Bruised Shin, Soccer, George and Dragon, Ann Coulter

With the World Cup in full swing, I’ve heard a lot of both good and bad about soccer. More people are loving the sport, but that seems to make the haters come out too, people like Ann Coulter (more on her later) who have not a clue about the game and criticize it from the point of their non-understanding. I used to be one, actually. I’d talk bad about the game, but as a part of growing up, I’ve learned to expand my horizons. I eat vegetables now, even spinach, mom, and I like music that doesn’t have loud distorted guitars. And yes, I quite like soccer.

I played only one year of soccer when I was young, fifth grade I think it was, and at that time, I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to get it because I’d been raised on football and baseball. My main memory from the whole of that one season is being at practice one day shivering in the rain as we were doing drills. One of the other kids on the team, Owen, looked at me and then down at my feet. “Are you wearing any?” I figured he meant cleats because that’s what I saw when I looked down, my white Nike cleats, and so I said, “Yeah.” Bad mistake. He then kicked me in the shin, not too hard, mind you, but hard enough when the pointy end of his cleated shoe hit my right shin head on.

“Ouch!”

soccer kick

The coach didn’t hear. He was instructing some of the better players in the finer points of the game. I limped around cursing under my breath and realized all too late that Owen had meant shin guards. He laughed. “I thought you said you were wearing some.” There was a bruise later that lasted for days, but I still didn’t ask my mom to buy me any shin guards. I just didn’t understand the game or its risks back then, and one season of standing on the sidelines did nothing to change that.

It would have helped if I could have watched the pros play on TV, but soccer was nowhere to be found. To my understanding, it was something kids who didn’t play football or baseball or basketball did, something that stopped later in life. It was something I thought not a real sport, or at least not a sport to be admired because to watch a bunch of fifth graders play soccer wasn’t exciting. They just kicked the ball here and there and then the whole group of players for both sides would chase it and someone else would kick it and every once in a while there’d be a goal. And for years I thought, “How boring it that?”

But then something happened, a miracle you could say.

Two years ago, I started dating someone who knew the finer points of the game, someone who watched the pros on TV. And if love isn’t enough of a miracle, there was an eye opening entrance into the world of real soccer where players displayed acrobatic skills in scoring goals or preventing them, where there were collisions and fights and trash talking, injuries. There was grace and skill, and I was floored at how precisely they could kick the ball, head the ball, curve the ball. Yes, curve. It’s true. People who don’t play don’t know this, but those shots on goal are not just straight. They curve, they arc, they angle. And the pros do it beautifully. It’s no different than kicking a field goal in football from the hash mark, except that the target in soccer is much smaller and lower and there is someone standing there to block it and there are usually a number of other players in the way and everybody is moving and the ball is moving, and yet there is contact and the ball sails into the goal at speeds of up to 80 mph.

And it got me thinking about youth football, that sad attempt for elementary school players to be an organized team. Every play in a youth game is the same as youth soccer. One kid has the ball and everybody runs around trying to tackle him with some of them tripping over their own shoelaces. All youth sports are the same. There are one or two players who far outshine the rest, and they dominate. The other kids just move and shuffle around. It doesn’t matter the sport.

George and Dragon

So I started spending a lot of time watching soccer with my girlfriend at the George and Dragon, an English pub in Seattle where the crowds come to watch the English Premier League, which along with the German and Spanish leagues is where the top players in the world play. I was immediately transformed. I do still love American football. I’m a big Seahawks fan, and I cheered mightily when they won the super bowl, but I get it now. Soccer is every bit a sport as football. And to those who still think watching paint dry is more fun than soccer, consider this:

1. Think about how boring a baseball game can be. I’ve been to four hour baseball games where only one run was scored in the thirteenth inning, and even though I like baseball, I was bored out of my mind. I appreciate the sport, I do, but in arguing equality for soccer, I must admit that baseball is often a very tiresome thing to watch. There’s a Simpson’s episode that gets to this when Homer quits drinking and then attends a baseball game.

Now, to be fair, some soccer games can be boring, but every sport has that, and there are scoreless games in soccer that are exciting (the Brazil – Mexico game of the World Cup being a perfect example), because every shot on goal is almost a goal, and just one goal, one little point, can completely change a game. Most sports don’t have that.

2. In soccer, they don’t stop for TV timeouts. The game is constant. Those players are moving for forty-five minutes for two halves of a game. That takes some stamina, and especially near the end of the game after running for ninety minutes, it takes not a small bit of athleticism to jump over a defender and head in a corner kick or head one out away from the goal. Those guys are superb athletes. They deserve our respect. Stamina-wise, they could run circles around most baseball players and golfers and probably a lot of football players.

3. It is a rough sport. There is physical contact. Players butt heads. They dive. They lay out for the ball. They get kicked in all parts of the body by opposing players. To not admit such means you have either never seen a professional game and/or have a lazy brain

Clint Dempsey

–Note: There is one aspect of the game that bothers me, and that is the falling down, the attempts to draw the refs into calling penalties by overreacting to a minimal amount of contact. It’s my thought that this is the main thing that prevents many Americans from respecting the game. Football players go at it and hit and tackle every play. They’re wearing pads, but that doesn’t matter. The force of those contacts takes a physical toll. For people who are brought up on that to watch a professional soccer player go down at the slightest bit of contact and cry foul to the ref is a hard thing to respect. It’s the one thing I’d change about the game. It does bother me, but honestly, it is a small part of the game.

Lastly, and even though I’m not a confrontational guy, fuck you, Ann Coulter. Your take on soccer is one of the most non-thinking, mind-numbingly stupid things I’ve ever had the displeasure to read. It isn’t a growing love of soccer in America that is a sign of our nation’s moral decay, it’s the fact that you have a syndicated column. You should come to the George and Dragon (they speak English there, you know) sometime to check out a game and see how exciting it can be. You have an open invitation. I’ll even buy the first round of drinks.

 

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