This Sporting Life
Michael Mandelbaum is one of America's leading authorities on US foreign policy and international relations and the author of T
he Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (Public Affairs), so who better to analyse why
football won't catch on in the USA.
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North Americans don't need football because they already get what it has to offer from basketball. ...Football and basketball are ... the team sports that most vividly evoke a common human fantasy: to leave the ground and fly through the air."
Presumably they don't need cricket either because they've already got baseball, which in the UK is known as rounders and played by 11 year old girls.
They've also lost that great sporting icon
Mike Tyson. Pity he didn't get kitted up like an American Rugby player and ask for more time-outs. Poor guy. I think he should listen to the
Barefoot Doctor's advice.
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However experienced you are, you actually know - relatively speaking - nothing. Life is mysterious. The construct you've created, based on all your opinions about how life works, is merely a construct. Accept this, and you will be transported to that childlike state, beyond the purely rational, wherein anything is possible."
Like becoming the World Tiddlywinks Champion. It's certainly
a game past its prime.
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