This Is American Soccer, US Soccer, MNT, WNT, and MLS - Tackling the subject of Soccer in the US, and worldwide.

PART 2

A talented tennis player, Jennifer Dempsey ranked in the top two at Nacogdoches High School. Her athletic pursuits begged for more attention, and being a family of limited means, younger brother Clint, 13 at the time, was forced to put his soccer development on the backburner after three years of family sacrifice supported his pay-to-play club needs. It was only fair; Clint is one of five children (younger than Ryan, Jennifer, and Crystal; and older than Lance) and was by no means the only child in the family with sporting aspirations.

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PART 1

Ron Isley croons from the stereo of the Audi A6 Quattro Clint Dempsey purchased from sports agency-mate Ryan Nelson. “You fool one day you’re here and then you’re gone.” But before the beat drops, before UGK’s Pimp C and Bun B have a chance to trade verses about making the most of the Texas youth they were dealt, before we’re even out of the parking lot of Dempsey’s apartment, we’re out of the car.

Across the street private preparatory school blazers tossed to the sidewalk, tiny fists on fragile arms flail like loose garden hoses. “What the…. Should we break up that fight?” Dempsey asks without a glance to me, his big black eyes fixated on the fracas as if he already has his answer. “Sure, your town your call,” I tell him beginning to crack open the passenger seat door. We jump out of the car stopping traffic on the bustling two-lane road in London’s Wimbledon neighborhood. The dozen kids, no older than 12 maybe 13, turn toward us as we approach, taking notice of the bigger boys calling out, “Hey, what are you….”

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I wasn’t sure Frank Dell’apa would want to talk to me. Like most I presume, I heard via du Nord that he was being moved at the Boston Globe, where he has been a sports reporter since 1989, from covering his preferred beat (Revolution and international soccer) to the Celtics. To be moved from soccer to basketball would be a promotion to most, but not to Frank, not to his loyal readership. It would be understandable if he just didn’t want to talk about it for a number of easy to deduce reasons.

But he said yes. And as with his decades of reporting, we are all the more lucky because of it. And for the digital time capsule of this here site, it kind of comes with perfect timing (sorry Frank). It is just that for a man who has spent his life in sports journalism chasing soccer this unexpected career tangent elicits perspective, which begs to be gathered up, marked down, and reconsidered as we determine the future—-journalism and soccer, observers and participants. Our conversation is after the jump. Click HERE for the full story…

For those who know me, it is no secret I love soccer and love jazz. For those who follow the two art forms, it is no surprise that neither are popular in the United States.

I recently wrote an essay for GOOD magazine–one of the better magazine launches in the last few years that I’m psyched to be even a small part of–on the state of jazz in the U.S.

On top of my own experience chasing jazz across the country I interviewed several musicians to get their thoughts. One of those I spoke to was pianist Jason Moran. At the end of of our interview I couldn’t help but inquire about what I saw as the existence soccer and jazz share in our country.

As JVC Jazz Fest begins in New York, after the jump we talk about a comparison you may not have thought about. Click HERE for the full story…

I don’t care for the comedy of Ray Ramano. It’s just not my thing. I’m more of a David Cross/Patton Oswalt kind of guy. I can watch the same Seinfeld episode a thousand times, but new episodes of The Simpsons can’t hold my attention.

Comedy might be the most subjective medium of all the creative arts. Because looking at the award tally, not to mention the pop culture award du jour that is a Simpsons guest appearance, it appears everybody indeed loves Raymond. I’m just not one of them.

Sports broadcasting isn’t that much different. He’s got one of the plum jobs in broadcasting for FOX, but I can’t stand Tim McCarver (re: thanks Deion Sanders). I love the measured intelligence of Joe Simpson. I really don’t care for Dick Vitale. Lots of people seem to love him (and he’s got a pretty good gig himself) but I’m just not one of them. And I don’t like the comparisons between him and GolTV’s Ray Hudson. Sure, they are both, um, individuals to say the least, and share a radical emotion for the sport they love, but Vitale paints the most mundane statistics not with a brush, but with a paint grenade of hyperbolic emotion. It can be a source of comedy, but you won’t find yourself laughing with (or at) him.

