The defending champion Packers are about to start their title defense season and the Brewers are (knock on wood) on a trajectory that will at least take them to the playoffs. I would bet everyone reading this can name at least five Packers and Brewers.
The defending champions of the world’s most popular sport and, arguably, its most prestigious league, Manchester United of the English Premier League, also just started their season. India won the World Cup of Cricket which took place a few months back and made over a billion people proud.
Quick – name one player on either Man U or the Indian National Cricket team. Can’t, can you?
If I stopped the average person on the street here in Singapore and asked him about the Brewers or the Packers he might think I was referring to locally brewed Tiger Beer and KC Dat (the moving company that packed and moved me two times since I’ve lived here). Aaron Rogers and Ryan Braun could walk the streets of Singapore (or any other city in Asia) without attracting any attention. Prince Fielder and BJ Raji would only turn heads because of their girth, not their sports prowess. But trot out Wayne Rooney or Sachin Tendulkar and you’d have a riot. I would doubt either Rooney or Tendulkar would even be able to get a table in the front room at Elsa’s if they walked in there on a Monday night.
Rooney, the Manchester United forward, has over 7.6 million fans on Facebook and Tendulkar, the Indian cricket star, has over 4.5 million. (FYI: India has 1.2 billion people, 100 million Internet users and 25 million Facebook users). Rodgers has 630K, Braun 206K, Fielder 36K and BJ Raji 33K. The first two are global superstars with an asterisk that means "except in the US;" the others are US superstars virtually unknown across any ocean.
Why does the world sports stage differ so greatly from the U.S. focus?
A quick look into the rankings of the most popular sports in the U.S. shows, depending upon the source, American football and baseball at numbers 1 and 2. Soccer, when it makes the list at all, is usually at about number 11 or so. In one survey it is wedged between running and skateboarding. Cricket, while gaining some popularity primarily due to an increasing South Asian population in the U.S., just barely breaks into the top 20. Still, it checks in a few slots behind paintball and bowling on the U.S. lists.
The world list has football (our soccer) firmly entrenched at number 1 with cricket a solid number 2. We are talking BILLIONS of followers for those two sports. On the world lists, baseball usually makes the top 10, primarily due to the fact is popular beyond the U.S. in places like Japan, Taiwan and Latin America. American football is nowhere to be seen. It lags far behind field hockey (men’s), table tennis and rugby.
We Americans love hype, drama and trappings. Football and baseball have all that. The broadcasts for U.S. sports are exponentially better than those for soccer and cricket. The rest of the world is light years behind in replays, analysis, electronic gadgets and even equipment. A soccer match is pretty much played straight through, no stopping with very little scoring. Even the timing of the game is strange. After regulation there is a very nebulous "extra time" which no one knows except the referees. The timing for the end of the game is a mystery. Cricket lasts forever. Each team bats once so a game is like one huge inning long, sometimes for three days. They even have a tea break. So civil. Who is going to go to a three-day match in the U.S.? We get bored after about 90 minutes of anything. How can you watch that? A new faster version called T20 is catching on and might allow cricket to crack the U.S. market a bit, but don’t hold your breath.
Why am I writing this? Because I am surrounded by blokes (see, I’m slipping) who keep telling me that their sports are so far superior to ours and I just don’t get it. I think they are crazy.
I proudly wear my Packer and Brewer gear, make sure all my friends get bored by my sports talk as much as I get bored by theirs. I get up at 2 a.m. to watch a game and catch almost all the Brewers games live in the a.m. here.
I am making an open offer to Aaron, Ryan, Prince or any of the guys to visit Singapore in the off season if they want a get away from their celebrity for a little while. In return, I can offer Sachin, Wayne or any of the superstars of global sport a place to stay in Milwaukee, where they will have a great time, but will need someone else’s clout to get that good table ...
