High School Soccer

I don't know why I clicked on a thead titled "High School Soccer." Perhaps I was mystically, subconsciously pulled to the greatness inside. That post represents an all-time great moment in message board history. Kudos.

 

11 bitch.

 

You just haven't been caught yet.

 

Brilliant!

 

From Chuck Klosterman's "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs"

"Like many U.S. citizens, I spend much of my free time thinking about the future of sports and the future of our children. This is because I care deeply about sports.
In the spirit of both, I've spent the last 15 years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been labeled as the 'sport of the future' since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come. But people continue to tell me that soccer will soon become part of the fabric of this county, and that soccer will eventually be as popular as football, basketball, karate, pinball, smoking, glue sniffing, menustration, animal cruelty, photocopying and everything else that fuels the eroticized, hyperkinetic zeitgeist of Americana.
After the U.S. placed eighth in the 2002 World Cup, team forward Clint Mathis said, 'If we can turn one more person who wasn't a soccer fan into a soccer fan, we've accomplished something.'
Apparently that's all that matters to these idiots. They won't be satisfied until we're all systematically brainwashed into thinking soccer is cool and that placing eighth (and losing to Poland!) is somehow noble.
Not really. Dumb bunnies like Mathis will be wrong forever, and that might be the only thing saving us from ourselves.
My personal war against the so-called 'soccer menace' probably reached its peak in 1993, when I was nearly fired from a college newspaper for suggesting that soccer was the reason thousnads of Brazilians are annually killed at Quiet Riot concerts in Rio de Janeiro, a statement that is - admittedly - only half true. A few weeks after the publication of said piece, a petition to have me removed as the paper's sports editor was circulated by a ridiculously vocal campus organization called the Hispanic American Council, prompting a 'academic hearing' where I was accused (with absolute seriousness) of libeling Pele. If memory serves, I think my criticism of soccer and Quiet Riot was somehow taken as blatantly racist - although admittedly I'm not completely positive as I was intoxicated for most of the monthlong episode.
But the bottom line is that I am still willing to die a painful public death, assuming my execution destroys the game of soccer (or at the very least convinces people to shut up about it.)
According to the Soccer Industry Council of America, soccer is the No. 1 youth participation sport in the country. There are more than 3.6 million players under the age of 19 registered to play, and that number has been expanding at more than eight percent per year since 1990. There's also been a substantial increase in the number of kids who play past the age of 12, a statistic that soccer proponents are especially thrilled about. "These are the players who will go on to be fans, referees, coaches, adult volunteers and players in the future," observed Virgil Lewis, chairman of the United States Youth Soccer Association.
Certainly I can't argue with Virgil's math. I have no doubt that batttalions of Gatorade-stained children are running around the green wastelands of suburbia, randomly kicking a black-and-white ball in the general direction of tuna netting.
However, Lewis's larger logic is profoundly flawed. There continues to be this blind optimistic belief that all of the brats playing soccer in 2003 are going to be crazed MLS fans in 2023, just as it was assumed that 11-year-old soccer players in 1983 would be watching Bob Costas provide play-by-play for indoor soccer games right now.
That will never happen. We will never care about soccer in this country. And it's not just because soccer is inherently un-American, which is what most soccer haters (Frank Deford, Jim Rome, et al) tend to insinuate.
It's mostly because soccer is geared toward the Outcast Culture.

 

On the surface, one might assume that would actually play to soccer's advantage as America has plenty of outcasts. But Outcast Culture does not meld with Intimidation Culture, and the latter aethestic has always been a cornerstone of team sports.
An outcast can be initimidating in an individual event - Mike Tyson and John McEnroe are proof - but rarely do they thrive in the environment of a team organism (e.g. Duane Thomas, Albert Belle, Pete Maravich, et al). Unless you're Barry Bonds, being an outcast is antithetical to the group concept.
But soccer is the one sport that's an exception to that relaity. Soccer unconsciously rewards the outcast., which is why so many adults are fooled into thinking their kids love it.
The truth is most children don't love soccer. They simply hate the alternatives more. For 60 percent of the adolescents in any fourth-grade classroom, sports are humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out four times a game. These are the kids who are afraid to get fouled in basketball because it means they are required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air balls. Basketball games actually stop to recognize their failures. And football is nothing more than a death sentence. Somehow outcasts find themselves in a situation where the people normally penalized for teasing them are suddenly urged to annihilate them.
This is why soccer seems like such a respite from all that mortification. It's the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected. Even at the highest levels, every soccer match seems to end 1-0 or 2-1.
A normal 11-year-old can play an entire season without placing toe to sphere and nobody would even notice, assuming he or she does a proper job of running about and avoiding major collisions. Soccer feels fun because it's not terrifying. It's the only sport where you can't fuck up. An outcast can simply succeed by not failing, and public failure is every outcast's deepest fear. For society's prepubescent pariahs, soccer represents safety.
However, the demand for such an oasis disappears once an outcast escapes from the imposed slavery of youth athletics. By the time they reach ninth grade, it's perfectly acceptable to just quit the team and shop at Hot Topic. Most youth soccer players end up joining the debate team before they turn 15. Meanwhile, the kind of person who truly loves the notion of sports (and - perhaps sadly - unconciously needs to have sports in their lives) doesn't want to watch a game designed for losers.
They're never going to care about a sport where the announcers inexplicably celebrate the beauty of missed shots and the strategic glory of reptitive stalemates. We want to see domination. We want to see athletes who don't look like us and who we could never be. We want to see people who would destroy us and we want to feel like that desire is normal. But these people don't exist in soccer. Their game is dominated by mono-monikered clones obsessed with falling to their knees and ripping off their clothes.
I can't watch a minute of professional soccer without feeling like I'm looking at a playground of desperate, depressed fourth graders all trying to act normal and failing horribly. "

 

Instead of reading FishHack's novel, I, too, would like to point out a previous love, rather lust, for an Amy. It was the fall of 1997. She was a brown-haired number, going about 5-foot-6, and she gave killer bl ...

Oh, nevermind. I cannot attain Meat's greatness.

 

I've met a few Amy's. None too special, though.

 

Meat, you are a golden fucking god.