Thus Spake Vuvuzela

A Slippery Ball

I imagine that all those who attended the recently wrapped up World Cup will have ears abuzz for eternity. Even now, having only watched the games on television, I am haunted by their sustain. It’s a kind of charmingly wretched hangover, the noise. Like when you wake up with just a shadow of drunk still upon you.

I must confess I lost interest in the later rounds. Once the US was dismissed by Ghana, I couldn’t really find a team to get behind. I feebly followed the Netherlands, but even they let me down. In fact, there weren’t all that many high points in the World Cup for fans of United States soccer. The tip top moment? The pinnacle of pride for the yanks? A fucking howler.

Now, I’m not an avid soccer fan (you can tell because I call it soccer), and I’m not even sure that you could call my mild interest in the sport even a casual fanaticism. I’m not really up with the lingo. By the time the next World Cup rolls around, I will have forgotten the off sides rules. So it completely stands to reason that I wouldn’t know what a “howler” is.

Essentially, a howler is an easy goal. A shot the keeper should have thwarted. In the US match versus England, our World Cup opener, English keeper Robert Green committed a howler. Up by one goal Green let a pansy kick from Clint Dempsey go by him. The equalizing goal from Dempsey ultimately resulted in a tie game. Without it the US might not have advanced to the second round.

This is not news. If you have access to ESPN, you know this.

But I think what might have gone unnoticed, in the whole scheme of things, is that soccer fans have a coined term for such major blunders.

Lingo from American sports is sublime. We invented touchdown, home run, hat trick, and sack. These are good terms. Most of them carry a positive connotation (unless of course you’re rooting for the team on which said lingo was inflicted upon). But in American sports there is no “howler” equivalent. I’ve wracked my mind trying to find one.

Say it. Think it. Hear it. It’s the perfect term. Upon letting a squeamish kick slip by for a score, goalies inevitably howl. They cry to the gods. They want the last few seconds back to make amends. They know their future is a tortuous mind-burden wherein the memory of their slack keeping plays back on a continuous loop. They crouch near the goal line — their bodies erupting in a blood curdling belch of verbal vomittous.

To howl: To be so miserable at one’s own actions as to cause physical and audible anguish.

We have no equivalent.

In football we have a fumble. But this is a nebulous term. You can fumble the ball and get it back. You can fumble the ball and pick it up for a gain. You can even fumble the ball and recover it for a touchdown.

In basketball there is the turnover. There again the word doesn’t imply that you’ve been scored upon.

In baseball, the strikeout. It’s not a good thing. But it’s hardly the end of the world.

In hockey there is no term. Clearly hockey is the North American sport most similar to soccer, and even in this game there is no phrase to stand as an equivalent. I’d imagine, in the wake of the popularity of this year’s World Cup, and the subsequent howler that helped us through to the second round, there might be some adaptation of the term. It’d be easily interchangeable.

That we don’t have a howler equivalent perplexes me. Everyone who has played any form of sports has felt some kind of anguish made manifest from their paltry play.

The closest term we have, and here again it is a weak example, is the pick six.

The pick six takes place in football. It is when the quarterback throws an interception, which is then brought back for a touchdown. Even still, the verbiage to pick — as in pickpocket — implies no fault of the quarterback. He’s the one who has been wronged. He was doing his job, and then a defender robbed him of not only the opportunity to advance the ball, but then also went on to score off the evil infringement of the quarterback’s rights.

Are we a blameless people? Can we not writhe beneath the weight of our own mistakes? Can we not invent vernacular to self mutilate? Can we not howl?

– Brian Allen Carr