Soccer in the US!


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I'm not sure who wrote this. It was a forwarded e-mail with no citation. AMERICA'S FAVORITE NATIONAL PASTIME: HATING SOCCER

June 25, 2014

 

 

I've held off on writing about soccer for a decade -- or about the length of the average soccer game -- so as not to offend anyone. But enough is enough. Any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation's moral decay. 

(1) Individual achievement is not a big factor in soccer. In a real sport, players fumble passes, throw bricks and drop fly balls -- all in front of a crowd. When baseball players strike out, they're standing alone at the plate. But there's also individual glory in home runs, touchdowns and slam-dunks. 

In soccer, the blame is dispersed and almost no one scores anyway. There are no heroes, no losers, no accountability, and no child's fragile self-esteem is bruised. There's a reason perpetually alarmed women are called "soccer moms," not "football moms." 

Do they even have MVPs in soccer? Everyone just runs up and down the field and, every once in a while, a ball accidentally goes in. That's when we're supposed to go wild. I'm already asleep. 

(2) Liberal moms like soccer because it's a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys. No serious sport is co-ed, even at the kindergarten level. 

(3) No other "sport" ends in as many scoreless ties as soccer. This was an actual marquee sign by the freeway in Long Beach, California, about a World Cup game last week: "2nd period, 11 minutes left, score: 0:0." Two hours later, another World Cup game was on the same screen: "1st period, 8 minutes left, score: 0:0." If Michael Jackson had treated his chronic insomnia with a tape of Argentina vs. Brazil instead of Propofol, he'd still be alive, although bored. 

Even in football, by which I mean football, there are very few scoreless ties -- and it's a lot harder to score when a half-dozen 300-pound bruisers are trying to crush you. 

(4) The prospect of either personal humiliation or major injury is required to count as a sport. Most sports are sublimated warfare. As Lady Thatcher reportedly said after Germany had beaten England in some major soccer game: Don't worry. After all, twice in this century we beat them at their national game.

Baseball and basketball present a constant threat of personal disgrace. In hockey, there are three or four fights a game -- and it's not a stroll on beach to be on ice with a puck flying around at 100 miles per hour. After a football game, ambulances carry off the wounded. After a soccer game, every player gets a ribbon and a juice box. 

(5) You can't use your hands in soccer. (Thus eliminating the danger of having to catch a fly ball.) What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs. Our hands can hold things. Here's a great idea: Let's create a game where you're not allowed to use them! 

(6) I resent the force-fed aspect of soccer. The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO's "Girls," light-rail, Beyonce and Hillary Clinton. The number of New York Times articles claiming soccer is "catching on" is exceeded only by the ones pretending women's basketball is fascinating. 

I note that we don't have to be endlessly told how exciting football is. 

(7) It's foreign. In fact, that's the precise reason the Times is constantly hectoring Americans to love soccer. One group of sports fans with whom soccer is not "catching on" at all, is African-Americans. They remain distinctly unimpressed by the fact that the French like it. 

(8) Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European. Naturally, the metric system emerged from the French Revolution, during the brief intervals when they weren't committing mass murder by guillotine. 

Despite being subjected to Chinese-style brainwashing in the public schools to use centimeters and Celsius, ask any American for the temperature, and he'll say something like "70 degrees." Ask how far Boston is from New York City, he'll say it's about 200 miles. 

Liberals get angry and tell us that the metric system is more "rational" than the measurements everyone understands. This is ridiculous. An inch is the width of a man's thumb, a foot the length of his foot, a yard the length of his belt. That's easy to visualize. How do you visualize 147.2 centimeters? 

(9) Soccer is not "catching on." Headlines this week proclaimed "Record U.S. ratings for World Cup," and we had to hear -- again -- about the "growing popularity of soccer in the United States." 

The USA-Portugal game was the blockbuster match, garnering 18.2 million viewers on ESPN. This beat the second-most watched soccer game ever: The 1999 Women's World Cup final (USA vs. China) on ABC. (In soccer, the women's games are as thrilling as the men's.) 

Run-of-the-mill, regular-season Sunday Night Football games average more than 20 million viewers; NFL playoff games get 30 to 40 million viewers; and this year's Super Bowl had 111.5 million viewers. 

Remember when the media tried to foist British soccer star David Beckham and his permanently camera-ready wife on us a few years ago? Their arrival in America was heralded with 24-7 news coverage. That lasted about two days. Ratings tanked. No one cared. 

If more "Americans" are watching soccer today, it's only because of the demographic switch effected by Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law. I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer. One can only hope that, in addition to learning English, these new Americans will drop their soccer fetish with time. 

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Funny, I recognized that it was the pathetic hateful excuse for a carbon-based reptile lifeform known as Ann Coulter's text at the second paragraph.

 

Edit: I have been really too harsh. I apologize to all the reptiles I have offended by comparing them to Ann Coulter

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hehe. Funny read. I suppose its what your bought up with and exposed to at an early age. It's easy to see how a lack of understanding of a game can affect your viewpoint on it. To me (as a brit footy fan) whenever i see basketball it seems to be a load of people running up and down a court all game taking it in turns to score, how you can ever get excited every time is beyond me, in fact its more "exciting" when they miss. As for american football its not really a sport is it? It's just a 4hour session of TV commercials broken up by a load of heavy americans running for 5 seconds before having a rest and regrouping. I say this purely because i have no understanding the dynamics, strategies, skill and effort required in those sports much like the author of the email regarding football.

 

For a new sport to be embraced in another country is near impossible no matter how much the media/sponsors want it and try to hype it up.

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Its a pretty funny read, just shows how ignorant she is to the sport and how its actually played. I like how in here column she tries to tie soccer to liberals/socialism. In her view American sports are about the individual aka conservatives where as soccer is a team sport aka liberals. 

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Funny, though ever so boring...

 

IIRC it was in the 1994 world cup, USA started a 20 year process to become "great" at a sport they sucked at. As pointed somewhere in USAs game threads, they have been getting better and better.

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I don't follow soccer / (association) football or care for it (that applies to pretty much all sports for me as an entertainment) and to me it's too popular for no good reason BUT it's certainly no dumber (or smarter) than any other team based sport either, be it american football, rugby, basketball, baseball, volleyball, etc. She seems to have issues.

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She's in the wrong business. Stand-up comedy would earn her much greater positive response, while still allowing to butthurt the same great amount of people. If viewed that way, it's indeed fun stuff (Y)

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I viewed it as comedy, or a funny rant.Don't worry about what horseface "thinks" just have a good laugh.  It's why I put it in this section.  :laugh:

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I found it to be a funny, yet very uninformed rant!

Until I read it came from Ann Coulter.

Now I can hear her go on that rant and .... I think I just threw up a little bit in my mouth.....  it's not funny at all anymore 

Trying to link it to Liberals, the Left and everything that is wrong with it in her eyes

 

The woman drives me insane :)

Yet if she's on a show I will keep watching to see what nonsense she spews this time

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