evolution

Lawrence.com’s Chris Wristen, on the signing of British soccer star David Beckham:

The headlines screamed from the front page of CNN.com on Thursday morning: “Beckham coming to America.”

ESPN.com called it a “British Invasion.”

The folks at MSNBC.com were even more enthusiastic, proving it with an exclamation point: “Coming to America!”

[snip]

Part of the Los Angeles soccer club’s hope in signing Beckham is that his personal star power and marketability will be the kick-in-the-pants that American soccer has been longing for. The Galaxy hope Beckham’s mere presence will put fans in the seats at home and away games and help the sport surge in popularity among people over the age of, say, 12 or 13.

But is this a realistic expectation?

Wristen answers in the negative, as you’ll see if you read his piece.

David Beckham and his celebrity wife, the former “Posh Spice” Victoria, may be giant stars in England, but it’s… England. They don’t rate any higher than neo-trailer-chic celebrity-wannabes like Britney Spears, mostly because they are neo-trailer-chic wannabes like Britney Spears. That, and soccer is… colossally boring. There’s nothing I’d rather miss than eleven pretentiously-named Brazilians and eleven boiled-beef-addled Englishmen kicking each other in the shins for two hours.

Soccer isn’t a sport, it’s a pretense; like disc golf, or lacrosse. Everybody remembers the white boy from Overland Park in college who wore the European football club jersey everywhere. Tell me you didn’t hate that guy.

Pretentious and boring is a bad combination in America; that’s why soccer has and always will fail as a spectator sport in this country. That’s the discussion we should be having: Why is anything a soccer player does news at all here?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 20:51 and is filed under culture, sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.