Soccer Fans Deserve Better Than Soccer

Sports are a great thing. They allow our minds to quit worrying about simple things, like war, poverty and injustice, and let us focus on more important issues, such as wearing the right shirt for this game or making sure the cookies you bought for the post-game snack doesn't contain peanuts. Sports build muscle, team camaraderie and much needed revenue for the schools.

Sports are truly awesome.

But the single greatest thing about sports is being a fan. Some might think the greatest thing is to be a wealthy athlete, but that is far from the truth. The jocks have to stay in shape, have their entourage to feed and house and have all of the publicity to deal with, even when you are trying to have a "private moment" with a 20 year-old girl in a public bathroom in the heart of Georgia. There are contract negotiation hassles, YouTube videos and STD testing. It's just not worth it.

However, being a fan requires no physical activity at all. In fact, some of sports' greatest fans have to waddle through the metal detectors. I mean, who wants to see a video of some thin dude with a six-pack dancing up on C-deck with his shirt off? No one does, unless you are a fan of Matthew McConaughey. Fans have no media to deal with, no public drama to deny and no worries about age taking a toll. Being a fan, especially when you are surrounded by other fans, is one of life's simple pleasures.

. Soccer fans are among the most passionate and temperamental sports fans on the face of the earth. They bring their appetite-both for alcohol and destruction-to their home stadiums as well as to away games. Where other fans only have to tote those foam "#1" giant fingers to the game or the occasional hidden flask, soccer fans have committed themselves to transporting big drums, massive flags and those funny plastic horns.

Soccer fans also have to double as karaoke singers. They need to learn at least 100 different songs/chants, making the entire stadium resemble an American Idol try-out more than a sporting event. They sing and sing and are only interrupted in their singing by the occasional brawl or the even less occasional score.

They also fight, and by fight I mean stadium-clearing, call- in- the- army fights. Ohio State fans are infamous for their couch burnings and car tipping, but soccer fans burn their own cars in order to warm up for what they are going to do at the stadium. The word hooligan came into being by describing the behavior of British soccer fans, which makes sense since living in Great Briton puts you in a fighting mood to start with. In Europe, countries have developed elite police forces that are used just to quell soccer fighting; a sort-of soccer S.W.A.T., if you will.

That is why I actually feel sorry for soccer fans. The most energized sports fans on the planet are reduced to watching soccer, which is the sports equivalent of watching paint dry. Here are millions of rabid, drunk non-Americans wanting something, anything, to help relieve their tensions and burning passions, and all they get is a bland fusion of kick ball and slow motion hockey. Soccer fans deserve better than soccer.

Listen, I agree that soccer takes a tremendous amount of skill, and I don't just mean the acting required in order to get a free kick. Moving that volley ball up and down the field requires agility, strength and endurance. It's just that endurance is required more by the fans than by the soccer players themselves. Honestly, how can people sit there and watch the ball being booted about with little hope of ever seeing an actual goal? It only took me a half-hour of watching The English Patient before I realized that movie was going to offer me zero entertainment and I left the theatre. Soccer fans willingly sit through 90 minutes of that mind numbing junk, and then they sit through another 10 minutes of penalty time after the game (which was added on to accommodate the excruciating shin kicks and tumbles they fake in order to gain extra minutes).

So here comes the non-American Super Bowl, the World Cup, which I am told is pretty darn important to everyone who has no prayer of beating our military. Soon countless Europeans will take time off from their workers strikes and government protests to sit around bars, watch television and drink nasty beer, all the while pretending that the ball bouncing off of some dude's head and into the feet of a dude from the other team who then promptly kicks it out of bounds is critical to the scoreless game that is now 80% finished.

At least NASCAR rednecks in this country get to see some wicked cool wrecks during their three hours of watching cars turn left.