World Views from Dallas Stadium Seats
ARLINGTON, Texas — The exit plan for this blog is to pivot to positive content about Asian athletes. I can think of four people who will read it, so investors will need to stomach a 50-percent drop in audience. F them. I will find my product-market fit. The baseline demographic of Asians and nerdy white guys with Asian fetishes likely is affluent and coveted by advertisers.
My target within this cohort isn’t so much the ethnic evangelists, but those who like sports yet recognize they get pretty boring if you don’t care who wins. And if you don’t gamble or play fantasy sports, you generally root for your hometown or current-town team. And if that town is Dallas, the Cowboys and Luka-less Mavericks have treated their fans with a level of disrespect exhibited in the type of hardcore porn best viewed in an incognito window over a private VPN.
What do I care if these rented megamillionaires win a trophy anyway? I can more easily manufacture a rooting interest in Asian players who give my sons role models and fight emasculating stereotypes. My 6-year-old said he wants to grow up to be Wemby, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him he will max out at 5-foot-11 with a torso shorter than Wemby’s dick.
I must say though my boy is ballin’! They don’t call travel yet, so he has no qualms hogging the ball and chucking.
World Cup is an exception to the need for a rooting interest. It’s just plain fun. My buddy told me one time in college in Sherman, Texas, somebody yelled out “World Cup” randomly, and a “cornfed whiteboy” immediately ripped off his shirt and got in goalie stance.
Thanks to my brother winning the ticket lottery, I went to the first match this month at AT&T Stadium (called Dallas Stadium for World Cup) between the Netherlands and Japan. The Dutch, I hear, are soccer heavyweights. No adult male I saw in Amsterdam was under 6-4. The Japanese brought us the Honda Fit.
You would presume between my default lean toward the underdog and shared slant in the eyes, I would be all about team Japan. The thing is, they were not kind to my Chinese people in World War II. (My half-Japanese wife and I currently use “kind” as a hyperbolic understatement joke. We’re constantly trying to teach kindness to the kids, and they’ve gotten in the habit of asking rhetorically “Is that kind?” followed by “That’s not kind.” When we see something heinous on the news like a triple homicide, we’ll say “Is that kind? That’s not kind.” It’s funnier in person.)
Those genocidal maniacs were not kind a century ago, and I would punish them with exclusion from the future Asian sports blog if their descendants weren’t so good at baseball. I’m just going to tell my boys Shohei is Chinese.
No one can tell the difference or cares to try, and I’m not hating on it. Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg don’t appear materially different to me. My ignorance of African countries is a multiple of that. Our minds are going to naturally group by continent. Humans have to organize information to make sense of it. Australians are so cool.
So you’re right, I did find myself cheering for Japan. They owe it to us and the Koreans to make us all look good. And they did.
The Japanese fans at this point are pretty well-known for bringing their own trash bags and cleaning up stadiums after games. It’s still a novelty to see a mass of volunteer janitors waving those blue bags and keeping up a hypnotic chant for two hours. It kind of sounded to me like a drum-fueled version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
You can barely make it out in this video I took that organically pans upward to the hole in the roof that allows God to watch his favorite team play during football season. I am just a naturally artistic multimedia journalist. This sports blog is going to be sick.
Japan fell behind twice, and to the novice transient soccer fan it seemed over because goals are so hard to come by. But they battled back each time and ended with a 2-2 draw that seemed satisfying to all attendees despite no winner. Maybe it’s because these are two of the most polite nations. I saw tons of intermingling and pictures after the match.
What I liked about the Japan fans was their chants got louder after the other team scored. I’ve had some exposure to Japanese Buddhist thinking, and I interpreted this as stay positive, never give up, pick up your people when they’re down. You’re not going to see that at an Eagles game when the home team is sucking, which is always. They get until halftime before the boos start raining.
I looked up the chant, and it’s actually a mashup with the Spanish “Vamos!”. Rafael Nadal’s rallying cry was legendary on and off the tennis court. Tom Brady’s LFG is king. They get you so pumped. Before visiting any country, I’m going to learn how to say “Let’s go!” in the native language. Chinese’s is underrated — “Jah-yo!”, which means hit the gas.
If we were to ever get an Asian American on Team USA, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Except write about here.
U-S-A Jah-yo!