The Fredösphere

I took Der Drübermensch (now 9 years old) to a pro indoor soccer match on Friday, and was very pleasantly surprised by how much we both enjoyed it.  The home team is the Detroit Ignition, and it helped that they are doing well this year.  Indoor soccer is played on an Astroturfed hockey rink, and the small size and enclosing Plexiglas make for a fast-paced, high-scoring game.  (Really, can someone explain to me why anyone would tolerate a conventional soccer game, once they've seen indoor soccer?  Zzzzzzzzzz!)  The spectators skewed quite young; there were very many kids of Der Drübermensch's age in the crowd, which bodes well for the future of the sport.

We had relatively lousy seats, but we were so close to the action, it didn't matter.  A capacity crowd in that arena would be fewer than 4,000, I think.  This experience confirms my long-held bias in favor of the semi-pro, the minor league and the small-time.  Quite simply, I regard the paying of enormous sums for the privilege of sitting somewhere about a mile from the action as completely, utterly bogus.  The thought of my one visit to a football game at U-M stadium still enrages me to this day; I was led to believe that, by buying that ticket, I would, you know, get to actually see a football game.  I and my "friends," the ones who talked me into going, sat there for three hours, speculating among ourselves vital issues such as:

Why is nothing happening now?  Was a penalty called?  Or maybe an officials time out?
Which team has possession of the ball?
When will they pass so we can at least see something besides the backs of the heads of the people in front of us?
Do people actually pay money to sit in this stadium on a regular basis?
Whose fault, ultimately, is it that this is happening to me, and what novel legal theory could justify my killing that person?

No doubt some of the seats in that 100,000-seat stadium allow one to see the game, but I doubt the proportion is even half of the total.  There's something deeply disaffecting about spending three hours telling yourself you are in the presence of at least 60,000 fools.  What a hateful, hateful experience.

Tomorrow, I'll dig a bit deeper and explain how the Detroit Ignition match portends very good things for the survival of classical music.

Labels: Culture