Soccer Blows

So, the  7/7/06 issue of USA Today has another Soccer hater article up and  the  stupidity continues. Have a read  and see what you think. Check it out here.

So, the main reasons that they give are:
1)Lack of scoring. Not only is this insipid but just ignorant. Baseball has less action, less of a build up for action, and more breaks between the action. Ah, but the Baseball purists say that the game is about more than scoring and it is about the individual matchups and the build-up for dramatic moments. Soccer has that and more. There is nothing more dramatic than a soccer goal when it comes because it can happen at anytime.

2)Our best athletes gravitate to other sports: frankly, my interests aren't just about this country and I couldn't care less that Reggie Bush or Lebron James don't play soccer. I admire great athletes from anywhere. Frankly, I see more to admire from Thierry Henry, Zinedine Zidane or Lionel Messi than I ever did when I was following the overpaid idiots that play Baseball or Basketball.

3)It gets lost in the "shuffle" of "major" sports. How major are these other sports? Other than Basketball which has embraced globalization, how "major" are American football or Baseball in the grand scheme of things. In the end, American Football=Australian Rules Football=Gaelic Football, as a passionately followed regional sport. Baseball? Don't be ridiculous. The game doesn't need the USA. It is a major sport, if not THE major sport, and until we learn it and understand it, we wll never understand the world around us.

4)It was not created in the USA: This was one of the most ridiculous reasons. I realize that sports in this country reinforce the idea of American individuality, that it is somehow different or better than other countries, but please, how arrogant do you have to be to ignore soccer because a Brit invented it? Was baseball not a form of rounders or cricket? Is American football not derived from rugby? Was basketball not created from soccer so that youngsters could play indoor during frozen Indiana winters? Please, anyone with any knowledge of history knows that no game is created from a vacuum.

5)The use of feet instead of hands. Feet-only sports have been around since the dawn of time. God, isn't hackey-sack the favorite sport of white dopeheads? Plus, every sport has some ingrained rule that limits participation. Why can't you hold in American Football? Why can't you kick the ball in Basketball? Why are substitutions limited  in Baseball? Anyway, there is more skill in artistry in Zidane's left foot than there is in Barry Bond's juiced-up right arm.

6)Ties go against the American idea of competition. Easy, Football allowed ties up into the 1980's. Hockey thrived with it. Some would say that Baseball in it's incessant search for the winning run even to exhaustion lessens the sport. Soccer allows ties not because it teaches the student of the game some stupidly liberal idea that there are no winners or losers in life, but that winning a season is more important than a single individual match and that a great team must sometimes take a draw to succeed in the end.

7)Finally, that it is too "middle-class" to penetrate US society. It is right that white liberals sometimes use the supposed safety of the suburbs to create soccer-mom enclaves where they use the sport more like a window treatment to decorate their parks, but there is and has always been a fraction of American society that is wholely ignored that uses the sport as an escape from the trials of urban life. Go to Griffith park, or Echo Park or Hancock Park in Los Angeles and see that the sport is not a middle-class knick-knack but a vital part of the immigrant backdrop.