I consider myself a well-rounded sports fan. I'm a former cross country runner. I crave football. I enjoy basketball, especially come tournament time. I appreciate the rush of sitting behind the glass at a hockey game. I even swallowed my pride and admitted a new admiration for baseball last postseason. But the game dearest to my heart is the original football, or soccer to us American blokes.
I was never much of a footballer myself - I didn't make my high school team - but my adoration for the sport has grown each year. Yet in this country, two diabolical groups laugh at me. They work in tandem, one from inside the soccer world, one from out. These villains I refer to are the Soccer Haters and the Soccer Snobs.
The Haters are the more populous faction. Among their ranks are SportsCenter anchors, traditionalists and meatheads who deem soccer wussy. John Q. Sportsfan tends to tilt this way, likely due in part to SportsCenter's influence. In fact, it's likely you are a Hater.
I know the arguments: The game is slow, it's just a bunch of guys kicking a ball back and forth, there's no scoring. While it's true that goals are rarer than in hockey, I've seen beautifully executed 0-0 soccer matches. I've also seen 10 goals in a game. Sure, some games are duds, but that's true of any sport.
I often feel as if somebody somewhere with money and power wants soccer to fail. It isn't just that on the rare occasions when soccer highlights are televised, they are accompanied by barbs from the likes of Dan Patrick. It's the near absence of the game on television in favor of programming like bowling, thumb wrestling and yodeling. Fox Sports World televises sports that haven't gotten a fair shake, but the channel isn't widely available yet, so in the dorms I deal with whatever ESPN gives me.
Sometimes I think I give ESPN too hard a time. For example, on August 13, the SportsCenter Top 10 featured two highlights from a Major League Soccer match at Columbus Crew Stadium. One was when the Crew-
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Chris DeVille
