Footsie

The fact that Ann Coulter hates it is enough of a reason to like anything. Things I genuinely don't care for, like guacamole or iTunes Radio, I'd seriously reconsider if it came to light that Ann was also contra, in any way, any of those things. In extreme cases of course, like guacamole,* no renegotiation is available, so it's definitely a possibility that I could find myself in some cases aligned with Ann Coulter. I've decided that this is evidence of my open-mindedness, congratulate myself and move on.

As someone who is not the son of immigrants nor even really, in any practical sense, the son of sports-watching people, I came to soccer fandom the honest, American way: as a victim of marketing. The 1994 World Cup here in the U.S. was supposed to sell soccer to an American audience. So far it's cost me several thousand dollars and one near heart attack.** It worked and is still working. I've skipped Super Bowls and World Series games, baptisms and weddings, even the whole last Netflix season of Arrested Development, but I have missed zero USA World Cup matches in 20 years. It helps that over that period there have only been a dozen or so, to be fair, but still! Dedication to a thing that only happens for a month every quadrennial still counts as devotion.

Being a new fan, I went to exactly no World Cup matches in 1994, including the goddamned final which happened at the Rose Bowl, a venue in easy driving distance that I've been to for dozens of other occasions I would not know surrender any body part in exchange for since, including UCLA football, to look at some empty house to just gettin' out and walking around the thing. In 2010 I was more than willing to offer a finger or an earlobe should the host-nation vote for 2018 and 2022 go our way, as expected, and finally get a chance to experience the thing here, as a fully realized foreigner-lovin' soccer nerd.

Well, by now many of us know how those votes went, unexpectedly to corrupt, vast and empty Russia and inconceivably to corrupt, minuscule and unseasonable Qatar. America, hoisted on the petard of its own petrodollars.

Now, it's been suggested by impartial observers that the current bold move against the racketeers' clubhouse that is FIFA by the U.S. Justice Department may be either revenge for the indignity of losing not once but twice, including to a country with a smaller population than the total attendance of the 1994 USA-hosted World Cup (still the best-attended World Cup ever, by the way). But considering this was a loss to the only Arab country graciously willing to accept enough of our money to agree to openly host the headquarters of the U.S. military command directing offensive operations against other Muslim nations, maybe this shouldn't have been quite so much of a surprise.

Maybe it's that. Maybe it's a genuine zeal for justice by a new attorney-general. Maybe it's concern for a growing stadium-and-infrastructure-related human-rights debacle that is projected to include more deaths than 9/11. Maybe we need a massive distraction because we're just not ready for the Bennifer news to be real. But probably, knowing us, it was a good-faith effort to overshadow a real pop-culture milestone for women in general, women athletes in particular and women soccer players specifically. You know how girls doing stuff makes guys uncomfortable.

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NOTE: John Oliver's breakdown of the issues was a year early, but is still the best one out there. Or at least the easiest to sit through. Very few FIFA analyses I find open with a dick joke.

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*No one is going to ever convince me that one of the ingredients is not the mashed brains of exotic Mexican birds of some kind, like a yellow-lored parrot or a sungrebe. There's no way that's ALL avocados.

**The period between when Damarcus Beasley's goal went in and then was disallowed vs. Italy in World Cup 2006 is the largest and fastest mood swing of my life, including the time I found out one of my internet blind dates was double jointed and a Scientologist.