My Modest Proposal

OK, I know. I'm no Jonathan Swift. Neither is anyone else, except Dean Swift himself. Nor do I advocate the eating of Irish infants . . . but I do have a modest proposal about another English obsession: soccer.

Of late, I have been watching the UEFA matches on ESPN, along with several World Cup qualifying matches. I have been watching soccer on a more or less regular basis ever since my three-year stint of living in Europe. I still don't get what all the fuss is about. Soccer is BORING! Actually, it's more than that: it's irrepressibly drab and awful. [Thank you, Michael Palin.--Ed.] I suppose Europeans would tell me the same thing about baseball, but I disagree. In baseball, there is strategy and movement on every pitch, and no one knows exactly what will happen at any given moment. In soccer, on the other hand [or foot--Ed.], everything comes down to the same three maneuvers: move the ball toward the goal, veer off to the side, kick it back to the middle, and hope someone redirects it into the goal. Hockey is similar in this regard, but it, too, is more interesting than soccer for two reasons: (1) the field of play is smaller; (2) the pace of the game is much faster. If I could choose, I'd prefer to watch hockey to watching soccer--but I prefer even more to watch baseball to watching either hockey or soccer.

Yet I keep trying, in the hopes that sheer exposure to the game will somehow open its mysterious attractions to me. So far, no luck. I suspect this has to do with how the winner of any given match is decided. In the vast majority of matches, nobody scores (or if anyone does, the sides typically are tied at 1-1) and the game comes down to penalty kicks. Penalty kicks always make me think of the old joke about the guy who takes home his beer and pours it straight into the toilet because he's "eliminating the middle man." Thus my modest proposal: let's just skip the 90+ minutes of pointless running around and go straight to the penalty kicks. What a great time-saver! It has the additional advantages of being (1) very interesting immediately and throughout, and (2) faster-paced than the interminable "game" played to get to said kicks in the first place.

But my modest proposal will never fly--TV advertisers would never go for it. No place to put all the ads that normally infest sports telecasts.