It takes leather balls to play soccer

Maybe there’s something I’m missing. Some hidden quality, perhaps, something that would inspire a “Eureka” moment on the scale of Newton discovering of the laws of gravity.

 

That’s about the level of insight it would take for me to understand the appeal of soccer.

 

This has been a strange World Cup, at least from an American’s perspective. Until this year, most Yanks marked the occasion by not marking the occasion; usually you stumble upon some half-buried sports article online or in a newspaper, and go, “Hey, look, the World Cup’s going on. Hmm. Who knew. I wonder what Garfield’s up to.” Then you eat your toast and go to work and forget about soccer for another four years.

 

Except now I can’t really use the pronoun “you” when describing these common experiences, because maybe you – yeah, you – no longer share that experience. Maybe you’re a convert. There certainly seems to be a lot of them these days, and that’s what makes this year’s competition so odd. Aside from times of great strife or triumph, I’ve never felt a particularly acute sense of solidarity with the great mass of my American brethren; but they could always be counted on to back me up in giving less than one-half crap about this boring European sport. I mean, yeesh. If I wanted to see grown men run around for three hours and not accomplish anything, I’d watch a Three Stooges marathon.

 

It’s a hugely popular sport to play in high school, so undoubtedly there’s no shortage of teenagers, dressed in too-short shorts and knee-high socks, who would kick my head in with their cleats for espousing such blasphemy. The key observation here, though, is that these sweaty-browed footballers get to actually play the game, while we in the stands root around the bleachers in the hopes that some hipster has dropped his bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms. As a spectator, the game is only redeemed when the field is made of candy, and all the players have the heads of giant babies.

 

Oh, and I’ve indeed been a spectator. Many, many times. My first job as a professional writer was covering high school sports, and so, against my will, I would frequently be forced to attend some match to try and find the drama in a 0-0 snoozer. Not only did I have to watch the game, but I actually had to pay attention, or else my stories would have read more or less as follows: “Kids from School A and School B met up in a soccer match on Friday, and did much running around before not scoring anything. Johnny Wigglefarts ran particularly fast for School A, and School B’s Dimitri Applebooger dove into the grass a lot, so he’s probably doing tons of laundry today. There was this one parent who wouldn’t stop yelling. He sounded like Don Rickles and looked like a canned ham. The end.”

 

So it’s not like I was some passive, bored lump. I was an active, bored lump. I had to learn about the game in order to cover it effectively, and you’d think this would have given me an appreciation for some of the sport’s hidden virtues. It didn’t. All that stuff I learned, and there’s still a long list of objectionable things I’d rather do than watch a soccer match. This includes, but is not limited to: bursting into a crowded mall with my chest hair on fire; getting a tattoo on my back of Glenn Beck in a Power Rangers suit riding a unicorn; stuffing my nostrils with live piranha; wearing the skin of a freshly killed deer and walking into a pack of wolves; drinking a half-bucket of bleach while jumping a motorcycle over a kiddie pool filled with venomous snakes; watching a Pauly Shore movie; and running a 5K in a beekeeper’s outfit covered with live scorpions.

 

Keep in mind, I say all this as a fan of baseball, which many people consider to be almost PBS-level boring, what with its long pauses for spitting and butt-scratching. What’s particular about baseball, however, is that even when it looks like nothing’s happening, something’s happening. A pitcher plots a strategy for the current batter, a baserunner digs his toes into the dirt and waits for his chance to steal – anticipatory actions which lend a sense of tension. These are the kinds of things that are revealed after repeated viewings, if you’re hardy enough to withstand exposure to giant tobacco wads, and grubby stubble smeared with pine tar.  

 

Surely, there are plenty of folks who’d tell me it’s the same way in soccer; that there’s a beauty in the playing of the game itself. To these people, I say: Here, I think you dropped this bag of ’shrooms.

 

Increased national interest in this year’s World Cup is likely due, in large part, to the relative success of the American team, which sucked marginally less than it has in the past. They’ve now been eliminated, and that was inevitable, because – let’s face it – soccer’s not our game. Never has been. When the pilgrims left the Old World to seek refuge in the new, they did so for two reasons: Freedom from religious oppression, and the belief that European football was crap.

 

But we hung in there, outlasting Great Britain and Spain, and while I’m genuinely happy for this year’s team – who else am I gonna root for, Argentina? – our respectable showing inspired a lot of American sports fans to disingenuously claim interest and expertise in soccer, as though they liked it before it was cool. Suddenly, soccer conversations are happening in workplaces. I’ll be honest: It’s freaking me out. The only people who should be taking about soccer are parents of players, and ... actually, just them. They’re the only ones.

 

As a grudging concession to these high-kicking ninnies, I will say it’s nice that Americans had something that brought them together for a while, what with political divisiveness and blah blah blah. If we really want to reclaim some semblance of national identity, though, we’ll do the most American thing of all. We’ll crack open a gross, watery beer, spit on our driveways, and put soccer on a shelf for another four years. Real football starts in a couple of short months.

 

Heck, I’m feeling patriotic just thinking about it.