Ban Soccer Now

The Olympic Games Opening Ceremony is tonight, 7:30 EDT. I’ll be there in front of the TV to see how London manages to follow up the Beijing ceremony of 2008. I imagine that’s going to be a difficult act to follow since Britain just can’t starve its citizens into performing such a huge precision event with the promise that IF it goes well they’ll be able to eat after its over.

The US Women’s soccer team opened with a 4-2 victory over France on Wednesday. They were actually behind 2-0 but roared back to the win. I think that’s an ominous beginning for the team that placed second in the recent women’s world cup to Japan. But, a win is a win and having the fire power to score 4 goals after trailing is certainly positive.

Soccer was not the only event to start before the opening ceremonies. A men’s archery competition was contested already this morning with a legally blind archer from S. Korea setting records in the ranking round. He also teamed with a countryman to break a world record in the team competition ranking round. The women are scheduled to begin their quest for archery gold before the ceremonies also.

Men’s soccer started yesterday as well. But I seemed to have missed something because I don’t see the US men’s team anywhere on the schedule. Did they not qualify for the Olympics this year? I see 16 teams listed and have gone through the schedule. Unless there is a glitch on the website we don’t have a team there to play what is supposed to be our most popular sport now, according to those in the soccer community who don’t know what a real sport is even to this day.

I've had enough of this sport here in America.

It appears that sport powerhouse countries such as Morroco, Senegal, United Arab Emirates and Gabon all qualified teams for entry. But not the US of A where we have spent billions of dollars on all sorts of programs designed specifically to develop Olympic teams.

Hopefully I have just missed something here and the site where I am getting my information is incorrect (nbcolympics.com.) It has a good shot at being wrong since it gets it political information wrong about half the time also, it seems.

Egypt, with all of its political turmoil in the last year managed to qualify their team.

Gabon? Seriously? Our team couldn’t out-qualify Gabon? We couldn’t beat a country with a name that sounds like a sound effect from an old Warner Brothers cartoon?

Nope…I just double checked. NO American team in Men’s Soccer. So what we ought to do now is just allow women to play the game and get our men and our boys back to playing real sports like Football, if that doesn’t get banned in the next few years, Baseball, Basketball, Hockey and even Tiddlywinks or Golf.

Let’s tear down half of the soccer nets around the country and replace them with Lacrosse goals, or Football uprights, or Ping Pong tables and let’s end that terrible experiment with the worst sport ever imported to this country for men.
It truly is a horrible sport to watch, for me anyway, because of the horrific lack of offense and one of the worst rules (offsides) in all of sport the way that it is written.

I say that male soccer players, who are usually smaller in stature, should all take up Lacrosse starting today. Here is a sport native to OUR country and it has what American’s actually like; scoring, strategy, physicality and it is flush with agility and skill. It is a superior sport BY FAR to “soccer” and it is OURS. Well, I know some of you will argue that we stole it from the Indians who originated it here on this soil, but Indians are now considered Americans anyway so it’s just the same. Ok…Native Americans…whatever.

Much to my dismay I got one of the semifinal entrants wrong in the last quarterfinal round on America’s Got Talent. While I ended up 15 for 16 the one I got wrong was Eric Dittelman, the “mind reader.”
This one annoyed me because of the three routines that he performed to get to the semifinal, I knew how to do each one, have done two of them in my own show AND I do them better.
His quarterfinal performance was smartly done but simple, from my point of view. Because I thought as much I figured surely he wasn’t good enough to move forward. It really kicks me in the ass and I am sure it does the same with a bunch of other mentalists as well. I have stayed away from trying to perform on that show because I think my mentalism routine needs more polish. Now, I figure that a bunch of these acts will show up on next year’s show. Heck, maybe even mine.

Anyway, I was 15 for 16 judging those quarterfinals and who would move on from the field of 48. That’s pretty decent.

My guilty pleasure of a summer TV show is ABC’s Bachelor Pad. Contestants who participated in both the Bachelor and the Bachelorette compete against each to try to win $250,000. It is absolutely pointless but it has hot girls on it (and I suppose the men are nice to watch for the women) and I do enjoy the strategizing that takes place. In that sense it is better than the Bachelor (I refuse to watch the Bachelorette to keep my “man” card secure in life) because the latter doesn’t have any strategy. It only has 24 desperate women trying to find “the real thing” on a national TV show, which makes it an awesome comedy show.

But now that the Olympics are on I’ll probably have to just catch up with that, and maybe even AGT, On Demand later. Because I am just a geek for the Olympics and am off now to go watch some archery!

One more...can't resist.

Done