Football or football?

Photo Credit: Foxsports.com

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you see the above 2 photographs of US supporters at the soccer World Cup being held in Germany currently? Ok, lets do that again: what’s the second thing that comes to mind when you see the above 2 photographs? These are from the Fox sports website, on which, as part of their coverage of this odd sport, to most Americans, called Soccer, they have a special section called “Babes of the World Cup”, wherein they show various comely fans of all the teams playing in the World Cup. Yes, Fox is really the fourth horseman of the coming apocalypse, trying to conflate something as innocent and virginal as competitive sports with sex, but it’s a pretty successful formula for Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch: mix sex with everything, and voila, you have another billion bucks added to your net worth!

Anyways, the original point of mine was the No. 1 sign shown by these attractive US supporters. There are 93 pictures of “babes” on the website, fans of virtually all the countries, and it’s only the US fans, in TWO photographs, who have the No. 1 sign held up, as a sign of support for their country. Now, I am not ragging on these two particular lovely women. My grandfather told me never to rag on a pretty woman – and 2 women?...sacrilege! But I am pointing out the fact that in the worlds’ most popular sport, followed by over 2 billion people, for which the interest level in the US during non-World Cup times is in the low single digits, and in which the US had a negligible chance of standing anywhere even close to the top 3 spots in the current World Cup, there are US fans who still have a No. 1 sign, as their preferred way of supporting their team! Speaks to a very innate desire in the US mind and soul: to be the best in everything! No. 1 is all that matters…if you have anything to do with No. 2 than you either need an anti-laxative or you’re the henchman of a bumbling, fictional evil genius.

The US has perfected the art of playing sports which no other country plays and then calling the annual championships as “World” championships! I like American football, like the NBA too, and as for baseball, I have nothing to say there, lest the NSA is keeping tabs here, but why, o why, do Americans not compete with the rest of the world in their major sports? There might be some kind of ignominy being beat by a, say, Mexico or Iran, in a soccer match but at least one would be competing against the best the world has to offer. Sports could also act as a bridge of understanding between countries that normally don’t talk to the US. Iran’s President (him of the unpronounceable name and of whom David Letterman, in his late night show, very aptly nick-named “Larry” to smooth things over) is a soccer fan. Now, what does Larry do in his free time besides chomping down goat curry with the friendly neighborhood Hezbollah militant or playing the “Holocaust or Dare” game with his close circle of weekend jihadis? Watch a soccer game! When he asks his adviser, “How are those infidel Americans doing in soccer?” and gets a response, “Supreme Leader, they don’t play soccer much!” his respect for the Americans goes down lower than to what he would have for a fuchsia colored abaya! Perhaps the way out of the current nuclear stalemate with Iran, for the US, is to play more soccer. It’s a simple enough game for Bush to follow (“Kick ball. Put into net. No, not this side’s net but the other net.”), and might just be the right conversation-opener that Larry was waiting for before abandoning his country’s nuclear weapons program and embarking on a full scale re-engagement with the US! After all, they don’t have much to talk about, do they? Larry is a hard-line Islamic neo-supremacist, with an ideology based on a fanatically rejectionist reading of history and Bush is a hard-line Christian neo-supremacist with a….never mind.