International Golf Contest in North Korea?

Communists are not communists any more: they are even hosting international golf contest.

SEOUL (Yonhap) — North Korea may host an international golf tournament on Mount Kumgang next year, a move to vex South Korean investors, according to a news report on Aug. 5.

This year’s North Korea Golf Open took place at the Pyongyang Golf Complex on the outskirts of the capital city on July 28-29 in a yearly event that has been sponsored by Britain’s Lupine Travel since 2011, reported the Radio Free Asia (RFA).

In an interview with the Washington-based RFA, the British firm’s president, Dylan Harris, said it has received permission to open such an international tournament for amateur golfers in 2015 at the Mount Kumgang course, which is currently closed amid the suspension of the inter-Korean tourism program.

The South-run tour of the scenic mountain on the North’s east coast came to a halt in 2008, shortly after a South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier there.

The golf course, the second of its kind in the reclusive communist nation, was constructed by South Korean investors. It would be absurd for the North to open the facility to foreigners without consultations with them.

A total of 15 players from eight nations, including Britain, China, Singapore and Estonia, meanwhile, participated in this year’s North Korea Open, Harris was quoted as saying.

The number marks a significant drop from an average of around 30 in previous competitions.

The decrease seems to be attributable to sharp military tensions on the peninsula and the North’s cancellation of this year’s massive dance and gymnastics performance known as the Arirang show.

A Century oF American Soccer Anxiety

Sunday’s match between the United States and Portugal was a certified hit: ESPN reported that it was the highest-rated soccer match of all time in the U.S., and that it was the “most-viewed non-football telecast” in the history of the network. (Football, in that case, meaning the American version.) This information is normally reserved for ad-sales meetings and high-fiving in executive suites—big jumps in all key demos!—not the kind of thing that fans ought to bother themselves about. Yet, when it comes to soccer, we’re used to worrying about how many Americans are watching—and, perhaps, what that number says about us. Sportswriters have spent more than a century fretting and fighting about the game and its place in the culture.

In 1912, as the United States was on the verge on being accepted into the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the Fort Worth Star-Telegram announced the pending news with the headline “Tardy Recognition Given to American Soccer Football.” The paper’s editors volunteered “the sweeping prediction that a few years hence soccer football will be recognized in the United States as the same thing in winter, fall and spring that baseball is in the summer.”

Yet a few years later the Philadelphia Public Ledger ran this headline: “AMERICANS SHY AT SOCCER, AS WITH ALL ALIEN SPORTS.” The story described soccer’s obscurity in the U.S. as compared with England. “No game is really popular unless the spectators and followers have some vital interest in it,” the paper said. “This interest is usually the outgrowth of a liking which had its inception in the participation of the game itself.” This would become a familiar argument: soccer would grow as a spectator sport only if it grew as a participatory one.

Around the same time, J. B. Sheridan, in the Ogden (Utah) Standard, trumpeted the benefits of playing: “Soccer develops a very fine and useful type of man along the line of the infielder or outfielder in baseball, a man not too large, but fast on his feet and quick to think … A slow man has no business in soccer. It calls for speed and catlike dexterity with the feet. Beefy boys cannot play soccer.” The counterattack, he added, was “one of the most stirring and inspiring spectacles known to sport.”

Soccer was fast, purposeful, and never dull. It was only a matter of time until it became the national sport. Unless, instead, it was slow, desultory, and often boring—and would never catch on.

That’s what Walter Camp, known as the “father of American football,” told the PhiladelphiaEvening Public Ledger, in 1914. “The main trouble with soccer is that it lacks definiteness,” he began. “By that I mean that every play made in soccer does not represent a maximum of effort. You know that on the soccer field the ball is often dribbled and many short kicks are made. Now, the average American wants to see every play in a game performed as though it were the deciding one of the game.”…

The New Yorker