Speaking as an American with the World Cup now almost one week away, I have never been more excited to watch soccer in my life.
It’s saying a lot considering it comes from a guy who once tried to sneak into his school’s laundry room to coat the soccer team’s jock straps with Icy Hot.
Needless to say, soccer was never my favorite sport growing up. Not until I started watching the World Cup.
Even though soccer isn’t “America’s pastime,” it has this uncanny ability to retroactively become the nation’s second love in the blink of an eye. For a case in point, recall the 2002 World Cup. What a milestone in U.S. athletics. The “Yankees” stole a foreign sport that year and became one of the top 10 teams in the world. As a bonus, they beat Mexico in the first elimination round.
That’d be like Mexico bouncing the United States out of the World Baseball Classic …oh wait, that happened.
I never thought I’d be waking up at 3 a.m. to watch soccer. International tournaments such as the World Cup can do crazy things to people. For starters, it helps a country cope with hard times.
Team USA’s historic run to the quarterfinals came months after both Sept. 11 and the outbreak of anthrax. The World Cup gave Americans something positive to see in the news.
It was simply a nice break. The U.S. saw a similar light at the end of the tunnel with the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980. The country was coming to grips with the aftermath of Vietnam plus an escalating Cold War, oil shortage, economic hardships, the Iran hostage crisis and breaking in the nation’s fourth president in less than a decade.
President Carter summed things up with his fittingly titled “crisis of confidence” speech. In this he stated that ” … a majority of people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.”
It wasn’t Uncle Sam’s brightest time. But then there was the miracle: a bunch of amateur college kids who beat the worldrenowned Team U.S.S.R. at Lake Placid, N.Y. For a brief moment, all was well in America. Correct those who call it an upset. It was a miracle.
Today, I find it safe to say that the U.S. has seen better days. Fortunately, its national team possesses the tools to go deep at this year’s World Cup and give all Americans the chance to smile.
Forget going deep, this team can actually win the damn thing. Team USA enters ranked as one of the top five teams in the field. The team returns two of the squad’s top goal scorers from the 2002 tournament in Landon Donovan and Brian McBride, plus several other World Cup veterans.
The Americans also have Kasey Keller – one of the world’s top goaltenders. Team captain Claudio Reyna said that if the team finishes any worse than it did in 2002, it will be a disappointment.
Get excited. U.S. soccer has never been better.
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