Catch a Rising Star

The New Yorker's post-mortem on the United States' World Cup soccer team includes a oafish sideswipe at suburban soccer programs. Over in Gelsenkirchen for the U.S.-Czech Republic game, the magazine's legal affairs writer Jeffrey Toobin is awed by Czech striker Jan Koller ("no one has quite the same combination of graceful athleticism and lurid menace...") and falls to bemoaning the lack of similar balletic brawn on the American team. The fault is somehow to be found in the suburbs. Toobin's article wants to convince us that "soccer in America can't quite transcend its suburban roots." He continues, "Soccer in the suburbs serves mostly as a bridge between Barney and Nintendo; it's a pleasant diversion, not a means of developing brutes like Jan Koller, to say nothing of the magicians who stock the Brazilian team."

The founding generation of any sport in this country has never, however, come from the suburbs--at least, not yet. A young sport is generally populated by the hyphenated Americans of the middling classes first, minorities or the sons and grandsons of immigrants: in the 1920s and '30s, the glory days of of Major League Baseball was keyed by Italian-Americans like Joe and Dom DiMaggio or German-Americans like Lou Gherig. Today, the explosion of Hispanic immigrants, from countries where soccer is a treasured sport, nearly guarantees that the United States will eventually bear its soccer stars. Hispanic soccer associations, often run by churches like the Irish and Italian CYO Leagues of an earlier generation, are already operating in many places. Established suburban leagues are already looking to draw talent from those leagues.

As it happens, unlike the urban champs of old, who grew up playing inner-city sandlot ball or boxing in city gyms, these Hispanic soccer worthies are likely to come out of the suburbs, where their parents gravitated to as the nation's biggest job growth areas. Toobin may be right that the Nintendo playing suburban sector will never produce a Ronaldinho, but a suburban soccer star is almost certainly being
born or made as we speak.

The New Yorker hasn't put Toobin's story online. It can be found in the July 3 issue of the magazine.