Lee Cataluna: Throw A Flag On This UH Soccer Advertising Ploy

Something uncommon is going on in Mānoa.

The University of Hawaiʻi soccer workforce is successful.

Not solely that, their video games are actually enjoyable to look at.

Freshman quarterback Micah Alejado, who’s 5 ft,10 inches tall and appears like he’s nonetheless in highschool, has a remarkably correct left arm and performs with a form of happiness that’s endearing. Wide receiver Pofele Ashlock has sticky palms and bounces across the area like his legs are made from rubber.

The workforce is filled with expertise, however there’s additionally a soulfulness to this 12 months’s crew. After final week’s drubbing of Utah State, your complete Hawaiʻi workforce joined with your complete Utah workforce on the sphere to kneel collectively in prayer. In this present period of rancor and discord, it was beautiful to see a second of grace and unity amongst opponents.

And then there’s Hawaiʻi’s kicker, Kansei Matsuzawa, who is superb at his very specialised job. He has an excellent backstory about rising up in Japan enjoying soccer and educating himself how you can kick a soccer by watching YouTube movies, and he speaks earnestly about his lofty objective of enjoying within the NFL.

You gotta love a narrative like that.

However, you don’t have to use it.

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There is a distinction between supporting expertise and commodifying it. Hawaiʻi leaders usually don’t know the place that line is, and it finally ends up feeling icky.

At the urging of meddlesome state lawmakers, Matsuzawa was given a jersey to put on that has his title on the again spelled out in kanji slightly than within the English alphabet like each different participant on the workforce. On the one hand, it was cute. On the opposite hand, it form of exotifies him.

Matsuzawa spoke to reporters ahead of the team’s trip to play Colorado State on Saturday, and was requested the way it makes him really feel to have his final title in his “native language instead of in English” on his jersey.

Matsuzawa chuckled like he is aware of to play the sport across the recreation of soccer, the place it’s a must to say what you’re advised to say to make sponsors, coaches and sure Japanophiles within the Legislature comfortable.

But first, perhaps as a result of he’s a 26-year-old senior and never a nervous freshman, he had the heart to provide a candid reply:

“Honestly, I don’t feel any difference. You know, like, I’m a player and it doesn’t matter kanji or English. I’d rather have English, honestly, because it’s kind of weird, little bit.”

It’s in all probability very bizarre to be made to put on a jersey that’s completely different from all people else on the workforce in a workforce sport like soccer; to be singled out and “othered” when all you wish to do is give attention to the position you play to assist the workforce succeed.

Here’s a man who’s working so arduous to study English — he will get higher by leaps and bounds every successive interview after each wonderful win this season — and someone decides the varsity can generate profits off him by making him a particular Japanese jersey and selling it to fans. Yikes.

The fascination with this soccer participant’s race borders on a particular model of racism, the fetishizing type, the type that claims, “Wow! Imagine someone who ISN’T from here doing something that we can do! That’s amazing!”

Yuck.

Obviously, he is an amazing player. And clearly he’s not from right here. But he must be the one who will get to say how he needs his title written on the again of his jersey. His kuleana is to assist UH win video games and observe his personal profession path, not keep it up his again Hawai‘i’s Nineteen Eighties-era obsessive dream of Japanese cash saving Hawaiʻi’s financial system.

In that interview this week, Matsuzawa course-corrected and answered the query the way in which he was presupposed to:

“But it’s so nice to, uh, represent Japan and the State of Hawaiʻi as a Rainbow Warrior football team. Yeah, I want, uh, there’s a lot of Japanese in Hawaiʻi, like Japanese Americans, so I want everyone to come and support us and we only have, like, three home games and yeah, I want everyone to show up at the stadium. Yup.”

Just this week, it was introduced that the rest of the UH home games this season will be televised in Japan. Like perhaps this may deliver Japanese vacationers again to Hawaiʻi to remain in all the massive resorts the Japanese constructed 40 years in the past.

To ensure, Matsuzawa doesn’t appear like he’s struggling by being exploited. He’s joking about how weird it all is and plugging that pigskin up and over the goalposts time and time once more.

The University of Hawaiʻi has a stable soccer workforce this 12 months, coached by a Native Hawaiian UH alum who got here house for his dream job. The video games match properly into the T.C. Ching enviornment on campus, the place college students can simply stroll down from the dorms to help the workforce and the place TV cameras catch beautiful pink skies because the solar units and Matsuzawaʻs kicks sail neatly via the uprights. The quarterback has an excellent arm on him. The back-up quarterback has been stellar. There’s a bouyancy to their play on the sphere.

Can we simply rejoice within the soccer? Can it simply be about pupil athletes enjoying the sport and never about, “Ooh, how can we make money off these guys?” 

Because proper now, a giant lesson Matsuzawa appears to be studying in faculty is that to play soccer, it’s a must to play the sport the place another person tells you what youʻre to be known as and the way you’re to be marketed.