Title: Fútbol or Football?
Topic: Cultural Texts (Balinese Cockfight and American Football)
Relation: cockfights and American Football are both sports in totally different places, but sometimes not everyone understands why such as Latinos who think Fútbol is played with their feet.
Description: Growing up, I never had a fascination with sports like most young boys have. I never got into sports, maybe because I found it to be very boring. While in elementary school, my class would play little sport games such as basketball, dodgeball, soccer, and kickball. I thought that those games were great, but I always wondering who invented the games and why? Where did the names come from? I never found out the histories about this sports, but I went along with them. When in sixth grade, my mother tried to get me to go along with society and enroll me into Little League Baseball, this was the worse experience of my life. I always had a fear of getting hit with the small, but deadly ball and little did I know that one day it was going to get me. It was the last inning, all bases were full and I was next to bat. As I swung to hit the ball, everyone yelled at me to run for it. So much was going on that I froze in place. Everyone soon turns to me and start to scream "are you okay?!" I didn't know what was going on, but as I turned my head down, I saw blood gushing out of my right thumb. After that, I never played sports again. Going into middle school, I met a boy who was from Mexico and had just moved to the U.S. One day he asked it I wanted to play Fútbol, I told him no thank you. I already lost one nail, I don't need to lose another. He looked at me as though I was on something. "You don't need your hands to play Fútbol, you kick the ball". being latino, I didn't really know about the sports in Mexico. I only knew about the 'American' sports. From that day, I knew that people always mistake sports and some have a hard time realizing what makes a sport in different parts of the world. Another thing I found out was that cockfights is also a sport in Mexico and it is sort of looked as a dueling/"who's the better man" kind of sport. 
Commentary/Analysis: As I looked at other world's sports, I began to think about what makes a sport. I think a sport can be anything that brings together groups of people to have "fun". The reason for fun being in quotation is because every person has their own definition of fun. When I would visit my family in Tijuana, Mexico, they would always ask me, "Porque juegan ustedes Fútbol con las manos y no con los pies?" I personally couldn't answer their question because I didn't know why Americans played football with their hands and not feet. Why not call it handball? I still don't know why it was called this, but I guessing it was all culture. Latinos call soccer, Fútbol, Americans call football, football. All around the world, people wonder how a certain sport is a sport, but its all about the culture of the people who play the "sport". 
I really liked reading your post about growing up as a non-athlete in American society where that is supposed to be the "norm". I come from a similar situation where I never was interested in the conventional things American kids liked to do. When all of my friends were on softball or soccer teams, I was doing Karate, Kickboxing, or Tae Kwon Do. It's interesting to look at different cultures, and see what norms are expected out of their communities. I also talked about football and the Balinese cockfights in my post because of the Super Bowl. It was always interesting to me why Americans call it football. We're just always doing things backwards compared to the rest of the world! (Metric system=case in point).
ReplyDeleteI think it's fun to consider which sports are important to which cultures and it really says a lot about those cultures. Growing up, my grandfather always encouraged my brother to play baseball because my grandfather himself played baseball and he believed that all Puerto Ricans are good at baseball. My dad and my brother turned out the same though: they both love to surf. I don't think my grandpa liked that my dad was surfing when he was younger since he believed so much in baseball being the right sport for a young puerto rican boy. I think in the same way Americans think that football is the ultimate sport, probably because it sums up so many cultural values.
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