Sports Report

I hate watching sports on television. Don’t get me wrong. I hate watching sports like I hate smoking cigarettes. It’s a bad and addictive habit.

I hate football most of all. Not so much for the barbaric stupidity of the game or the barbaric stupidity of the hype that surrounds it, or even because of the stupid fucking announcers, but because it is played in the fall on beautiful weekend days. If I spend a late October Sunday plunked down in front of the tv watching one game after the other, and possibly even the execrable pre-game show, instead of going out and enjoying the weather, I feel like a totally useless pile of shit.

But there are exceptions. There are certain games that are worth watching, especially if they are played on a bad-weather day when there’s really not that much else to do. The rare football game, or possibly world series baseball, and quite a few college basketball games are good, especially in the tournament. The NBA, however, pretty much always sucks because of the open cheating by the league and its refs. It is marginally better, at best, than professional wrestling.

Soccer has never really been an option, and I consider that a good thing. It’s not like I need another sport to feel bad about watching when I could be doing something more productive and/or interesting. But the World Cup soccer tournament has become one of my favorite sporting events and it’s nice that it only comes round once every four years.

Today’s Brazil - France match was an example of why watching sports can on rare occasions be worthwhile. Of all the major sports, it is most difficult to score in soccer. The entire game is set up to favor the defense, so it takes a near perfect combination of passes resulting in a perfectly placed kick in order to score a point. When this happens, the sequence is often genuinely beautiful. It can even have a fleeting feel of transcendence when everything is perfectly placed. It can be art.

Yes, I know, there are a lot of boring matches, but that is no less true in our major sports. I think the obvious reason why the American beer guts don’t like soccer is because they don’t get a chance to see it. As mentioned above, my name is Chuck and I am a sportsaholic. And although I manage to keep it in check and spend my autumn Sundays hiking above the Hudson or taking the kids on some kind of adventure or other, I understand what sports watching is all about, and in that regard soccer is just like anything else. The same fat losers who sit up at night watching ping pong on ESPN and claim to hate soccer have just never watched it.

And when the World Cup rolls around, like the playoffs in any sport (except the the NBA), some matches reach the highest level of organized competition. And today’s match between Brazil and France was one of those examples. Unfortunately, the other match between England and Portugal really sucked and I was very much disappointed that England lost. Not that I really cared who won for any rational reason, but I figured that France would beat Brazil and the other two semifinalists were Germany and Italy, so were England playing France and Germany playing Italy and the winners playing each other for the championship, it would be like World War II redux. The possibility that George Bush might consider the lack of an American presence as a setback in the war on terror and bomb the finals would have provided additional drama. And still, if France and Germany win their semi-final matches, watch out. A victory for either of those teams could be construed as a victory for terrorism.

And finally, I'll just note for anyone living in the New York metropolitan area or planning a visit, if you like watching live soccer and have a corresponding appreciation for great Mexican food, I highly recommend going down to the Red Hook soccer fields some Sunday, having a burrito or a plate of ceviche and taking in a good match in the proper atmosphere.