[Vision2020] Hostility to soccer

[Sunil Ramalingam]

What I don't get is the hostility to soccer by some American sports writers 
and radio talk show hosts.  It's as if love of sports is a zero-sum game, 
and somehow to admire soccer is to take something away from football, 
baseball, or basketball.

I grew up with soccer, and love watching it.  If my knee felt better I'd try 
to play.  When I returned to the U.S. at seventeen, I started watching 
football and love watching it or playing sandlot football.  I started 
playing rugby in college, and would watch it more often if I could justify 
the cost of adding the expensive cable box.  (If someone will let me come to 
their house to watch, I'll bring the beer and try to leave behind my kids.)

Last week I heard the idiot sitting in for Tony Bruno claim that if he were 
on the field for a World Cup game, no one would be able to tell he was a 
useless athlete.  I had to change the station, because I was screaming at 
him that we'd all watch him drop with a heart attack after five minutes of 
every attack by the other team being funnelled through the space he was 
occupying. (Also, long, run-on sentences make me light-headed.)  The other 
side of his argument was that his ineptitude would be obvious in any of the 
'American sports.'

I see that some people don't appreciate 'strange' games because they don't 
understand them.  My dad thinks gridiron football is dumb, because he 
doesn't understand it; my explanations to explain it to him fall on deaf 
ears, because he's not interested in learning about it either.  He's happy 
to tell me it's dumb.  But the repetition doesn't make him any more correct 
than the idiots on the radio when it comes to soccer.

Sunil