Rant #2,165: Kick

The baseball races are heating up.

The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, the two teams with the best records in baseball this season, are revving up for classic confrontations later this month and later into the season.

The All-Star Game is about a month away, and people are beginning to vote for their favorite players to appear at the mid-summer classic.

And the World Cup is on.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz ...

Do most Americans really care about the World Cup?

Well, with our PC world, Americans are supposed to care about the World Cup, and supposed to care about football, or what we call soccer, on these shores.

I will call it what we call it, soccer, and this sport has been shoved down our throats for generations, and sorry, the summer is baseball time, and baseball and soccer do not mix.

Look, the fact is that this boring sport--where players basically run back and forth on a large field and try to score, and 99.99 percent of time, they do nut succeed--is the world's most popular sport, filling stadiums to the gills with people.

And with some knocking our current administration for being so nationalistic, is there a more nationalistic sport than soccer? And in particular, during the World Cup competition?

American advertisers who have bought into this nonsense--feeling for the seemingly 320,859,039th time that soccer would finally take hold here--were taken aback when the American men's team did not even qualify for the tournament.

They had already committed millions in ad dollars to the promotion of the World Cup, and their millions are being wasted, because our own team isn't in it.

Sure, there is more interest in soccer now in America than there has been in previous generations.

Again, I am not being political here, but with so many nationals living in our country now, both legally and illegally, the interest has to be up, but for most Americans, the only sporting cup anyone cares about is probably hockey's Stanley Cup.

And no one can deny that on the junior level, soccer is a popular sport, but once those kids move up in age, they seem to lose interest in the game ...

Because of its "boring" factor.

Those that claim that soccer is the most "scientific" of sports use that as a cover for its lack of scoring, and overall boring stature.

And in the championship series like the World Cup, there can actually be ties?

What other sport, in particular in their respective championship series, allows this nonsense?

And if I hear the use of the world "nil" by supposedly with-it sportscasters to describe zero goals, I will scream.

Look, we have tried every permutation of this sports in this country--indoor, outdoor, professional leagues, network coverage--and it has simply not worked well.

Remember Pele? His coming was thought to be the turning point for soccer in America, an international sports celebrity who was actually going to try to get Americans interested in the sport.

Sure, I guess it worked briefly, but by the late 1970s, it all fell apart.

The sports has had other celebrities try to bring Americans up to speed with soccer--David Beckham, for one--and it simply has not worked.

So soccer, and its World Cup, are simply the PC world's dream, highlighting a sport that will be nothing but a niche competition in the U.S. for the foreseeable future.

And sure, Mexico can rock its nation to a minor earthquake when it comes out of nowhere to win a game, sure, American sportscasters can all of a sudden become interested in a sport that they normally wouldn't cover, and sure, Americans can all of a sudden have some interest, like they have in certain sports during the Olympics, but no, soccer is never going to take off here, no matter what some people think, and more importantly, like some people want.

So if you have any interest, watch the World Cup, feign interest as if your very life depended on it, but honestly, I would rather watch Aaron Judge hit a mammoth shot into the stands than see Rinaldo take a shot at the goal and try to score.

There is really no comparison, is there?