Get Out USA!

Many would like to see the end of the USA acting as the World Cop. I'd like to see the USA stop bidding for the World Cup. Soccer is a lame sport. To its defense, it requires outstanding stamina and athleticism. Big deal, so does being a porn star.

With hockey and basketball there's no room for soccer. All three rely on placing an object into a goal. In hockey and basketball the goal is small, defended by padded or giant dudes, and it is realistically targeted several times a minute. The pace is fast, the skill (especially in hockey) is amazing.

Contrast to soccer where a guys run up and down a gigantic field for an hour and a half, perhaps coming close to scoring a few times. 95% of the game is spent in the transition and you can't use your damn hands. Boring. It sucks just more than baseball.

In 1977 I lived in Chicago and two players from the Chicago Sting, a US Soccer league team, came to our school to tell us why soccer is cool and football is not. See, our school only let us play soccer because it was safe. They didn't like tackling or line drives. They instead wanted us to focus on "headers", "bicycle kicks" and "man-on's".

While two or three geeks were enamored with the visitors, I and most of the other kids didn't buy their poison. They actually ripped American football, telling us how boring it was and how the players weren't really athletes. We should have heckled those European long-hairs right out of the gymnasium. Later, we gave any capitulating geeks swirlies until they recanted their adoration of a girls' sport.

Thirty years later nobody here cares about soccer. You still can find a drunken Scot or an exchange student that's all fired up about it. However, professional soccer matches draw small crowds of several dozen Mexican men. Amateur soccer is confined to childrens' sport, dominated by parents that won't let their kids play football, baseball or hockey. Soccer is safe, and you can glue that soccer ball sticker on your minivan.

Soccer is safe. That is the problem, it lacks strategy, speed and the possibility of critical injury. It is as un-American as the Speedo and should be banished from our shores. It is not an important sport here and it never will be. Why don't we just leave it for them? Let the world have its happy speckled ball, its knee socks and red cards. We've always been just fine without it and we always will.