Give world’s most popular sport chance it deserves

  Brian Thompson Thompson can be reached
at [email protected]

I am a typical American guy. I love sports.

I started playing baseball shortly after I could walk. If I
could hit a good curveball, I might still be playing. These days, I
sit back and enjoy watching my overachieving San Francisco Giants,
year after year, finish better than the lowly Los Angeles
Dodgers.

I also love football. My weekends in the fall are spent in front
of the television all day. Saturdays, I wonder why UCLA’s
defense is like a sieve and why my university teased me so badly
with a title run back in 1998. Sundays, I find myself wishing it
was 1994 again so that my 49ers could actually win a few games. In
the winter, I attend nearly every UCLA men’s basketball home
game as well as show off what little basketball skill I was given
playing intramurals.

Baseball, football and basketball. That’s typically what
we think the extent to which the passion for sport runs in this
country.

But as I sit at my trusty laptop and write this column, I am
entirely engrossed in a soccer game, of all things. No, I
didn’t randomly stumble across this game on TV. I have been
planning on watching it for a few days. In fact, I’m even
wearing the home team’s jersey.

I’m doing something that a few years ago I would have said
was unthinkable. I’m enjoying watching soccer. I even have a
favorite team, Arsenal of England, which I’m watching play
against Valencia of Spain in a competition called the Champions
League.

A year ago, I didn’t have a clue what the Champions League
was, and if you told me it had to do with soccer, I could have
cared less.

I grew up actively disliking soccer. It was a wussy sport. Real
men played baseball or football. Who wants to watch a sport where
people run around aimlessly for 90 minutes without a single goal?
And 1-0 games? How boring is that? Sure, hockey is low scoring, but
at least there’s fighting.

But for some reason, soccer grew on me. Last year, I was asked
to cover UCLA men’s soccer for the Daily Bruin. I’ll be
perfectly honest: I was not looking forward to it. I didn’t
know a thing about the sport and didn’t want to. But hey, it
was my job, so I did it.

I ended up liking the sport. Week in and week out, I was able to
watch UCLA play great soccer against teams from across the nation.
I also met people who had devoted most of their lives to the game
they love.

Little by little, I was starting to get it.

Soccer wasn’t such a wussy sport after all. I saw players
stay in games after taking vicious falls, and players return
following surgery, risking reinjury because they wanted to get on
the field so badly.

And in the process, I witnessed perhaps the greatest NCAA soccer
game in history, and perhaps one of the most compelling games in
any sport. UCLA fell to Indiana in quadruple overtime of the
semifinals of the Men’s College Cup in 1999. I consider it to
be an honor to have personally witnessed that game. I enjoyed the
experience so much that I decided to cover the sport again this
season.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to go to Europe, where
soccer is THE sport. Everything else comes after soccer. Nations
build hatred toward one another over this game. Fans sometimes get
beaten and have even been killed for getting a little too
rambunctious in enemy territory.

The funny thing is that they don’t even call it soccer
there. Soccer is “football.” Calling it that makes
Americans laugh, as we all know what REAL football is. But
nonetheless, soccer is king in the rest of the world.

Going to Europe opened my eyes to how great soccer is. When
it’s played at such a high level, it’s beautiful to
watch. Crisp passing. Great goalkeeping. Tremendous goals. Players
can kick the ball at angles and speeds that defy the laws of
physics. Hopefully, some day that level of soccer will be played
here in the states.

And it’s unbelievable how much the fans get into it. Fans
sing their team song during games. I even read how a fan in Nigeria
made a vow to kill himself if his team didn’t win.

The team only managed a tie.

So after the game, he pulled out a small bottle, drank the
contents and soon after keeled over and died. Hey, no one said
soccer fans are the smartest in the world. But they are the most
passionate.

So while in Europe, I adopted a team: Arsenal. It was easy.
London is my favorite city in the world, and Arsenal is the best
team in London. It was like moving to L.A. and finding it easy to
pick the Lakers over the Clippers. Or UCLA over USC, for that
matter.

So, here I am, sitting at home, watching a game being played
halfway around the world and loving it as much as a Giants-Dodgers
or UCLA-USC game. Hard to believe.

To take things a step further, during my trip to Washington
D.C., I went early one morning to a bar to watch the England vs.
Finland World Cup qualifying game. What kind of American am I?

I don’t think soccer will ever be as popular here in the
U.S. as it is abroad. We have our own sports that we are pretty
darn good at. But if you’re like I was, don’t be afraid
to check it out. You might be surprised. The Bruin men and women
play all fall quarter and have a newly renovated Drake Stadium to
play in. You don’t know what you might be missing.

Arsenal rallied to beat Valencia 2-1 on second-half goals by
Thierry Henry and Ray Parlour, much to Thompson’s delight.
Fellow Arsenal supporters or haters can reach Thompson at [email protected].