The World Cup was the subject of local media and culture reporter John Rash’s column this past weekend. He interviewed me for the piece and we had a wide-ranging conversation about a number of different dimensions of soccer in contemporary U.S. culture–the status of its main professional league (MLS), soccer’s relation to other major league sport in terms of viewing, consumption, and cultural influence, rates of participation among youth, recent sociological research on soccer and international awareness, the tremendous international success of the women’s national team, its popularity among immigrants, etc. Here are the ideas and quotes he ended up using:

Hartmann, who focuses on the sociology of sport, detects an interesting inversion of how Americans perceive global sporting spectacles.

“Americans often watch the Olympics only as a nationalistic competition with a patriotic idea of ‘How is the U.S. doing?’ I think fans of the World Cup are a little less interested in how the U.S. is doing, and more interested in the international competition,” he said. “If you think of the long ideals of sport creating cross-cultural understanding, [the World Cup] is a little bit true to the Olympic ideal.”

Hartmann points out that because soccer is “not a dominant part of our hegemonic sports culture, but a little bit more peripheral,” the fan base is a bit different. Given its global nature, soccer has always been popular with immigrants, who make up a higher proportion of the population than at any time since Ellis Island. And American-born fans tend to be worldly, compared with the general population, he added.

Suffice to say, I am fairly happy with all this, and feel like Rash, the good reporter and thinker that he is, made me sound fairly knowledgeable and smart. Still, perhaps because I took Rash’s call in the middle of a media training session for academics organized by Theda Skocpol’s Scholar’s Strategy Network (coincidence?), I find myself reflecting more than usual on the process and my own participation in it. For example, I don’t remember if I actually used the phrase an “interesting inversion” of typical perceptions of global sporting spectacles, though I kind of like the phrase and wouldn’t put it past myself to have talked my way into a line like that. (I definitely said “global sporting spectacles” a time or two.) I also find it funny that I said “a little bit true” to the Olympic ideal as it is the kind of qualifier I am often critical of professionals in the sports media for over-using.

More significantly, I definitely recall stumbling over the question of how to label the more Olympian ideals of cross-cultural understanding (“internationalist,” or “cosmopolitan,” or something else altogether ) and whether to set them directly in contrast to nationalism or patriotism. I’m still not sure which set of terms make my interpretation (and soccer itself) more palpable to ordinary Americans. But the one that thing really makes me cringe in retrospect is the phrase “dominant part of our hegemonic sports culture.” I know I used it, and maybe the term “hegemonic sports culture” made me sound smart. But hegemony is one of those words we often work hard to avoid here at TSP because so few folks out there in the regular world know what the word means.  If only our editor Letta Page had been on hand to clean up my spoken prose.