And yes, I have soccer fever. This weekend I've watched about ten hours of it, six hours of it today (all done while mainly in my bed recovering from a hangover). Yesterday, I went to North Beach yesterday morning to watch the Italy/US game and met up with friends at Gino & Carlo's and settled in to watch the game. It was one of the most epic, enjoyable, dramatic games I've been a part of watching (up there, actually with the England/Argentina game in '98), I mean, it had it all- a comeback, a clear-cut villian (the Italians), several dramatic plot twists, and then the killer- Beasley's disallowed goal. When that ball went in, everyone was jumping around and high-fiving and right in the middle of it, I noticed the Beasley was looking totally distraught and I remember turning to my friend and asking him if he scored did he look so upset? And then the 2 that was on the screen turned back to 1, and well, that's how it stayed. I've seen a lot of sports (a lot) but I've never had that sense of a bunch of people putting themselves on the line as much as the Americans did. That's the thing about soccer, it's all pretty much laid out there for everyone to see. No time-outs to break things up, no endless stops in the play-- it's just running and running and chasing and tightly wound faces.

The other thing about the match is that when you think about it, we, as Americans, or at least globally conscious Americans, don't really get that much of an opportunity to actually root for our country in anything. In every other sport, we're pretty much the 100 pound gorilla. It's either our sport (baseball or basketball) or we have million dollar programs backing the players up. Oh, and the best drugs money can buy. And then, of course, on a global level, it's hard to root for anything we do because, well, we kind of suck on a global level right now. But not in soccer. We are plucky underdogs. We are not annoying. We are something it's easy to get behind and root for. Sure, at some point it'll be inevitable that we'll turn into 100 pound soccer gorillas (too much money in the country and too many immigrants coming into the country), and the rest of the world kind of knows it, but right now, it's fun to root for us. It's maybe the only thing we could do that makes you say "America, fuck yeah" and not feel like a moron.

And the fact that most of the country doesn't care...well, we do suck as a country right now, don't we?

PS- so yeah, there was a "great" NBA final game tonight. The dudes across the way, the one's who always keep me up because of their partying, wheeled a TV outside and watched it in the courtyard. And you know what? Bleh. Whatever. Do that game over, except have one team be down a player for half the game. And one of the teams be a bunch of whiny divas who flop everytime somebody breathes to close to them. And do it without time outs or TV timeouts and so they final five minutes don't take half an hour to play.