Breaking Dawn and Bending it Like Beckham

Yes, it’s 8:40 on a Monday morning, the exact time my “spontaneous blog” entry on lamonitor.com is supposed to be published.

For those who don’t read me that often (i.e. pretty much everyone...my wife only reads my stuff when AOL’s “Breaking Dawn” chat room is full of Team Edwards), you know that one of my favorite editorial subjects are random things I happen to peruse while appearing like I’m working. I mean, working. Of course that’s what I mean.

I couldn’t work in much football-watching time on Sunday for various reasons, so I was checking out various Internet scoreboards when I ran across this interesting tidbit: The Sporting News’ headline of the L.A. Galaxy’s and Houston Dynamo’s clash was “the biggest MLS Cup we’ll see.”

You can also read that as “the biggest anyone will see ever because nobody cares a lick about MLS (I’m guessing no more than half of the people reading this will even know what ‘MLS’ stands for, let alone know why they should see it).”

I watch enough soccer to have an appreciation for the athleticism involved, but, on one of the many-other-hands, I can see why most Americans don’t, beyond, possibly, their kids’ Pee-Wee league team. If one wasn’t turned off by soccer before, the story a few years ago of the French world-beating soccer stud who headbutted an opponent nearly to death during the biggest (and possibly final) game of his career and maybe even the biggest in the history of his beloved country because, allegedly, the other guy said something impolite about his sister (“I hear your sister is flighty and of dubious moral fiber,” I may be paraphrasing slightly) would be enough to do it.

Apparently, this guy, the Junkyard Dog of French soccer, grew up in a household where sisters were held in reverence above all others. Like on Mars or something. Where I come from (here), sisters are the apparatuses on which one hones their Noogie or Indian Burn skills.

Back to the MLS Cup: from what I can gather, the only reason anybody MIGHT care about this game is because it could well have been David “Bend it Like My ACL” Beckham’s last hurrah in U.S. soccer. Honestly, I though he’d retired like five years ago. My knowledge of Beckham can be summed up thusly: he’s rich, he plays soccer and he’s married to one of the Spice Girls. Frankly (and I’m not even a little ashamed to admit this), I know more about the Spice Girls.

Any soccer fan reading this is surely now thinking “how original, an American rambling on about the problems of soccer.” And you’re right, I’m likely just piling on. But, from a purely objective standpoint, there are no shortage of reasons why high-level soccer will never be much more than a novelty act in this country. Here are but two of those:

1) A former colleague of mine once asked me, straight-faced, why sports fans had to act in such a rude manner. My answer, if I recall correctly, was “because it’s not the ballet.” I believe he was referencing a prep basketball game he attended where fans were yelling and trying to distract the visiting team.

Most former athletes at any level above Pee-Wee can attest to being called names from opposing fans that would’ve made John Wayne shed a tear. That comes with the territory.

In high-level soccer, fans hurling all kinds of insults at you about your sister aren’t likely to catch your attention. In fact, those are probably YOUR fans doing that. Before they’ve started drinking.

Yes, a Giants fan was beaten savagely by some Dodgers fans earlier this year over a baseball game. That is deplorable.

Soccer fans have been known to start fires, start race riots and even cause full sections of stadiums to collapse. That’s a little over the top in America, even for a country that turned Barrel Man into a celebrity and made rap star Ice Cube compose a jam expounding the virtues of Raider Nation (spoiler alert: there are no virtues of Raider Nation).

2) Would a U.S. World Cup championship invigorate this country into embracing soccer? It very well could. For a couple of years.

In case you missed the subtle clues, the U-S-of-A bites its thumb at most things that are seen as even slightly foreign, Beetles, Beatles or Chinese food notwithstanding. To most Americans, soccer is seen as slightly foreign, in much the same way that man-purses are seen as slightly foreign. This, I realize, isn’t anything like a fair comparison, but I’m talking about perception here.

So, for fair comparison’s sake, let’s take a look at another sport that’s seen as foreign: cycling. Pro cycling’s equivalent of the Super Bowl is the Tour de France (do you see a problem already?).

The Tour de France, of course, is a grueling, month-long race that tests every fiber of a cyclist’s being from start to finish. Only the greatest cyclists in the world can finish, let alone win the Tour de France, and only by suffering through more physical and psychological punishment than most people experience in a lifetime.

Now, I’ll subtract Lance Armstrong and Greg LeMond, arguably the two greatest American cyclists of all time, who both managed to pull off two nearly-unimaginable feats: winning the Tour de France multiple times and getting Americans to give a rat’s booty about the Tour de France. Besides them two dudes (and without dragging Google into this), name five men who have ever won the Tour de France. Odds are, if you’re reading this in one of the 50 United States, you can’t do it. Odds are, America dwellers, you can’t even name the guy who won the Tour de France this year (that would be Cadel Evans of Australia). Now then, which teams won the most recent Super Bowl, World Series and NBA championship. See what I’m saying?

Will soccer be an exception to this rule? Possibly, but not likely. Along with the ShamWow and “Sailor Moon,” memories of a U.S. win in the World Cup would almost certainly fade within a few years and Americans would get back quickly to the business of not paying attention to high-level soccer.

And if Beckham – one of the few pro soccer players, if not the only one, most Americans could name – hangs up his Copa Mundials for good, as could well be the case, what few memories U.S. sports enthusiasts have of MLS (Major League Soccer...see, I knew you didn’t know what it meant), will be hung up along with it.

For now, I’d better go. My wife is screaming about a blog post disparaging Taylor Lautner’s abs.