So the US is in Group E for next summer's World Cup in Germany. Group E is Italy, Czech Republic, Ghana, and the US. That's a tough group in my less than professional opinion. I'm not exactly the world's most astute soccer (sorry, I mean, football) follower, but I have enjoyed watching the World Cup since 1994, and like everyone else I was ecstatic when the US won it all in '98 and '02. OK, wait that didn't happen. The US have never won the World Cup.
Growing up in western Pennsylvania, I understood that the four sports were Football, Basketball, Wrestling, and Baseball, and you could tell what season of the year it was by what sport was being played.* Wrestling I never cared for, so I almost forgot about it, but in western Pennsylvania you can't forget about wrestling, especially with all the high school kids in the bathrooms sticking fingers down their throats and giving themselves enemas trying to make weight.
I never even watched a wrestling match until I was teaching middle school in Delaware and was recruited to run the scoreboard for a match. First and last time.
Soccer as you may have noticed, didn't even enter into my reminiscences of my youth...that's because there wasn't a team in my school district. Part of that had to do with the fact that soccer simply wasn't big in the backwoods and part of it had to do with the fact that the football coach doubled as the district's athletic director and wasn't too interested in a rival sport siphoning off some of his talent.
My first exposure to soccer, other than "crab soccer," which we played in elementary school phys ed classes, was in college during intramurals. One of my roommates had played soccer in high school and convinced the rest of us to field a team. Hilarity ensued. I think we may have won one game, or maybe it was that we scored one goal. I'm not sure. But I learned the rules of the game and started to enjoy it, especially since my experiences freshman year told me I was too old to play sandlot tackle football.
To this day, I cannot play soccer any better than your average 10 year old, but since I'm bigger than they are I can usually knock them down.
*Not that I played any of those sports after middle school. I played tennis, and not well.
3 comments:
Rugby, now there is a manly sport!
I started playing soccer at age eight. But then again, I lived in Maryland where we also play bizarre sports like lacrosse... :)
Hmm...a fellow western Pennsylvanian. I too had to play crab soccer and hated every minute of it. In western PA there is only one kind of football. When I came to DC I had no idea what the hype was all about with soccer.
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