Posted by Johnnymac 7:03 AM
I sit next to a guy at work who is constantly taking phone calls and leaving early and all-around devotes his life to coaching his kids youth sports leagues. Mostly they focus on baseball (year round?!?!?!) but one of his kids plays flag football, too. He's a nice guy and all, but he's what one might call the quintessential example of an ugly American when it comes to being biased against soccer. There is actually a small group of us at work who do follow and like soccer, and whenever the discussion comes up Mr Baseball doesn't miss the opportunity to call soccer a "stupid kids game" and "not a real sport." When pressed, he claims that it's not a real sport because, "You don't use your whole body, like in American sports. Any sport where you can't use your hands isn't as hard as a sport where you use your whole body. I mean, you have to be able to run good, but I mean, come on. Fifth graders play soccer!"

"So how do you use your feet in baseball?"

"You have to touch the bag just right."

"But in soccer you have to run and control the ball with your foot at the same time."

"But you don't use your hands, so that's just running around the field. That's not a real sport."

Uhh, right.

So, anyway, I got up early because I thought my club was playing in the early game this morning. Turns out I was wrong, they're playing in the 8:00 game instead, but I ended up watching this one too, and anyone named after Ronald Reagan and who can do this with either foot isn't all that bad.

Seriously, Ronaldo is a big douche (what, is he going to cry after he scores?), but anyone who says he's not as much of an athlete as this guy or this guy or this guy or this guy is willfully blind or needs a new "A" section for his dictionary*. Check him out:


I plan on showing this video to Mr Baseball tomorrow morning. I wonder what he might say the equivalent play in baseball is?

* - In the interest of full disclosure, I will freely admit that I am personally one of the "these guys" myself than I am like Ronaldo. Mr Baseball grew up in West Texas too, so I can't be too hard on him because when until I actually sat down and started following soccer, my football heritage led me to have pretty low regard for it, myself. But I grew out of it, and I hope Mr Baseball can someday, too.

1 Comment(s):

Posted by  Dr Fro, at 8:47 PM, December 23, 2007  

It is one thing to say "I just really don't like soccer and quite another to say you *hate* it. The latter is just standard rhetoric from jingoistic, xenophopic, paranoid, ignorant fools.

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