Hudson’s commentary, unlike his opinion, is harder to pin down, though he’s not afraid of pulling the pin on a grenade or two . You of course have the metaphor bombs, but watching an entire game with GolTV’s team delivers the give-and-take that finds moments of brotherly bickering in an Abbott and Cosetello frame that sets it apart like the best local baseball broadcasts over the course of that lengthy season. You’re not just waiting for the next explosion, you’re smiling, getting argumentative, and yes laughing, sometimes all at once, as if you’re watching the games with your crazy uncles. At its worst GolTV’s broadcasts with Ray Hudson are silly, over the top nonsense. At their best, it’s a soccer sitcom as the team captures the essence of the beautiful game in the broadcast booth. Click HERE for the full story…

Buzz Carrick’s first job in soccer was an unpaid position with NESN, the New England Sports Network. Foreshadowing? He’s barely earned a dime off soccer since. There is a behind-the-camera broadcasting career in there somewhere that pays the bills, but 3rd Degree, the decade-old website founded and produced by Carrick and focused on FC Dallas, runs on volunteers for a financial loss.

But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the site. With practice reports, overseas pre-season training, reserve game features, and an open mind to new opinions, 3rd Degree has been filling one-by-one the voids left by the mainstream soccer media, creating a blueprint for the what the future of soccer journalism may look like. If hyper-local journalism is the future as some say it is, well, 3rd Degree is soccer’s explorer in residence. And if there really is such a thing as citizen journalism, this is an example of that as well, because Carrick doesn’t consider himself a journalist even though he holds himself and 3rd Degree to industry standards.

But before I could say any of this for sure, I needed Carrick to touch a few more voids. The story of 3rd Degree’s methodical rise out of the darkness is after the jump. Click HERE for the full story…

“You goin in,” a Fulham fan asked a Portsmouth rival from the line at Fratton Park’s visitors gate? “Of course,” the hefty Pompey supporter said smiling, his PFC jersey stretched to the brink over his belly. “Once in a lifetime isn’t it?”

Yes sir. My first two English Premier League games go down as not just historic for me, but for Fulham as well. My week in England comes to a close, but Fulham and its American quintuplets will be in the Premiere League next season, thanks to the greatest ugly win I have ever seen. (Reading and Derby County’s American players were not as lucky). Click HERE for the full story…

Fulham v Birmingham City. Saturday 03-May-2008 3:00 pm.

Riverside Stand. Block X Row 2 Seat 11.

I’m a little lost for words. But not tears. It was unexpected. But taking my seat in the second row 20 yards up the sideline, the crowd singing and smacking their Clap Banners, I kind of lost it, a boy welcomed to the bosom of the mother he never met.

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At 40, Fox Soccer Report anchor and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) broadcaster Mitch Peacock has seen a few things, held a few jobs. My father on the other hand has had one job, been with one company his entire professional life. At 30, I’ve already surpassed him. The reality of my dad’s career inadvertently raised me to think that was the norm, that if for some reason you bounced from job to job there was something wrong. Then I entered the journalism world and came to realize that he is the rare case.

With this newfound knowledge, I forced myself to speak to as many people as possible to rectify my worn-in belief, to prove without a shadow of a doubt that leaving one job and taking another is not only not a bad thing, but could in fact be better, maybe even required if you expect to progress in your career.

Early in the life of TIAS I decided to reach out to some soccer journalists in order to learn their stories and discover their paths. Soccer journalism is its own beast with its own issues and following those issues is imperative I believe to getting at my self imposed editorial directive: What is American soccer? As goes the sport in this country, so goes the media, or is it the other way around?

The fact that the #1 soccer highlight show—number one because it’s the only one—in the country is produced in Canada by a Canadian company and sold to other markets, the U.S. being just one, is a great example of the at times, umm, odd?, soccer marketplace. With dwindling budgets, un-(soccer)educated editors, publishers, and producers, not to mention the hyper-fracturing of the consumer base, soccer is forced even further out in order to find a place in this wide world of sports and entertainment. Apparently that means Winnipeg, Manitoba.

As with soccer, each of our own professional aspirations and career paths face a daunting future. We all must find a place in this continually more competitive world. Peacock’s story, which he shares with me after the jump, is a prime example.

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For quite some time I’ve wanted to create a map that could graphically answer my oft recycled question, “what is American soccer?”

But there were two problems. First, the full cultural answer to that query is impossible to fully contextualize at TIAS, much less a single map. And secondly, while I am a certifiable freak for maps—I once created a map of Vermont’s glacial geologic history—I don’t know the first thing about making a map when you replace the colored pencils with a computer.

Enter Bill Turianski from Bill’s Sports Maps. A recommendation from Jeremy Rueter at Albion Road led me to Bill, who after I planted a seed, produced a map exclusively for TIAS depicting the professional soccer landscape for MLS and USL. Future maps are the obvious next step in this project, allowing one quick glance across the years to exhibit the growth or decline of the sport in this country.

A full size image for 2008 is after the jump. Click HERE for the full story…