By Stephen H. Webb
Thursday, March 5, 2009, 12:00 AM
Soccer is running America into the ground, and there is very little anyone can do about it. Social critics have long observed that we live in a therapeutic society that treats young people as if they can do no wrong. Every kid is a winner, and nobody is ever left behind, no matter how many times they watch the ball going the other way. Whether the dumbing down of America or soccer came first is hard to say, but soccer is clearly an important means by which American energy, drive, and competitiveness is being undermined to the point of no return.
Maybe the dumbing down of America has something to do with idiots like you being allowed to teach American college students with no supervision.
What other game, to put it bluntly, is so boring to watch? (Bowling and golf come to mind, but the sound of crashing pins and the sight of the well-attired strolling on perfectly kept greens are at least inherently pleasurable activities.)
Good point, they should add “bowling pins crashing” to those sound machines people use to fall asleep. Also, I see your point with the golf greens. I mean, maybe if they played soccer on highly well-cared for and flawlessly-manicured grass people would…oh wait, they fucking do.
The linear, two-dimensional action of soccer is like the rocking of a boat but without any storm and while the boat has not even left the dock. Think of two posses pursuing their prey in opposite directions without any bullets in their guns. Soccer is the fluoridation of the American sporting scene.
What? Are the opposing posses the other posses’ prey or are they each pursuing different prey? Why don’t they have bullets? Because the field is linear instead of circular? This can’t even be called an analogy because it doesn’t make any sense.
For those who think I jest, let me put forth four points, which is more points than most fans will see in a week of games—and more points than most soccer players have scored since their pee-wee days.
1) Any sport that limits you to using your feet, with the occasional bang of the head, has something very wrong with it. Indeed, soccer is a liberal’s dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability.
I believe that disability you’re speaking of is called a rule. And all sports have rules-many of them, in fact. This is why basketball players can’t kick the ball and why baseball players can’t do 'roids and why football players can’t just throw the ball to someone else before they get tackled.
I won’t even address the liberal comment at this time. It’s just too inane to believe that it was even written.
Anthropologists commonly define man according to his use of hands. We have the thumb, an opposable digit that God gave us to distinguish us from animals that walk on all fours. The thumb lets us do things like throw baseballs and fold our hands in prayer. We can even talk with our hands. Have you ever seen a deaf person trying to talk with their feet? When you are really angry and acting like an animal, you kick out with your feet. Only fools punch a wall with their hands. The Iraqi who threw his shoes at President Bush was following his primordial instincts. Showing someone your feet, or sticking your shoes in someone’s face, is the ultimate sign of disrespect. Do kids ever say, “Trick or Treat, smell my hands”? Did Jesus wash his disciples’ hands at the Last Supper? No, hands are divine (they are one of the body parts most frequently attributed to God), while feet are in need of redemption. In all the portraits of God’s wrath, never once is he pictured as wanting to step on us or kick us; he does not stoop that low.
Holy shit, is that really part of your reason for disliking soccer? Because God loves our hands? And because deaf people don’t sign with their feet? How could a person that exists in reality, such as myself, even come up with a response here? Answer: Can’t-it’s too fucking ridiculous.
2) Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up.
Yes, just the reason I started playing sports when I was 6; so that I could be broken down, military-style, until I was curled in the fetal position, crying, yet begging for more. Fun is for pussies.
Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding. Even its language was intimidating, with bases, bats, strikes, and outs. Striding up to the plate gave each of us a chance to act like we were starring in a Western movie, and tapping the bat to the plate gave us our first experience with inventing self-indulgent personal rituals. The boy chosen to be the pitcher was inevitably the first kid on the team to reach puberty, and he threw a hard ball right at you.
You’re joking, right? I know for a fact that, in T-ball, no one even keeps track of the score and everybody gets to run the bases. But I did forget about those intimidating words…BAT! Scared you, didn’t I?
Thus, you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables. We also spent a lot of time in the outfield chanting, “Hey batter batter!” as if we were Buddhist monks on steroids. Our chanting was compensatory behavior, a way of making the time go by, which is surely why at soccer games today it is the parents who do all of the yelling.
So, time went by slowly in these games? Even though you were shit-your-pants scared of every move you made and spent half the game fearful of getting your face ripped apart by a 6 year old's fastball? I guess these gay old times didn’t occur until after you had built back up following the severe mental and emotional beat down you experienced in 4 year old T-ball?
3) Everyone knows that soccer is a foreign invasion, but few people know exactly what is wrong with that.
And luckily, we have real Americans like you to tell us.
More than having to do with its origin, soccer is a European sport because it is all about death and despair. Americans would never invent a sport where the better you get the less you score.
