Not Playing The Field

I learned two interesting things watching a men's field hockey game between Great Britain and Argentina at the Olympics today.  One, some people just can't stop reliving the war in the Falkland Islands.  Two, field hockey is yet another global phenomenon the United States just . . . doesn't . . . get.

Field hockey is the the second most popular sport in the world, after soccer, and it has almost zero support in the United States . . . especially for men.  In this country, field hockey is mostly seen as a women's sport, or, as I like to say,  a "dame game."  You look at high schools and colleges and field hockey is thriving for girls, but don't you know that it's different for boys?  You may beg to differ, but I challenge you to name any school system or college in this country that has a field hockey program for students with Y chromosomes. 

I heard one story about a boy in Massachusetts whose parents sued to let him join the girls-only field hockey team at school.  I honestly don't know what, if anything, happened.  Without any schools or leagues to turn to, male field hockey players in America play in some clubs in New York, Connecticut, and California, but that's about it.  You can't build a stellar national team with that sort of infrastructure, and the result is that the only time the U.S. men's field hockey team gets to play in the Olympics is when the Games are held in the U.S.  And of course, they suck.  They came in last at Los Angeles in 1984 and at Atlanta in 1996. They did win the bronze medal at Los Angeles in 1932 . . . but that's because there were only three teams in the competition.

The British, incidentally, aren't in the men's field hockey competition simply because they're hosting the Games; they earned their berth.  It turns out they're one of the best teams in the world.  That's because the Brits - like everyone else outside America - see field hockey as a sport that anyone can play, irrespective of gender.  Good grief, women - including American women - are boxing and wrestling now! And field hockey is still laughed at in this country as a "dame game?" I don't laugh at the sport, just the Yankee men who play it - not because it's girly but because, well, they suck.  But if American men want to play field hockey, we shouldn't stigmatize them for being effeminate or, worse, un-American.  We should encourage them.  Then maybe one day we will have a men's field hockey team we can be proud of.

Meanwhile, what's up with our men's soccer team?  We keep supporting and building up soccer in this country, it's becoming more accepted, and our men's team got disqualified from Olympic competition again?  There's no excuse for them to suck like this.  At least our men's field hockey team has a legitimate reason to.