A Very (American) Happy Ending

When the United States scored in the 91st minute against Algeria today to take a 1-0 lead in its last World Cup group contest, American fans were euphoric. Three minutes later, the match ended with a triumphant Team USA, a dejected (and eliminated) Team Algeria, and a collectively incoherent American media contingent.

Ronald Blum, writing for the Associated Press, dubbed it "the most amazing late-game moment in American soccer" and, one-upping even himself, "one of the most stunning turnarounds in World Cup history."

In the New York Times, Jére Longman effused, "But there is a particular spirit about this American team, a persistence and resilience that compel it to play on, a belief that unyielding commitment will bring a deserved reward even at times when skill and technique may not."

The Wall Street Journal's Matthew Futterman, who wrote that the game induced "an almost otherworldly tension," also described Landon Donovan's game-winner as "such an enervating play at such a dramatic moment in the game and after such a week of throbbing controversy that it caused a joyous ripple across the ocean—the sort of moment that makes people remember where they were when it happened." (Donovan himself, with no trace of irony, deadpanned, "It makes me believe in good in the world."

In the Boston Globe, Eric Beard quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson and Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho, then virtually blubbered, "These men from the United States were raised with confidence in the theory of self-determination, that is, being autonomous, causal agents of our own acts and our own self." He closed, fittingly, with a benediction: "So go forward America, and we will continue to trust these great men who believe in the virtues that stem from invaluable positivity."

Amen to that. If there's one thing we Americans can embrace, it's a happy ending. Hollywood knows this, dime-store novelists know this, and I'll be damned if our sports columnists don't know this too.

The one thing these journalists do fail to grasp, however, is the format of the World Cup tournament. Team USA's victory today means it gets to face Ghana next, and then another team, and another, and, finally, yet another. This is, of course, assuming the Stars and Stripes actually get that far. The squad, despite its members' overwhelming "confidence in...being autonomous, causal agents of [their] own acts and [their] own self," probably won't.

It's practically a rite of passage for American sportswriters to master the art of overstatement, but there seems to be an unusually dense influx of kitsch emanating from that rarefied South African air these days. It is one matter to so thoroughly assault readers with the word "hero" in a sports context as to rob the word of all meaning; it is quite another to invoke the voices of deceased poets in a strangely sycophantic ode to athletes.

Sports is likely the only news genre in which the reporters' creative license reigns supreme. This journalistic omnipotence can extend to the wholesale recasting of a game or match into a supernatural conflict of morality and desire, without so much as skipping a beat or raising an eyebrow.

Here in the United States, where a good number of us are still learning to differentiate between receiving a yellow card (this is bad) and a green one (much better), the art of relating events that transpire on a soccer pitch half a world away has never been more seductive for reporters. I'm not so sure the coverage has me "[believing] in good in the world." But if the recent sports articles and columns are any indication, it's not so hard to believe in exaggeration.