I know it wasn’t “invented” in America, but don’t you score less as you get better at golf? But that’s beyond the point, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. I believe the correct correlation would be the better the defense gets, the less you, the offense, scores…in certain circumstances, depending on how good your offense actually is and how reliable the other team’s goalie is. In short, what a stupidly bold statement that is not only inaccurate, but also irrelevant.
Even the way most games end, in sudden death, suggests something of an old-fashioned duel. How could anyone enjoy a game where so much energy results in so little advantage, and which typically ends with a penalty kick out, as if it is the audience that needs to be put out of its misery. Shootouts are such an anticlimax to the game and are so unpredictable that the teams might as well flip a coin to see who wins—indeed, they might as well flip the coin before the game, and not play at all.
I’ll give you that shootouts are anticlimactic and that most people would prefer to see the game end some other way. But shootouts are not designed to put the audience out of its misery because most soccer fans aren’t miserable assholes like you.
4) And then there is the question of gender. I know my daughter will kick me when she reads this, but soccer is a game for girls.
Kick you? I hope she legally emancipates herself.
Girls are too smart to waste an entire day playing baseball, and they do not have the bloodlust for football. Soccer penalizes shoving (yep, no shoving in football, true enough!) and burns countless calories, and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating. As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth more than the masculine business of destroying your opponent with insurmountable power.
YOU actually found a woman that would marry and bear children with you?? If I was your wife, and I just read the above statement, you’d see some of that bloodlust that we ladies are apparently indifferent to.
Let me conclude on a note of despair appropriate to my topic. There is no way to run away from soccer, if only because it is a sport all about running. It is as relentless as it is easy
A quote: “As a display of nearly death-defying stamina, soccer mimics the paradigmatic feminine experience of childbirth.” Oh, you said that, like 3 seconds ago. So, tell me, is soccer as difficult as childbirth or is it easy? Pick one, dick.
and it is as tiring to play as it is tedious to watch (and Heaven forbid we get tired while playing a sport). The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture. What the left could not accomplish through these intellectual fads, one might suspect, they are trying to accomplish through sport.
Yeah, now that American kids are playing soccer, we’re just one little jump away from Marxism. All you just did there was use big words to make an idiotic argument that is wholly political and, in no part, sports-related. Nor, again, does it make sense. But you’re obviously a conservative douche, so you’re well-versed in the smoke and mirrors debate style.
Yet this suspicion would be mistaken. Soccer is of foreign origin, that is certainly true, but its promotion and implementation are thoroughly domestic. Soccer is a self-inflicted wound. Americans have nobody to blame but themselves. Conservative suburban families, the backbone of America, have turned to soccer in droves.
Oh my God, in droves? Before we know it, the real America will be filled with minority-loving gays! GAYS, I TELL YOU!
Baseball is too intimidating, football too brutal, and basketball takes too much time to develop the required skills. American parents in the past several decades are overworked and exhausted, but their children are overweight and neglected. Soccer is the perfect antidote to television and video games. It forces kids to run and run, and everyone can play their role, no matter how minor or irrelevant to the game. Soccer and relevision are the peanut butter and jelly of parenting.
Ahh, the old relevision. There’s no way I can pass up on making fun of a typo, but maybe that’s just old existentialist, Marxist, post-structuralist, deconstructionist, soccer-loving, liberal me.
I should know. I am an overworked teacher, with books to read and books to write, and before I put in a video for the kids to watch while I work in the evenings, they need to have spent some of their energy. Otherwise, they want to play with me!
Just give them a few years. They’re learn what a jackass you are soon enough and then spend their time doing drugs and trying to get pregnant just to spite you instead.
Last year all three of my kids were on three different soccer teams at the same time. My daughter is on a traveling team, and she is quite good. I had to sign a form that said, among other things, I would not do anything embarrassing to her or the team during the game. I told the coach I could not sign it. She was perplexed and worried. “Why not,” she asked? “Are you one of those parents who yells at their kids? “Not at all,” I replied, “I read books on the sidelines during the game, and this embarrasses my daughter to no end.”
It also probably eats away at her soul, since her father is incapable of taking an interest in the things that are important to her. I’m sure she’s well on her way to the path I described above. Hope you taught her about safe sex!
That is my one way of protesting the rise of this pitiful sport. Nonetheless, I must say that my kids and I come home from a soccer game a very happy family.
Umm…worst last sentence to a persuasion piece EVER? So, you hate soccer so much that you object to it even on a political level. You find it un-American. You think it’s too easy (yet, of course, simultaneously too hard). You can’t even make yourself watch your daughter, who is good at it, play it. Yet you come home from a soccer game a very happy family? Bat. Shit. Crazy.
