As America prepares to celebrate 250 years of kicking butt and taking names, I’m celebrating something that we aren’t kicking: soccer balls.
Our victory over the Brits did more than guarantee life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It also freed us of the menace of European culture. We dumped tea and we drink coffee. We pushed away Parliament and penned a Constitution. The Brits got to keep their fish and chips, while we chose quality dental care.
And our greatest victory. We got football. Britain got stuck with soccer.
Soccer is a 90-minute toothache on grass, a boring contest between incredible athletes wasting their time at a tedious task. It was spread around the world via global oppression. As the British Empire grew in the 19th century, it inflicted soccer on its subjects. While the redcoats patrolled the streets, Wooster and Jeeves forced the locals to learn about red cards and heading.
So why is America hosting the World Cup smack dab in the middle of the celebration of our national greatness? Why are my airwaves jammed with ads celebrating glorified kickball while I’m trying to salute the red, white and blue?
I, for one, refuse to participate. When they gather in Los Angeles on June 12 to hoist the tipoff or drop the puck or whatever they do to start a soccer game, I will be tuned into something more exciting, such as the Knitting Channel or the latest video on “AllAboutAccounting.com.”
Spare me your outrage, soccer fans. I already know your arguments. Or rather, “argument,” because when you point out how boring their game is, the soccer fan’s ready answer is, “What about baseball? Now that’s boring.”
Well, let me tell you about baseball.
First, it’s not just America’s sport because it rocks. It’s America’s sport because it was perfected here in the good ol’ U.S. and then sent on to take over the world — well, significant parts of Asia and Central America, anyway.
(OK, so baseball isn’t America’s sport; that’s the NFL. But go with it, I’m on a roll.)
Is baseball more boring than soccer? Please. In soccer, nearly all the activity is away from the goal. How many actual scoring opportunities in a typical World Cup match? A dozen? Maybe 20?
In baseball, every single pitch is a scoring opportunity. Sure, the vast majority are just balls and strikes, but every pitch could be turned into a home run. Which is why a 3-2 baseball game is so much more exciting than a 3-2 soccer match. (And why the crowd cheers every goal for about 20 minutes. They know nothing else is likely to happen for a while.)
It’s also not a coincidence that soccer and socialism often go together. (British prime minister and unapologetic socialist Keir Starmer? Lifelong Arsenal fan.) Socialism leads to poverty, which means buying bats, gloves and helmets is a problem. For soccer, all you need is a ball and a mob of people to kick it around. And socialist nations always have people standing around with nothing better to do.
We’re Americans, dammit! We demand more.
Once, during a trip to Ireland, I was stuck in a sports bar for a couple of hours waiting for a friend. The Irish and their Guinnesses (“Guinni?”) were gathered around the flat screens on the wall, watching “football.”
I glanced up at another screen, where a handful of locals were glued to something called “hurling.”
To this day, I have no idea what the rules are, but it involved guys with club-like sticks running around a field and hitting a fist-size ball while engaged in high-speed collisions with each other. After half an hour, I turned to the room and cried, “Why isn’t everybody watching this?!”
Bring the World Cup of Hurling to the United States, and I’m in. Or even Formula 1 racing, or that weird Canadian ice game with the rocks and brooms. Anything but soccer.
From George Washington to FDR to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, what’s the one thing they had in common? They weren’t boring. They knew how to put on a show.
We fought the British to keep things like soccer out of America. And if it takes another Revolution to keep it out, I say “Live Free or Die.”
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