Brian D. Bunk

Chicago, 1905. SDN-004085, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

One sure way to irritate historians of soccer in the United States (and yes, there are a few) is to call the sport foreign. In various forms the game has been played by Native Americans and Puritans; factory workers and college students; and professionals and preschoolers throughout American history. Why then does this idea persist? The reasons are complex, but one important factor is that the mainstream sporting press, especially in the second half of the 20th century, has continually depicted soccer as a foreign game.

Anyone who watches ESPN, the nation’s dominant sports network, probably already realized what the website Deadspin.com [http://deadspin.com/what-i-learned-from-a-year-of-watching-sportscenter-5979510] quantified for 2012: the majority of airtime on the channel’s signature news program Sportscenter focused on just three leagues, the National Football League, National Basketball Association,  and Major League Baseball. Soccer meanwhile earned just 1.3% of the total and most of that miniscule amount was devoted to international soccer. Of course ESPN has only been on the air since 1979 and for many years was not nearly as influential as it is today.

Instead fans relied on printed media for sports news, and one of the leading periodicals over the last six decades has been Sports Illustrated. I spent some time examining how many times and in what context the editors put soccer on the cover. Since the first appearance of the weekly in August 1954 through to August 2013 soccer has made the cover just sixteen times. It’s not just the absence of the sport that’s significant but also the context in which it has been portrayed. Fifteen of the sixteen soccer covers have featured foreign players, foreign locations, or U.S. national team players, both men and women. The individuals include Pelé (Brazil), Giorgio Chinaglia and Mario Balotelli (Italy), Daniel Passarella and Diego Maradona (Argentina), and David Beckham (England).  Another showed Brazilian players celebrating their World Cup triumph in 1994 and in 2010 a cover story promised to explain “what soccer means to the world.” Each of the six times U.S. national team players made it to the front they were featured in their roles as representatives of the country in international competitions. In a few cases individuals playing in major American professional leagues have graced the cover: Pelé and Chinaglia from the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL) in the 1970s and David Beckham for the L.A. Galaxy of Major League Soccer in 2007. Notice that although the leagues were based in the U.S., the players featured were born overseas. Only once in all the decades of SI has an American-born player, playing in an American league appeared on the cover. Curiously it was also the first soccer cover in the magazine’s history: goalkeeper Bob Rigby of the Philadelphia Atoms (NASL) on September 3, 1973. The history of soccer in the United States is much longer and richer than most people realize, and we shouldn’t allow coverage of the sport in the United States to mask its true social and cultural significance either today or in the past.

Brian D. Bunk is a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and creator/host of the Soccer History USA Podcast.

Maura Jane Farrelly and Chris Beneke

April was an especially cruel month in Boston. It was also a profane one. In the wake of the marathon bombings, the Dominican-born Red Sox slugger David Ortiz dropped an f-bomb before the team’s April 20 game. “This is our f**king city” he declared to an approving roar from the “Boston Strong” crowd.

A week later, a filmed confrontation between Cambridge resident Roger Nicholson and Dan Bidondi, a correspondent for the conspiracy theory website, InfoWars, went viral. At a press conference earlier in the week, Bidondi had implied that law enforcement officials knew about the marathon attacks hours before they happened. Nicholson told Binondi that he was not welcome in Cambridge, where the citizens have “half a f**king brain.” “I don’t care if people think I’m an ***hole,” Nicholson said, “ I’m not saying the FBI blew up innocent people.”

Under ordinary circumstances, both Ortiz and Nicholson might have been censured or fined for their emphatic use of expletives in public space. But less than an hour after “Big Papi” addressed Fenway Park, FCC chairman Julius Genachowski tweeted that all was forgiven. Ortiz, the chairman noted, “spoke from the heart.” Nicholson’s tongue-lashing earned its own kind of public sanction when Nicholson was invited to appear on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir show. Bashir extended a warm welcome to Nicholson and agreed that the idea of government involvement in the Boston bombings is a “risible theory.”

Both events raise a question with which a liberal democracy must occasionally grapple: When is profanity justified?

Forty years ago, near the fractious end of the Vietnam War, these same questions came to a head when the Supreme Court heard the case of Cohen v. California (1971). In a narrow 5-4 decision the Court ruled that Paul Robert Cohen’s t-shirt, imprinted with the phrase “F*** the Draft,” was a form of protected speech. “People bring passion to politics,” Judge Harlan wrote in the majority opinion, “and vulgarity is simply a side effect of a free exchange of ideas—no matter how radical they may be.”

In the 1960s and early 1970s, profanity became a kind of oppositional discourse, a means of expressing firm, unequivocal dissent or of radically reframing mainstream assumptions. What is indecent and obscene, new leftists argued during the 1960s, was not bad language or sex, but violence, bigotry, and poverty. The idea was arresting. And so it remains today.

Of course, profanity is sometimes merely indecent, and sometimes merely titillating. In 1972, a year after the Cohen decision, George Carlin famously enumerated his seven words you can’t say on TV, which walked a fine line between political expression and mere titillation. That line is not always obvious nor defensible.

The politically expressive power of profanity (just like its comic effect) resides in its restricted and selective use. Employed too often and without thought, profanity devolves into coarseness. Liberal democracies require the civil (and yes, decent) language that shields our social interactions, collective endeavors, and commercial enterprises from the unrelenting siren call of the id.

But Ortiz’s f-bomb and Nicholson’s remind us that profanity can sometimes perform an invaluable public service. When pointed and well-conceived, it can bring egregious false-dealers to light or express deeply felt grievances in a poignant way. In other words, it has the capacity to stir us from our collective slumbers.

We just shouldn’t grow too dependent on it.