Best of the week entry 1

Comes from the ever acerbic P.J. O’Rourke, one of the few people I can say is more sarcastic and smarmy than I am. His target this week is world cup soccer, A Modest Proposal for Improving a Dull Game …

There is, however, the possibility that the powers-that-be in international soccer have no interest in creating more excitement, that their entire aim and purpose is to increase the tedium in the sport. In that case I suggest you encourage your players to do as my daughter and her teammates do and wear their iPods throughout the game.

But I don't believe this is what you want for soccer. The purpose of sports—even foreign sports—is not to bore people. Boredom can be so easily obtained. Hunger, exhaustion from making a living and authoritarian governments that ban the fun parts of the Internet provide it free in most of the world. And here in America we just have kids and send them to progressive schools.

Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life. You're almost there. Just use your hands, introduce some full-body blocking, expand the goal area, break up the game a little so that people have time to go to the bathroom between plays and maybe change the shape of the ball slightly so it's easier to carry. Now you've got a sport.

Nothing brings out American self-loathing like soccer. Oh, if only we Americans we as enlightened as Europeans! Soccer is one of those things that people can shake their head about at cocktail parties to seem enlightened and worldly. It is quite popular to bemoan America’s disdain for soccer as a sign of our collective provincialism, never once giving credence to the obvious answer: maybe Americans find soccer boring because…soccer is boring.

Hey America hating pseudo-intellectuals: Newsflash. Most Americans, even the most rabid sports fans, don’t find soccer interesting. At all. In a matter of weeks it will fade into the background again, taking up its rightful place alongside T-ball as a game for little kids to play. In spite of ESPN’s attempts to create interest for purely monetary reasons, American by and large stopped paying even a modicum of interest once America lost to Ghana.

Thanks to P.J. for putting soccer back in its place: the elementary school playground.