one of my favorite sports columnists, the always acerbic Jay Mariotti. He makes an excellent point about the hype.
Are you ready for some futbol? Not anymore
June 15, 2006
BY JAY MARIOTTI SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
We can't even agree on the name. What the rest of the world calls football, we call soccer, simply because we already have our football and it reflects America's desired macho profile of bleeding, crippling physicality. Our soccer is a fringe sport of moms, kids and diehards, contrary to their football, a life-and-death psychosis that can breed hooliganism, suicide and occasional murder if a player heads a ball into his own net.
They don't relate to us, we don't relate to them. They are on Mars, we are on Pluto. When Bono narrates those cool World Cup promos with accompanying U2 music, we see kids kicking balls and wonder why they aren't throwing or shooting balls. Clearly, the world cares and we don't, for reasons more political and generational than we'll ever grasp. The only time your typical "SportsCenter'' guy has talked soccer is when Brandi Chastain ripped off her shirt, introducing the wonders of the sports bra to the male consciousness. To this day, our biggest and best kid athletes play football and kids too small generally play soccer, which could be a metaphor for American life.
So why even try to be part of the global football culture? Why force-feed ourselves into an elite party when we don't have the pedigree or the passion, when we fail to get a buzz over teams squeezing maybe a minute or two of cumulative excitement out of a 90-minute match? This sports nation in 2006 is about football's speed and hard knocks, basketball's speed and creativity, NASCAR's speed and crashes. If we want to hang out, ponder strategy, drink beer and watch life go by, we attend baseball games and cheer home runs, 1-2-3 innings and catcher-to-catcher knuckle sandwiches.
Soccer? On the food chain, it ranks somewhere above lacrosse and below Sudoku.
Our national kickball community, as one radio host dubs it, tried to market the game this month with an unprecedented blitz. It coincided with America's supposed inroads on the international scene, fueled by a shocking quarterfinal appearance in the World Cup four summers ago -- do you even remember that happening? -- and a blurry No. 5 ranking by the sport's governing body, FIFA. "A sleeping giant,'' U.S. coach Bruce Arena called his team, considered our most talented ever. The hype heading into a new World Cup, in Germany, was suffocating.
Confusing futbol with football, apparently, ESPN decided to lather the event like the NFL playoffs, complete with studio shows breaking down the daily action. Nike erected huge billboards in New York and other cities with a bold-faced warning -- "BEWARE'' -- which instinctively makes you look skyward in Manhattan for King Kong or aircraft until you see the images of four U.S. soccer players, two of whom I'm vaguely familiar with. Sports Illustrated placed players on its sacred cover and referred to them by first names and nicknames -- Beaz, Landon, Gooch and Bobby -- a quartet that could have been a boy band for all anyone knew. Corporate America was rallying around a cause, always suspicious and scary.
All the fuss, for that?
We were told to wave our flags, flaunt our patriotism and bask in an American soccer renaissance. The Fourth of July was coming, and by golly, our boys were going to race through the first round and force a defining showdown against those grand Brazilians, whose players go by solo names -- Ronaldhino, Ronaldo, Adriano and, of course, Kaka. Before the first game, President Bush called the boys with an inspirational message. On a June Monday in the USA, people actually took longer lunch breaks to see what all the fuss was about, with 2.14 million households tuning in compared with 998,000 for a similar interval in 2002. Here we go, laddies, here we go. The Americans were going to silence the Czech Republic and prove their transcendent point. Did somebody actually suggest soccer as our new national pastime as the game started?
Whoever did was sadly mistaken.
National waste-of-time, I'd say.
The great soccer salesmanship job turned out to be a scam. Those world rankings must have been compiled by Fifi, as in someone's dog, because Team USA entered the stadium in Gelsenkirchen and laid one of the all-time stinker eggs in World Cup annals. If the Americans looked scared, disorganized, confused, passive and out of their league, that's because they would say all those things themselves after a 3-0 loss, keeping in mind that 3-0 in this sport is akin to 49-0 in the NFL.
What bothered me most was finger-pointing by Arena, which surely is perceived and ridiculed as ugly Americanism by a world hardly enamored of the U.S. these days. The coach is responsible for a team's psyche and preparation, especially in an event that comes every four years. But Arena showed the body language of a man so disgusted by the performance that he wished to separate himself from these inferior slugs beneath him. When he wasn't shaking his head and looking at the sky, he'd stare at his players with his hands behind his head. With two games remaining, that is no way to inspire the troops, no matter how poorly they played. If Arena thinks he's a tough guy, I'm here to tell him he's no Bill Parcells in the cred department.
Arena's shots off the mark
He called out forward Landon Donovan, midfielder DaMarcus Beasley, goalie Kasey Keller and others. And while nobody was disputing that everyone played terribly, it's revealing that some players are questioning Arena's strategy. Beasley, who needed to be aggressive offensively with a big deficit, wondered why he was placed at right back in the second half. "I was back there defending the whole time,'' he said. "I don't know what he wants me to do.''
At a Wednesday press gathering in Hamburg, midfielder Bobby Convey said some of the players didn't understand their roles. Whose fault is that? And why did Arena wait so long in Germany before announcing his starting lineup?
Arena has continued to rip away anyway. Of Beasley, he said, "If he's any kind of a player and a man, he understands. If he doesn't, then he's not going to be able to help us in Games 2 or 3, either.''
"The reason we didn't do well is because everyone did not do their role, maybe didn't know their role and maybe didn't know what to do,'' Convey said.
Is it possible this team was so absurdly overhyped that expectations rose beyond reality? Because barring a Saturday miracle against Italy, which never has lost to Team USA, you can say arrivederci to the stateside soccer dream. Why would anyone with a clue think the Americans were ready to break through? Their World Cup record at European venues is 3-10-1, and against European competition, they're 0-8 and have been outscored 23-4. "It can be done,'' Arena said.
I don't share his belated optimism. America wasn't ready for the elite world stage and probably never will be, at least in our lifetimes.
It would be wrong to suggest no one in this land cares about the World Cup. In ethnically rich cities such as Chicago, interest is huge in neighborhoods and bars. But the people who drive this U.S. sports engine needed a specific reason to care.
That reason disappeared Monday. Wake me up in four years.
On second thought, don't.
Anyone care to help me out here?
whereas Texas is full of mexicans 
