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

In the last post, I made a point that everything you need to know about the Beckham transfer you could gather from Good Morning America and their atrocious handling of breaking the news and filing one of the first interviews. I stand by that estimation, but I found something more in the coverage of the transfer: the malcontent the greater sports media has for soccer. Men attack the sport which not only are they unfamiliar with, but they do so with such zeal (and mediocre humor) that one can only conclude its a vendetta, and it is completely inexplicable. It’s as if they were kamikaze pilots, killing themselves to kill someone else. What’s the point?

You know, I’m fine with the fact that nearly everybody ignores soccer. Please, keep ignoring it. I’m fine with ESPN’s bourgeois coverage and gutter rat announcers (like MLS, Fox Soccer Channel slowly improves). I’m fine with all of it until soccer makes a splash in the baby pool, be it with a world cup or the signing David Beckham, and then every Tom, Dick, and Football comes out of the woodwork to shoot it down. What’s up with that?

Which reminds me. excuse me just this moment. SCREW SWIMMING!!! Yeah, those damn swimmers. You can’t even score a goal in swimming. You all just dream of water polo. Yeah. Take that Mark Spitz! Why don’t you just move to Australia where they worship your weird non-scoring sport? You will be nothing here! …but we’ll root for you every four years. USA! USA! USA!

Sound familiar? Slicing the soccer pie is similar to dividing Republicans and Democrats these days. There is very little common ground. Sometimes I think the polarization is the only thing they have in common, and the spin… oh the spin. In the right hands, any news is bad news when it comes to soccer.

You either are with soccer or you are against it. I’m not exactly sure where this polarity comes from, but I can’t think of another sport that American sportscasters, writers, etc, feel the need to lambaste. Where does the vindictive scrawl come from? It can’t simply be because the game was not invented by us, can it? Are the detractors that prejudiced? Can their hate really proliferate the propaganda they spew? It worked for the White House. And those hilarious congressmen changed every ‘French’ to ‘Freedom’ in the Capitol cafeteria. Should any of this soccer spite really surprise me?

They do it all the time – these expert columnists – speaking without knowledge of the game, proudly leaning on the original hilariousness that is the mini-van mom joke. Is that really the best you can do? For anyone listening who understands the game, fan or not, it simply makes the otherwise objective reporter seem ignorant. I can’t even count how many articles and columns I’ve read in the last week that clearly were written by people who aren’t soccer people – which is fine – but as a good reporter or columnist, shouldn’t they be doing their research, forming a solid opinion? Enter Rocky Mountain News Columnist, yeah yeah, he is a columnist, but still, Bernie Lincicome. I could have chosen any one of the hundreds of anti-soccer rants, but Bernie’s - what decade was it cool to name your kid Bernie - was especially nice.

“The generational impulse to save soccer for those who ignore it in America, to have it ready just in case all those tots scrambling around while their mothers check their watches grow up to become adult fans, turns hopefully to David Beckham.”

Cynical humor doesn’t begin to describe the disdain. Poor humor might, but are mothers, or some guardian thereof, not capable of this at any peewee sporting event they go to, even going as far as including the NFL or NBA? I forgot about those rabid moms at my little league baseball games. I hear your mother will get it if she even so much as glances at her wrist. There’s a real sport. My mom, for the record, enjoyed watching my soccer games more than my baseball games, and she simply worried I’d get hurt during my football games. What a wimp! Can we get, I don’t know, T.O. to come over and explain the quaint subtleties of tackle football to my mom? What’s that Bernie? He’s already taken…

“It would be like us sending Terrell Owens to Iceland - not a bad idea, by the way - to bring the quaint subtleties of tackle football to an unconcerned society.”

Call me when T.O becomes the most recognizable face of American football in the world, and then we can talk about what else is inaccurate with this statement. Oh wait, no one cares about American football, and I will give you an example Bernie, something you seem unable to do… how’s NFL Europe doing? Last I checked its near folding, changed its name to Europa, and exists only in Germany except for one team in Amsterdam. So on a global scale, US soccer is doing quite well. But no one cares about the world except Thomas Friedman and people looking to beyond their fertilized, fenced-in backyards.

But whatever - let them have their fraternity moment. It’s their chance for solidarity against something. The sporting world knows this all too well, what with its rivalries that often mean more to fans and broadcasters than to the players of the field. This paradigm continues to the broadcasting of sports. I would give the world to watch any sporting event on TV as if I was in the stadium. Give me a good picture, an ambient soundtrack, and a scoreboard. Kill the announcers, the graphics, and the commercials. Funny, soccer comes closest to this. How, Lippie, do you put up with all those football ads breaking into your hours of wonderfully available merchandise? And why, when soccer is simply trying to knowingly up its ante in the American sporting landscape by bringing in a guy in who is merely talented on the field while being the greatest world-wide marketing face in the world, are you criticizing it, when the broadcasts of “your popular sports” are little more than TV timeouts? You keep saying it isn’t going to make it here, that it will never be a Big American Sport, but what you seem to overlook is no one is saying that it will. Not Me, certainly, but not Commissioner Garber or David Backham, people whose quotes and opinions you should pay attention to and maybe consider before taking pen to paper.

