t be many bottles of 1963 Dow left, it may (just) be worth recording some of my own impressions, which I jotted down on a scrap of paper: “Translucent maroon, you can see through it, like tea. Green apple, pepper, caramel, licorice, asphalt. Not necessarily complex, but perfectly balanced, without a hint of that nasty, vegetal mintiness of table wines that are past their primes.” When I asked my friend for his impressions, he (most would say rightly) winced and said, “I don’t do that.”

My urge to treat the wine as something beyond a mere beverage—to comment on and discuss it—and my friend’s equally strong desire to shun such pretentions and keep his thoughts to himself can be seen as emblematic of how Americans react to wine. Even though wine is enormously popular in the U.S., it has never fully shed its reputation as the drink of snobby, rich aesthetes. The following passage from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast illustrates how the author could only drink wine naturally in Europe, or anyway outside the U.S., where Americans fetishize the stuff:  “In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal . . . Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.”

I thought of some of this last weekend when I drank vintage port and, later, watched the game. I also thought (not for the first time) about the similarities between wine and soccer. Most obviously, fans of each tend to intellectualize their passions, to talk about them in stilted language, though there is nothing inherently intellectual about wine or soccer. Wine critics talk of a wine’s “finesse,” its “lingering finish” and “exquisite balance,” its “masculinity” (or “femininity”) and “nobility.” In short, they use terms and concepts that are typically not applied to other foods or drinks, even beer and spirits. Soccer commentators employ similarly nerdy terms that would sound laughable if they were used to describe almost any other physical activity outside the performing arts. They talk of a player’s “quality” and “current rich vein of form,” of “naive” defensive plays and “educated” left feet, of “brilliant finishes” (that last term neatly overlapping with wine lingo).  All of this contributes to the popular notion that soccer and wine are the provinces of snobs and eggheads, not “normal” people.

I’ve mentioned something of Americans’ uneasy relationship with wine. We have a similarly uneasy relationship with soccer. While growing in popularity, particularly with young Americans and urban liberals, soccer has never been widely accepted here. The documentary Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos has an illuminating interview with John O’Reilly, the former New York Cosmos promotions director. O’Reilly describes the 1975 press conference that introduced Pele to the New York press after Pele signed with the team. O’Reilly recalls the influential, conservative New York sportswriter Dick Young shouting from the back of the crowded room: “[Young] was just heckling the entire time. ‘Soccer is for foreigners, shouldn’t be played in America!’ Everything negative.” Many American political conservatives continue to carry Young’s torch. Ann Coulter’s June 2014 jeremiad, “America’s Favorite National Pastime: Hating Soccer” is representative. Soccer, she writes, is “foreign” to Americans and is a threat to American values.

So while Americans are watching more soccer than ever—as evidenced by the strong ratings here for the 2014 World Cup and rising MLS attendance—there is still a sizeable contingent of intelligent citizens that regard soccer as un-American. And that contingent makes it nearly impossible for any American to regard watching soccer as Hemingway’s Europeans regarded drinking wine—“as something as healthy and normal.”

Glenn Davis, a former professional soccer player and current soccer radio and TV broadcaster for the Houston Dynamo, is a proselytizer of the game. I listen to his podcasts occasionally, and more than once I’ve heard him urge listeners to come down to Houston’s soccer stadium to enjoy “the company of like-minded individuals.” Every time Davis mentions “like-minded individuals,” I bristle. Because the comment speaks to soccer’s entrenched status in this country as a cult activity to be enjoyed not by all but by an enlightened few. Americans don’t go to NFL or NBA games to be in the company of like-minded individuals. They go to watch the games. And they assume there will be all types of people there—blacks and whites, conservatives and liberals, Budweiser drinkers and wine collectors—not just people like them.

For soccer to be widely accepted in this country, it doesn’t need more like-minded individuals. It doesn’t need more people who frequent Portland coffee houses and Brooklyn pubs. In other words, it doesn’t need more people like me. It needs more people who want to kick my Obama-voting, wine-note-taking ass. I may not want those people sitting next to me at MLS or U.S. national team games, but until there’s the strong possibility that they will be sitting next to me, soccer will continue to be, as Men in Blazers’ Roger Bennett and Michael Davies say, “America’s Sport of the Future. As it has been since 1972.”