American sport - 24 June 1994

I never fail to marvel not at what gets into the papers and on to the box but what doesn't. A ceremony took place last Saturday and if anyone had told me 49 years ago that when in the fullness of time this ceremony would surely take place and it would not blanket the headlines of the world I should never have believed it possible.

I spotted the story as a snippet reprinted on Monday in a paper that I pick up occasionally, a short piece with the sombre, incredible heading allies bid farewell to Berlin. Canons boomed it says here in salute, parachutists fell from the sky, helicopters flew by in formation and 75,000 spectators watched the soldiers step martially through the streets.

The most startling and I imagine for many of those older spectators the most moving participant in the parade was a single aeroplane, a DC-3, the flying workhorse of the Second War, which as a transport C-47 carried men and material across two oceans, but here in Berlin it was the lone symbol of Berlin's most desperate hour, it represented the hundreds of British and American flights that in 1948-9 night and day dropped food and medicines for the besieged people by way of defying and eventually breaking the Russian blockade of the city. Russian blockade of Berlin, cried an incredulous college student to whose generation I gather the Russians are a greatly misunderstood shaggy bear of the people trying very hard without much of our help to be a going democracy.

Well, if you don't remember that grievous winter or haven't read about it, it's too long, too grim a story to go into, suffice it to say that since the Russians had captured Berlin in 1945 all on their own they wanted to have it and hold it, but they'd agreed before the war ended with Britain and free France and the United States that Berlin should be occupied jointly so they divided it into separate zones with free access from Western Germany to the virtual island of Berlin, it worked restlessly at best. The contrast grew sharper every year between prospering West Germany and the poor dour Eastern sector of Berlin.

And in 1961, the East German Police sealed off 68 of 80 crossing points and overnight built a barrier of barbed wire and concrete, it became known as the Berlin Wall and stayed intact for 28 years. So since 1945, British, American and French troops have been in Berlin to protect West Germany and the West from the communist countries beyond the Iron Curtain.

It's been 31 years since the young American President John Kennedy roused half a million Germans with his defiant cry "Ich bin ein Berliner". I ought to say that that thunderstorm of applause was amplified by bellowings of laughter for what nobody told the president at the time was that in German a Berliner is a cake. It was as if in another city he'd cried, "Wherever your liberty is threatened, I give you this solemn promise I am a hamburger". Still, that unforgettable scene flooded the television screens of the world; it was the supreme guarantee that Berlin was the American frontier. The allies, said one speaker the other day, came as saviours and stayed as protectors; they liberated us from one dictatorship and saved us from falling under another.

So last Saturday almost 50 years after they came, they began to leave. I don't wonder if you never saw any of Saturday's solemn and emotional scene because this has been a week of you might say universal sport. I don't remember such a week of what the sports writers called "climatic events" in so many sports last Wednesday was the final, the Cup Final if you like of America's favourite sport, favourite sport to play certainly, basketball, the Knicks and the Rockets. And we've had the famous Stanley Cup, the ultimate trophy of Canada's contribution to sport – and what would be that?

Well of course, one of the two games they originated, the first being lacrosse, this one is from coast to coast known as hockey, which everywhere on this continent means ice hockey. The other hockey known as field hockey is to hockey as rounders is to baseball. Hockey has been supreme in Canada and the north-eastern United States for a long time. The rules were standardised at McGill University in the 1870s, the first hockey league set up in the 1880s and the Stanley Cup was first awarded, just think, in 1912. That's as far as I'm going with ice hockey, the history of Berlin should be enough for one week.

I can hear almost the intake of breathe; the incredulous gasp from some people it might not mentioning the festival that Americans call "Wimbleton". An American who'd been in England for the Wimbledon fortnight last year said to me on his return "the British are sure crazy about tennis on TV aren't they". No, I said rudely, they're crazy about Wimbledon and unless things have changed drastically in the past year or two, you'd better stay in the United States if you want to see on the tube everyday the play in the Australian Open, the Italian Open, the French Open and in the blistering weeks of summer the United States Open.

Well, Wimbledon is only halfway towards its climax, but it has provided at least one reeling sensation in the first round, disposal of Steffi Graf. How about golf? I hesitate there, I talk about golf once a year in April from Georgia, yet I have a friend in England, a lady who says, "I rarely listen to him he talks all the time about golf". Well, we'd just emerged from the cauldron of western Pennsylvania with the youngest and the oldest great golfers in the world wilting under a sun temperature of 125 in pursuit of the United States Open Championship and it was won by a tall, languid, perpetually smiley gum-chewing South African Ernie Els in a play off with a Scot and an American.

In April, a Spaniard won the Masters Tournament. This is the first time that the first two of the four major tournaments have been won by foreigners; the papers are black with further melancholy statistics, six of the last eight major championships have been won by foreigners, what's worse by six different men. In the world rankings, put out of course by Sony, there are only two Americans in the top 10. I will say no more about golf except to quote a lugubrious headline in the New York Times, Where Are America's Golfers?

So hockey has had its finest hour, basketball, baseball is now in full stride, golf has its second of the four grand slam tournaments and awaits the third in Scotland three weeks from now, Wimbledon is well on the way, but we haven't mentioned the world's favourite sport, certainly the biggest spectator sport in any country you care to mention except the United States of America. And yet, as a 100 million people do not need to be told the climatic event of soccer is taking place nowhere but the United States, a situation so improbable to all but the fanatics that the most typical American response to this great honour of being the shop window for the universal favourite game, the truest American response was shown in a comic strip this week. A middle-aged man on the left, a visitor enquiring of two middle-aged Americans a man and his wife, the dialogue goes like this.

"I've come to your country to watch football."

"Really. I'm a Chicago Bears fan myself."

"No, no. Soccer." "Soccer but she's my wife."

"No, no it's a game 11 men playing with their feet."

"Sounds kind of kinky."

It ends with the visitor going off saying "crazy American" and the American saying "crazy foreigner".

For filling the stadiums they're going to have to depend pretty much on what we used to call "the immigrant group" and now call "the ethnic minority" even when they're in the majority, but so far they've racked up surprising figures. The Dutch v. Saudi Arabia drew 50,000 in Washington. Brazil beat Russia in Palo Alto California before 80,000. In New Jersey, in 101º in any discoverable shade 60,000 showed up to cheer or groan as Ireland beat Italy.

The truth, which would surprise many an American couple like the one in the cartoon strip, the truth is that soccer is running neck and neck with two other sports as a game the young most like to play in schools. The favourite of course is basketball beyond any other sport and then volleyball. By the way, volleyball on the beach with nubile semi-naked girls is getting to be very popular on television, I can't think why. And then softball, then soccer, baseball is listed next most popular though baseball is an exclusively summer game, which must confuse the comparative statistics. Those statistics come suspiciously from the soccer industry council of America.

Still, you can say that soccer has taken on in a big way in the schools as a professional game a league was formed with enthusiasm in 1968 and died from public neglect in 1984. Whether the playing of the world cup in the United States will prime the pump of national interest in soccer or whether once the cups gone and forgotten, soccer will remain in popular esteem somewhere between lacrosse and bowling that is the question. It's not a question I think that will noticeably trouble the rest of the world, which long ago crowned soccer as king.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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