After digging through all the muck, there seems to be no answer except the fact that you don’t want it here.

“Clearly, the peak of soccer in America was when Brandi Chastain ripped off her shirt for the national ladies, and that is something Beckham might consider, being every bit as attractive.”

Is there really anything you can add, Bernie, to prove once and for all you hate soccer? Even your use of the ‘ladies’ sounds condescending. Is this the only moment you remember since Pele? And is that because you are a dirty old man, or is there another soccer moment or personality you’d like to call in and try to ridicule?

“Maybe Nomar Garciaparra and his lovely wife, Mia, to China to teach the hit- and-run, and they could, while they were there, thank the folks for lending us Yao Ming.”

While this sentence lacks a main verb, it has the other hot woman Lipi remembers. Well done. Care to sum up and go back to another sport Berns?

“For a while there in the ’70s, we became Boca Raton for faded foreign soccer celebrities, a place to retire with wages, and the result was the same as it will be with Beckham, indifference, bankruptcy and collapse. Why soccer should think that we are suckers for such silliness is its problem, though Beckham does take a nice picture. His wife, Posh, as well.”

Ah, to be a columnist. Just spout out anything without having to explain it or back it up. I guess we aren’t buying baseball’s silliness with the import of its Japanese Gyro-baller or scheduling regular season games in Japan. The NFL is just kidding about the game next year in London. Once MLS makes its first million off Beckham, can we get Berns McLippicomber to write soccer an apology? Or does throwing that ‘though’ into the last sentence allow him the out he’ll need to dig himself from this elitist, misogynistic (i.e. American) hole, as well as getting in one last good-looking female?

So What?

This is probably exactly with the Bern-ster wants anyhow. A soccer fan with his panties in a bunch. Yes, I wear panties, but only because I thought that was the only way to get Boutros Boutros-Lincicome’s attention.

Besides exposing these guys for the fallacy that they are, is there anything soccer can do to ensure the hate dies off? Is there any convincing these people that Beckham is a step in the right direction – getting talent and marketable players – but just one step, not THE step, and that soccer, like it or not, is on a slow climb from what seems like some sort of post-war, post-Pele, political backlash? Will it ever be as big as baseball – even Beckham says no, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a world market now. The Big 4 (or is it down to 3 now) American Sports are starting to realize that, why haven’t Berniling-a-ding-dong and his Minutemen fallen in line. That is, after all, what they do best.

In discussing this with a friend, our mutual love of skateboarding came up. Will it ever be a major American sport? No, but it seems to have largely dismantled the adolescent mall rat miscreant image that it held during our childhoods. Or remember when snowboarding was not allowed at most ski resorts? Isn’t the mountain big enough for all of us?

My exceedingly more-plugged-in and edgier friend noted that “Skateboarding never changed its approach - it just kept grinding on.” It’s not a major american sport, but once fledging skate companies are making millions, the athletes national marketers. I think the analogy works pretty well, but what is more, I realized, is that no analogy or point-by-point rebuttal to idiotic sports writers changes the fact that any lesser value – accordingly to the powers that be – is going to get the beat down until they win. In the same way quarterbacks have to win to be fully enshrined, not just great, soccer will have to step up and win some big games, which admittedly is something they have yet to do (and it will take a few, not just one).

We could work to eliminate the things naysayers love to pick apart – the diving, for example - or we could start counting each score as 6 (but that would just be CRAZY), but none of that can take the place of winning.

And winning is what Beckham just might be able to do. I’ve yet to read someone positioning it like this, but look at the LA Galaxy roster: Beckham, Donovan, Jaqua, Albright, Quaranta, and now Cannon between the posts. Add in Yallop, known to be one of the best coaches in MLS, and you might have the first team that might be running away with MLS Cups and running into what might be the first opportunities for an MLS team in international competitions such as the World Club Championships. Olympic Lyon comes to mind. How much of the French League to we hear about? Lyon has won 5 straight league titles and seen some success outside their country. Why can’t that be MLS? (and why isn’t MLS going for guys like Lyon’s John Alieu Carew?)

Bottom line: I see plenty of reasons to be excited about American soccer and MLS, and Beckham is at the bottom of that list, but plenty too, are the people waiting for a new opportunity to say soccer sucks. What’s worse, I feel as if I’m only – as any good mother might say – dropping down to their level trying to refute them, but then again – as any good soldier might say – to kill a swamp rat often means getting wet. I’ll take my lumps, but I’ll be damned if those lumps won’t be warranted.

Epilogue

Even Is On has a ”Hater Page”. I’m nominating Bernie Lincicome, and as I know he isn’t the only one out there. Send in the your favorite writers making the same egregious mistakes and the same campy arguments again and again. And in case you were wondering, I’m not the only one who thinks Bernie is horrible. This Nuggets fan seems to agree!