The French are simply not Cricket (but neither are the Americans)

This morning, I roared with laughter over two op-eds in the NY Times. The first, by Stephen Clarke (author of “Talk to the Snail: The Ten Commandments for Understanding the French.”) is about the French presidential contest between front runners Nicolas Sarkozy (conservative) and Seglene Royal (leftist). Here are some clips from that:

Twenty-first century France rebels against change, not for it. These days, what typically happens is that a government decides to do something radical like, say, enable companies to fire service-sector workers who assault their customers. The unions see this as the first step on the slippery slope to slavery and call a national strike. After a week of posturing, the government backs down and waiters and sales clerks go back to insulting customers just as they have done since time immemorial.

The 2007 presidential election campaign is demonstrating just how deep this crypto-conservatism runs. After a relatively exciting, gossip-fired start to the battle for power, the French have decided, as the first round of the election approaches in April, that they want things to be boring again.

Historically, French presidents have been old, bald guys — Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac. In terms of sexiness, imagine an endless line of Dick Cheneys. This time, though, both front-runners have all their hair and, in one case, lipstick. Quite a novelty.

…This time around, sex has come storming out of the closet. There was the incident a couple of years ago when Mr. Sarkozy’s wife, Cécilia, ran off to New York with her lover. In a dramatic turnaround, Mr. Sarkozy wooed his wife back, maybe with promises that she’d soon be choosing the curtains in the presidential palace. Meanwhile, the Mona Lisa smile on Ms. Royal’s face suggests that either her doctor has prescribed some very relaxing herbal teas, or she is exceptionally enamored of campaigning. Her, let’s say, permanently fulfilled expression prompted so much speculation about her sex life that she has issued legal threats to rumor-mongering Web sites.

And then there's a piece by Shashi Tharoor (a departing under secretary general of the United Nations, is the author of “The Great Indian Novel” and the forthcoming “The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: India, The Emerging 21st Century Power.”) on the merits of Cricket as a sport and its relationship to Americans. Here are a few clips from that:

…Americans have about as much use for cricket as Lapps have for beachwear. The fact that elsewhere in the civilized world grown men dress up like poor relations of Gatsby and venture hopefully into the drizzle clutching their bats invariably mystifies my American friends. And the notion that anyone would watch a game that, in its highest form, could take five days and still end in a draw provokes widespread disbelief among results-oriented Americans.

In a concession to the pace of life in our increasingly Americanized world, one-day international cricket matches were born in the 1970s, and the World Cup features one-day games (which take about seven hours, rather than 30 as in the five-day “test matches”). But that hasn’t made it any more popular here. A billion people might be on tenterhooks around the world for the results of each match, but most American newspapers don’t even adequately report the scores.

Ever since the development of baseball, the ubiquitous and simplified version of the sport, Americans have been lost to the more demanding challenges — and pleasures — of cricket. Because baseball is to cricket as simple addition is to calculus — the basic moves may be similar, but the former is easier, quicker, more straightforward than the latter, and requires a much shorter attention span. And so baseball has captured the American imagination in a way that leaves no room for its adult cousin.

There was a time when that used to bother me. I have buttonholed sports editors at receptions and urged them to think of their duty to civilization. I have tried to explain the allure of the sport to a skeptical Yankees fan by sketching a cricket pitch on a napkin in a sports bar during World Series commercial breaks. I have even appealed to the Hemingway instinct that lurks in every American male by pointing out how cricket is so much more virile a sport, how fielders have nothing but their bare skin to catch something that is considerably harder than its padded American equivalent.

But now I’ve given up. As legions of missionaries have discovered before me, you can’t bring enlightenment to people who don’t realize they’re living in the dark. “You mean people actually pay to watch this?” exclaimed one American I tried to interest in the game. “It’s about as exciting as measuring global warming.”

“And just as vital to the rest of the planet,” I retorted.