svenhag
(svenhag)
May 14, 2007, 8:56pm
1
Rather than delve in the conspiracy side of things, I would be interested in knowing how things have evolved in the US since the time of this interview (from late 60s up to now), as far as:
Popularity of mostly American sports vs international sports
Popularity and role of womens sports vs mens sports
Any other angle inferred form the text
http://www.apfn.org/THEWINDS/library/order1.html
SPORTS AS A TOOL OF SOCIAL CHANGE
And along these lines then we can talk about sports. Sports in the United States was to be changed, in part as a way of de-emphasizing nationalism. Soccer, a world-wide sport, was to be emphasized and pushed in the United States. This was of interest because in this area the game of soccer was virtually unknown at that time. I had a few friends who attended an elementary school other than the one I attended where they played soccer at their school, and they were a real novelty. This was back in the 50's. So to hear this man speak of soccer in this area was kind of surprising. Anyhow, soccer is seen as an international sport and would be promoted and the traditional sport of American baseball would be de-emphasized and possibly eliminated because it might be seen as too American. And he discussed eliminating this. one's first reaction would be - well, they pay the players poorly and they don't want to play for poor pay so they give up baseball and go into some other sport or some other activity. But he said that's really not how it works. Actually, the way to break down baseball would be to make the salaries go very high. The idea behind this was that as the salaries got ridiculously high there would be a certain amount of discontent and antagonism as people resented the athletes being paid so much, and the athletes would begin more and more to resent among themselves what other players were paid and would tend to abandon the sport. And these high salaries also could break the owners and alienate the fans. And then the fans would support soccer and the baseball fields could be used as soccer fields. It wasn't said definitely this would have to happen, but if the international flavor didn't come around rapidly enough this could be done. There was some comment along the same lines about football, although I seem to recall he said football would be harder to dismantle because it was so widely played in colleges as well as in the professional leagues and would be harder to tear down. There was something else also about the violence in football that met a psychological need that was perceived, and people have a need for this vicarious violence. So football, for that reason, might be left around to meet that vicarious need. The same thing is true of hockey. Hockey had more of an international flavor and would be emphasized. There was some foreseeable international competition about hockey and particularly soccer. At that time hockey was international between the United States and Canada. I was kind of surprised because I thought the speaker just never impressed me as being a hockey fan, and I am. And it turns out he was not. He just knew about the game and what it would do to this changing sports program. But in any event soccer was to be the keystone of athletics because it is already a world wide sport in South America, Europe, and parts of Asia and the United States should get on the bandwagon. All this would foster international competition so that we would all become citizens of the world to a greater extent than citizens of our own narrow nations...
Very important in sports was sports for girls. Athletics would be pushed for girls. This was intended to replace dolls. Baby dolls would still be around, a few of them, but you would not see the number and variety of dolls. Dolls would not be pushed because girls should not be thinking about babies and reproduction. Girls should be out on the athletic field just as the boys are. Girls and boys really don’t need to be all that different. Tea sets were to go the way of dolls, and all these things that traditionally were thought of as feminine would be de-emphasized as girls got into more masculine pursuits. Just one other things I recall was that the sports pages would be full of the scores of girls teams just right along- there with the boys teams. And that’s recently begun to appear after 20 years in our local papers. The girls sports scores are right along with the boys sports scores. So all of this is to change the role model of what young girls should look to be. While she’s growing up she should look to be an athlete rather than to look forward to being a mother.