The 1990 World Cup - 13 July 1990

Having decided to get away from what we used to call "it all" and now call "the real world" – which for me is the monstrous American scandal of the thrifts, the trial of the mayor of Washington on drug charges, New York's horrendous homicide rate, Aids, acid rain, the defence budget – not least, to get away from New York's infernal summer, I found myself sitting in balmy London, sneaking an occasional glance at the reports of the economic gabfest in Houston, Texas.

And it occurred to me what a splendid thing it would have been if President Bush and Mrs Thatcher, and Chancellor Kohl and the rest, watching the rodeo staged for them in the drenching heat of Houston, had suddenly been distracted by a tidal wave of cheering and a tornado of ticker tape, floating their way from downtown Houston.

It was, it might have been, the homage paid by her native town to a poor black girl, one of seven children, of a working mother from the Houston slums, who was riding high down the city's main street having conquered the unconquerable Navratilova on the centre court at Wimbledon.

It was not to be. But a lot of us hoped that some day soon it will be. As it was, Zina Garrison, a name and a talent well-known in tennis circles these eight years or so, in two days moved up into the small, charmed circle of athletes known to the wider circle of people who know next to nothing of their sport.

It would have been something to have the world of sport move so rudely and audibly into the world of international statesmen, and one stateswoman, who perhaps need to be consoled, from time to time, with the reminder that many more millions of human beings stay sane, or stay blithe, by paying little attention to politics while paying rapt attention to football, baseball, athletics, racing, both two- and four-footed, and, three or four times a year, even to tennis and golf.

By the way, I'm always being asked by non-Americans which are the most popular American sports. American themselves, of course, never ask because they assume they know. They'd get a shock if they consulted my new bed book, about which I must talk sometime, a thousand-page study of that "real world" which shatters more preconceptions, at a glance, than you could upset in a year in a loony lefty or a bloodshot Tory.

Well, an exhaustive statistical survey of American tastes was made on the answer to a comprehensive question, "Which sport, or sports, do you play or watch or read about?" It comes out that the American people's favourites, in descending order, are football (American), basketball, baseball, hockey – ice of course, only girls' schools play field hockey or used to – racing, bowling (all right ten-pin), boxing, trotting races.

After that, the audience shrinks dramatically. Towards the bottom of the list are tennis, followed by golf, followed by lacrosse. To me, the golf figure is the really scandalous one. Just think – just over 6% of Americans play, watch or read about golf. Ninety-four Americans in 100 live in the outer darkness of ignoramuses who have never heard about Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman or Nick Faldo.

I don't know what can be done about this. But is seems to me to be on a par with the alarming percentage in both America and Britain of schoolchildren who are incapable of writing a simple, declarative English sentence, who are, as they say, functionally illiterate.

You will have noticed, if it crossed your mind at all, that soccer is never mentioned. Yet, if you talk to American parents of boys whose school, either private or public, plays soccer, you'd think the playing fields of the whole country were being taken over by what is, in scores of other countries, the national sport. Soccer is surely, without any challenger, the universal sport.

We shall have to wait till next year to have the accurate count of the numbers of television viewers who saw the World Cup. But the Italian organisers, possibly exaggerating a tad, estimated that the figure is 3.5billion. That's one half of the human race.

How many of those glued and riveted spectators were American? Less than 1%. Not of the American population, but of the American viewing audience, which by a generous calculation must mean that, say, one third of 1% of the American population were watching, or 870,000 out of 260 million.

And yet, the United States has been chosen to be the site of the 1994 World Cup which will be an amazing bit of news to, among others, 259,130,000 Americans. They, like me, will be asking, "How come?"

Well, I know nothing of the workings or the wiles of FIFA, international soccer's governing body, but two years ago it looked at the contending applicants and chose the United States as the place for 1994 over Morocco and Brazil.

The received, determining, factor, I'm told, was the surprising fact that at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, nearly 1.5 million tickets were sold for the soccer games. Naturally the United States government is quick to play up this figure, the Department of Commerce has calculated that the 1994 World Cup will attract about three million spectators in the flesh. And it has already published the figure of $1.5 billion as the likely tourist take.

Furthermore, the United States has a soccer booster, or missionary, of remarkable distinction. A man who, after the long Asiatic freeze, broke the ice in opening up American relations with China who, for several years, determined, more than anybody, American relations with Europe and the Middle East and the Soviet Union and who now advises countless bigwigs of countless nations on how they should run their lives and their businesses.

He is Dr Henry Kissinger who, as a native German and a boy given to the sport, has never lost his passion for it. Well, if he could persuade the most anti-Communist president, Mr Nixon, to go back-slapping and toasting the leaders of China, maybe he can convert a large chunk of the American populace to watching soccer.

Personally, I doubt it. Twenty years ago, or more, I remember writing a piece about the warming, the increasing, American affection for the game. The creation of a North American Soccer League for pros seemed at the time, as the politicians say, "a seminal move".

Later on, some 50,000 spectators gathered in a stadium in New Jersey to watch the magical Pelé. He was starred on the cover of national magazines. Was he a portent of a revolution in Americans' sporting taste? He was not. In retrospect he turned out to be the last hurrah for a sport that had expanded beyond the limits of available talent and audience.

Schools across the country had taken up the game with enthusiasm, but the sons of the enthusiastic parents feel differently. That sudden spurt of interest in soccer was seen to be not a portent but a fashion. The North American Soccer League collapsed.

Now, the new enlightened theory is that Americans may be just what the doctor ordered to revitalise a game which has grown so rock-like in defensive tactics that scoring goals has become, not a feat, but an error. The idea is that if Dr Kissinger's missionary zeal works at all, Americans will be encourage, or taunted, into making an exciting new game by investing in soccer some of the tactics, the calculated deceptions, the team huddle of American football. I can hear soccer fans groaning in protest, "Oh please, not all that violence!"

Well, American football is not all that violent. It's calculated. Not as violent as hockey, ice. It may look to the outsider like armoured warfare, but it's really mobile chess, with humans as the pieces. Its lasting appeal is to a scientific mind that loves swift problems.

Albert Einstein was once invited to attend a Friday night strategy session of the Princeton football team. It went on, of course, for an hour or two, and by the end the blackboard was a wriggling maze of figures, arrows, circles and statistics. Einstein threw up his podgy hands. It was all beyond the mental comprehension of the man that discovered that E=mc2.

That is the appeal of American football to its fans. Like baseball, an even subtler game in which, as television now makes blessedly clear, there is not a second's pause in the poker-game signals passing between the pitcher and the catcher, the manager in the field, the batter and the managers. Like baseball, what attracts the mass of Americans to football is cunning and subtlety of movement disguised as mayhem. They looked on soccer briefly, but by now seem not to be entertained.

Now all the plans for the United States as the host country in 1994 were, of course, laid before this year's World Cup was played and televised. An old German veteran of the World Cup, Paul Breitner, who is a sort of George Best of German football, has just announced in his newspaper column that he's heard grim news. Great, good news for him and his readers, that the United States Soccer Federation – and there is still such a body – has heard from the American television networks that they wouldn't touch the World Cup with a hockey stick. And that, consequently, quote, "the United States will give up the 1994 World Cup".

His educated guess is that it will go, wouldn't you know it, to Germany. Huffing, puffing denials have come from the United States Soccer Federation, more impressively from the president of the 1994 World Cup organising committee. "This rumour", he says, "has no basis in fact whatsoever".

Dr Kissinger, hearing about the American 1% viewing audience this year, commented, "Hmm. That is a big problem".

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