It’s none of the usual explanations: lots of scoring being better than endless nil-nil draws—I’ve been to cricket matches in which 1,000 runs were scored and you could hardly call them riveting. It’s not the hoopla or the sport-as-family-entertainment thing either which soccer fans accustomed to English hooliganism are supposed to appreciate. (Have you ever been to an Eagles game?)

Baseball fans will have to forgive me here, but the answer, I think, is that football is the quintessential American sport. It’s no accident it hasn’t really caught on elsewhere (the annual NFL game in London notwithstanding) whereas baseball and basketball have at least a claim to a global following and participation.

In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don’t mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework.

Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other’s brains out. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that.

Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: AP

For 26 years straight, New Zealand has defeated the US in rugby to win the Ross Island Cup. But these aren’t professional rugby players -they are scientists and support staff who live and work in Antarctica! The national team back home in New Zealand are the All Blacks, but the team from Scott Base goes by the name Ice Blacks. The US team from McMurdo Station, well, most of them don’t even know how to play rugby before they are recruited for the annual game. Yesterday’s game is recounted in embarrassing detail at Discover Magazine. Link

See the New Zealand Antarctic team performing their customary haka in this video from a few years ago. Link

(image credit: Chaz Firestone)

The nude rugby international, which started as a celebration of New Zealand’s national nude day, was held yesterday as a warm-up – although temperatures were reportedly cold enough to prove embarrassing – to the forthcoming match between the All Blacks and France.

Needless to say, there were plenty of tackles flying about with only one interruption … when a fully-clothed streaker ran on to the pitch.

Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: Stephen Jaquiery/Otago Images/Otago Daily Times)