My parents forced me to play organized soccer. I wish they had banned me from soccer for the rest of my life.

And I mean soccer, not the sport the rest of the world calls futbol. If I was captured by enemy combatants and threatened with non-stop viewing of soccer, I would immediately cough up the location of my fellow troops. I used to think the Hispanic announcer was yelling "GGGGGGOOOOOOAAAAAALLLLL" when calling a soccer match. That was, until I realized it was a response to the question: "Do you want to watch soccer?"

"NNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOO."

The only time I even contemplate soccer is every four years when the World Cup is the feature story on the sports page. I used to ignore the World Cup altogether until I noticed that more and more Americans were tuned into the matches (I call them games). Even my friends started calling me up to "catch a match at a local bar." I'd rather watch snails cross a road than be subjected to watching soccer games. To make matters worse, my friends watched the most recent tournament at a restaurant that provided the ethnic cuisine of a participating country. I told them thanks for the invitation, but I'd already contracted my annual case of food poisoning.

Later that week while exercising at a local YMCA, I noticed a group of people glued to one of the television monitors. I went over and was bemused to find a World Cup game on the screen. The score was 0-0. I went back and exercised for fifteen minutes and then returned to the TV screen. The score was still 0-0. Fifteen more minutes of exercise and the score was still 0-0! Gratefully, the game ended 0-0, or so I thought. But that was actually the beginning of two mundane overtime sessions that still produced a 0-0 score.

Breathtaking!

They finally decided the game with a series of kicks where the kicker goes one-on-one against the goalie. Basically, the goalie has no defense except for a cup. Kind of like a gun duel where only one guy has a gun.

When the score invariably is 0-0, there is never an opportunity to release any pent up tension. So the fans fight instead, which ends up being the most entertaining aspect of a soccer game. After all the merriment, the nation's fans who won the game riot in the stands and destroy cities in their homeland.

Soccer is not only boring, but the rules are peculiar to say the least. Instead of a clock winding down to signal the end of a half or a game, Soccer uses a clock that tick, tick, ticks until it reaches the forty-five minute mark for each half of play. But the games never stop at the forty-five-minute mark. For every delay in the game, the clock keeps ticking and the delayed minutes are added to the forty-five minute total. We never actually know when each half ends. The players keep kicking each other in the nuts until a referee blows a whistle to signal the end of the half or game. It's hard to find drama in a clock-keeping system like that.

The only pleasure I got from soccer was when I kicked a kid in the shins or nuts. They still do that on the world stage, except for that display of sportsmanship a player receives a colored card; the color depends on the severity of the foul. Yellow means bad and red means really bad. The more cards collected by a team (not club), the worse it gets. That's my only explanation for these cards because I still don't understand what they mean.

In four more years, there will be another display of unbridled enthusiasm for the World Cup.

Remember to wake me when it's over.

Learn more about this author, Keith Bailey.
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