I GET A KICK OUT OF FOOTBALL

My sweet South-American daughter-in-law and I are having a little "pissing contest" over the plusses and minuses of American Football vs Soccer (football to the rest of the world.) It is my impression that soccer is a much more feminine sport, whose popularity is based upon the more universal ability of "everyman" to participate no matter what his/her body size. Football is a sport of behemoths with bursts of power and speed and sudden impacts.. Soccer is a more graceful endurance sport with an hour and a half of running per game. I almost forgot, when describing the violence of football that in soccer, the violence occurs in the stands as the fans kill one another over which side is better. Both sports are surrogate battles, but in the South American version of war, when Chile plays Argentina, for example...it is for blood and is much more ingrained into the national Psyche than American football. The seriousness of the world cup is more like World War 3, rather than the entertainment spectacle which is the Super Bowl, where Americans watch as much for the million-dollar-a-minute advertising and the halftime show (where wardrobe malfunctions are de-rigeur) as for the game.

We never really celebrated soccer in America until two major social changes took place...we become overrun by foreigners whose national sport is "Football" and we became a more feminized country in which the school yard fist fight was replaced by the personal injury lawsuit. Though we did not have "soccer moms" back in the day (1950s-60s) we did have kids who played 3 varsity sports, as I did, and the mothers attended the games. They did not have Mini-vans and SUVs but station wagons galore were parked at the stadium. I am multilingual and am not threatened by the invasion of the little people, but sometimes I wish we had more tussles on the playground than in the courtroom. Anyhow, on the positive side, as I look at the soccer ball, I notice a strong resemblance to Yin-Yang, the symbol of universal harmony of opposing elements...the masculine and the feminine, dark and light, etc. all contained within everything. And, I say to myself...perhaps soccer is more in sync with nature, the Universe, and the circle of life and more deserving of a place in the America of 2010 than the game of football which can only be played effectively by 300 pound people who can bench press an SUV.