Soccer

If I do end up publishing this blog, I hope to heck that none of my posts are as serious as the first one I wrote, the election night one. Here’s a lighthearted look at another polarizing subject: Soccer.

I like to believe that I am in no way a racist, except for one way: (Insert tongue in cheek here) I believe that soccer is a game for the browner people of the world. A game for people who live in places where donkeys or camels are still a valid choice for commuting to work. Just keep on trampling each other when the soccer bleachers collapse.

I don’t like soccer partly because it gets in the way of more important games, like football. Football is the greatest team sport known to man. The thrill of watching it, the depth and strategy are second to none. The down side of football is that you can’t play it when you are a slightly overweight almost 40 year old dad. You can play some pretend versions of it, which are still fun, but it’s hard to find 22 guys and 22 sets of helmets and shoulder pads to throw together a pickup game for old guys. It’s a good thing you can’t, because if you could my knee ligaments would not survive for long. So when you’re a slightly overweight almost 40 year old dad, you have to satisfy yourself by coaching football. You can’t coach real tackle football because you don’t have an extra 40 hours a week (and perhaps also lack actual coaching talent), so you have to be glad your 10 year old wants to play “flag” football.

So you go to the flag football draft and you try to put together a team that will do well and will be fun for the kids. (That means you have to get skilled, fast people so you can win.) Then, various members of your team start not showing up for practices and games because, you guessed it, they also play SOCCER.

I got news for you: If you are on my football team, my football practices are more important than your soccer practices. They are also more important than your soccer games. In flag football we have to figure out things like formations and plays and zone defenses. And we have like 2 hours to figure it all out before our first game. But you’re not here because you are at soccer practice where, as far as I can tell, you just run around and kick stuff.

My children all gave up soccer a year or two ago and I am forever grateful. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved attending all your games. Especially how they would take an entire hour and your team would excitingly score zero points, and have the ball in the other team’s half of the field for up to 5 minutes out of the 60 minutes. The reasons for this, as far as I could tell, could be outlined like this:

Your team: A bunch of white kids
The other team: A bunch of white kids plus one or two youthful soccer gods who were apparently bitten by a radioactive South American.

So dear soccer: Just stay over there across the ocean or south of the border and you and I will get along just fine. Love, Me.

P.S. Don't go calling yourself "football."