 |
| USA kit by Where's Waldo? Brands, Inc. |
WHEN I ARRIVED at work this “morning” (midnight to all of you), a colleague whom I regularly antagonize was watching the USA vs. Mexico World Cup Qualifier match. It ended in a 0-0 tie, or “draw” as it is known in the fuutball parlance. I decided to avoid this low-hanging fruit and instead changed his workstation avatar to a My Little Pony character.
Nonetheless he got quite excited and agitated by all the nothing that was happening on TV as nobody scored any points -- sorry, “goals” -- or did anything remotely interesting. Instead, I set my own monitor to the thrilling final moments of the Mavericks vs. Clippers game, which had many points scored - more than 200, in fact -- including what would have been an astonishing game-winner by Blake Griffin that was waved off by officials because of a questionable foul call. The Mavs sent it to overtime with a buzzer-beater game-tying FG and won in the extra period.
That, my friends, is an exciting sport.
Soccer, on the other hand, has absolutely no clue how to make games interesting to American sensibilities, or even provide any sense of finality, for that matter. The clock counts up, not down; there is a nebulous “stoppage time” at the “end” of the game that has no impending sense of conclusion / doom / ecstasy for fans, and games frequently end in ties, or as was the case overnight, with no scoring whatsoever.
I fully realize this is the world’s favorite sport, and that many of you love it as well. I have tried, and I cannot embrace it. I can, however, name many things I find more exciting than World Cup qualifying soccer:
- The WNBA
- Curling
- The PBA Senior Tour
- NPR’s This American Life
- The Joy of Painting
- Aquariums
- Waiting for an oil change at Pep Boys
- Little League baseball practice
- Inside the Actor’s Studio
- Compiling lists
- Reading the B&H Photo - Video - Audio 2006 annual catalog cover-to-cover
- Playing the Atari VCS 2600 version of “Haunted House”
- Flight delays at Reagan National Airport
- Infomercials
- The musical stylings of Godspeed You! Black Emperor
- Reading my own blog
Soccer, like all other forms of athletic competition, is at least partially subjective. Yes, the outcome of games is determined by objective rules and scoring; but as with baseball, tennis, NASCAR, cheerleading, figure skating, WWE, or any other purported form of organized athleticism, entertainment value is in the eye of the beholder.
READ THIS
It's not Jurassic Park, but scientists are getting close to bringing back some of the species we humans have eradicated. Let's hope the newly-cloned zombie carrier pigeons and Tasmanian tiger abominations don't turn against us.
