That guy up there may just be the best expression of the state of soccer in America right now. I don't mean Clint Dempsey, who's being impersonated by the Lego-ish figure. "Deuce" is pretty integral at the moment, to be sure — in fact, tonight, in a qualifying match against Guatemala, he may well be the driving force that keeps the U.S. men's team on track to make the next World Cup. (We really don't want to lose this game.)
No, I'm talking about the cutout itself, which, before I folded it into three-dimensional goal-celebrating form, was one of the back pages in a brand new soccer magazine called Howler. The magazine's Letter From the Editors refers to "the question you hear again and again when reading the mainstream press: Will soccer ever make it in America?" The verdict seems to be yes, and Exhibit 1, the editors clearly believe, is Howler itself.
No argument from me. You know soccer has found its legs when, in the midst of print's Big Decline, a new publication about the beautiful game, on heavy paper stock and perfect bound, no less, takes the field. With lots of contributors from the mainstream (including The New York Times). With stories that count on American readers sharing a pretty deep contextual familiarity with (or willingness to lose themselves in) soccer in all sorts of shapes and places, from River Plate to 3-5-2 formations, from the San Siro to Shinji Kagawa to the insides of Carlos Valderrama's head.
A passage from Howler's lengthy story about the M.L.S. All-Star game outside Philadelphia in July neatly captures soccer's spread, and the depth of penetration that makes Howler's shot possible:
The morning after the game, taking a cab to the train station, my Moroccan cabby hears my strange accent and wants to know where I'm from. I do my party trick of naming cities — Belfast, Sunderland, Manchester, New York — and am rewarded with the best piece of cab dialogue I've ever had: "Sunderland? Chamakh should have gone there — more minutes. New York? You know [Mehdi] Ballouchy? We're here."
Hearing someone casually, and without prompting, offer me a reference that encompasses what would once have been impossibly disparate and parochial experiences reminds me of the quantum leap the cultural aspects of soccer have taken in the digital age.
"Digital" explains it. Americans who get Howler's blind, multilevel joke about Eden Hazard, say — "Inevitable Controversy: Breaks John Terry's nose for calling him a 'dirty Walloon' " — do so because they read about these guys in the online English press and see them in action on Fox Soccer (channel Nos. 797 and 798, where I watch). And yet there's something of a paradox here: Howler's own Web presence is little more than a plea to buy the magazine!
But that's O.K.: American Soccer Now, which debuted within weeks of Howler, will be taking up some of that slack. Where the magazine is filled with yesterday, the Web site can focus on today — aggregated Twitter feeds from national team players, for example, or polls with instant results. Indeed, if you want to get up to speed on that World Cup qualifier tonight in Kansas City — it's big, I'm telling you, big enough for ESPN2 — you can't do much better than visit American Soccer Now.
It may not provide the pleasures of nicking yourself with an X-acto knife or getting glue stick all over your fingers, as I got to experience a few minutes ago assembling paper-Lego-Dempsey, but it has its own very real interactive pleasures. Start by checking on some user-generated lineups for tonight's game and see whether Dempsey — No. 1 in the ASN Top 100 — should be playing up top, out wide or somewhere in the middle. Whatever it takes to get those arms spread, I say.
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