http://www.denverpost.com/ci_5009890?source=rss Interesting perspective, confirms what we all know about soccer coverage in this country.
The sport is boring. There's too much standing around and not enough sustained action. Its hard-core fans are brainwashed lemmings, and its specialized press corps a bunch of shameless advocates. Plus, why should we get excited about a sport in which U.S.-born players aren't the best in the world, and in which Team USA was a washout in the recent high-profile world tournament? But enough about baseball. My favorite part!
Frei could've said football. I enjoy watching it here and there but sit down with a stop watch and time it. It takes 3 1/2 hours to play a one hour game. That's "action"?
Add that to this childish comment in the DP today by Jim Armstrong Oh, and let's not forget yesterday's crap from Bernie Lincicome in the RMN titled "Adding Beckham, MLS has lowered its goal standard" If I had to guess, it would be that these guys are getting a bit concerned soccer may start picking up and they will need to grow up and recognize it.
Yes! Agreed. Or as Wendy Parker of the Atlanta Journal Constitution calls it, Helmetball. Terry Frei did do a nice piece about soccer in the Post during the 2002 USMNT Cup run. A breath of fresh air in those pages, which are filled with troglodytes such as Jim Armstrong, who fits Frei's description of reflexive anti soccer stereotyping to a "T". This braniac starts each of his 'notes' columns with a paraphrase from a beer commercial, he's so proud of being an idiot... Anyway, don't get me started! But to get back to the quote, it IS ironic how a lot of the stereotyping emanates from the Bronco writers' side of the newsroom.
LOL Beat me to the punch! My bad for not checking for intervening posts.. Again, I wholeheartedly agree. Is the tide beginning to turn?
Someone from the Rapids supporter group should invite Frei out to a game and buy that man a beer. Great article. Paul.
I dropped Mr. Armstrong a quick note: If I had anything to say about aging white dinosaur columnists who worshiped ego centric thugs and gangsters playing sports where skill and talent has been replaced by over weight and over hyped behemoths, this is the point in my email I'd mention it. email retuned: _Rule_imposed_mailbox_access_for_jarmstrong@denverpost.com_refused Delivery last attempted at Sun, 14 Jan 2007 21:06:54 -0000
Superb idea, and done! Invited him to the Nat's viewing on 1/20. He didn't quite accept or decline, but he did reply (almost instantly) to say this---
Great idea, Chili! I also think Mark Kisla would be a good candidate for such an invitation, as he has made sympathetic statements about soccer and its fans in the past.
His opening paragraph was genious. Very creative. I just dont get why the other media types, national especially, love to bang on soccer?? It is to the point now that they come across as threatened ?? And their rationale, or 'takes', are so laughable that I just simple excuse their ignorance. Well done Terry.
Ever read anything by either of those two hacks? Jesus, they are useless covering sports they profess to like. Soccer is better off that Armstrong and Lincicome don't cover it. I mean please; Say what you want about David Beckham but we all know Jim Armstrong doesn't really look down his nose at Becks. Let's say you think bike racing is sissy, you still know Lance is big smoke. Same would be true of Federer in tennis. Wasn't it Shakespeare that said "He doth protesteth too much." Overcompensation for a small Johnson would be my guess.
It's probably the fox-news-i-zation phenom. Where you have media so fragmented that you get someone like bill O'Reilly who goes out of their way to get attention and appeal to a very specific group of LOYAL viewers/readers. I think a columnists job has always been to stir things up but with newspaper getting less and less in terms of readership it seems to me there is more pressure to do that fox news sort of thing with the columnists. They're never going to win over a lot of readers but they're probably hoping to keep attention of those who really do detest soccer. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't match their demographics for readership and subscriptions.
Same reason people bang on about snooty French, repressed Germans and drunk Irish. Prejudice saves time.
This season may be a good time for the Supporters groups to start a petition at the Rapids games asking the newspapers for better Soccer coverage this year. This same petition could also be taken to some of the stronger adult leagues, and get them to sign up. I think if the papers get a petition with over 10,000 signatures, and it is also mailed to some of the sports pages advertisers, they may wake up. As an industry, newspapers are losing out to other ways to get the news.
What I loved about the article was that he draws on the hockey experience. The NHL has been my #1 since 1986 (it's not so much now - I like old school hockey) and up until 1994 - I heard all the same retarded comments about hockey that I hear about in soccer. Stupid crap like: it's hard to follow the puck, none of the players are American, it'll never work in markets that have warm weather. Blah blah blah. MLS will be as big as the NHL some day - to that I've no doubt. MLS used to be run in secret too - and the players would sit in the locker room not knowing what the others were making ... then the Hockey News published every player's salary in the same manner as goes on in MLS via the Washington Post. The biggest story was that Doug Wickenheiser - the number 1 pick in the 1980 draft - was only being paid $30,000 a year. The discrepancies were unbelievable. Up until 1999 - teams in the NHL were moving left and right - Winnipeg, Quebec, Colorado, Minnesota, Atlanta, Hartford (SAVE THE WHALE!). The financial ability for franchises to survive were an enormous story - lots of teams were losing money. The only real big difference was - the NHL has always been the premiere league in the hockey world. Terry knows all this - and it's wonderful to hear him say that. Hockey and Soccer have a lot of direct ties - especially with all the Europeans now. Did you know Brett Hull almost was a professional soccer player! MLS has made strides in breaking these barriers/milestones a lot quicker than the NHL did. What MLS has achieved is simple incredible.
From the front page of CS Gazette Sports today: http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1328854&secid=3 The editorial tilt at The Gazette is decidedly in the "soccer isn't worth space" corner but the Beckham signing may actually turn things around for The Gazette. A reason given by The Gazette sports editor for the lack of Rapids coverage is apathy (ie empty seats). With the Beckham signing and the new stadium I would guess the excuse will change or folks in The Springs will get better Rapids coverage this season.
Yep, hockey was my sport was well. And you are right in everything you say...I remember when the only hockey on TV was the Tuesday night game on USA. The problem is that hockey hit it's popularity limit a few years back. The NHL is poorly run and they figured too late the way to run a league is how the NFL runs it. Hockey is a dead sport in this country right now (ESPN was getting higher ratings with 2 year old poker tournaments than with the NHL). Part of the problem with hockey is that is is not viewed as an American sport by most people in the US. For some reason, this hurts sports in this country. Part of the problem was that people did have a hard time following the puck (it does take a while to learn to follow it if you have never playe d the sport). Remember that stupid Fox Sports Puck Trak...the puck would glow blue and then turn red with a comet trail if it was moving at a certain speed. Just dumb. There are sports journalists out there that will never give soccer a chance...and 100 times that many normal folks that won't either. That's okay, because I won't give hoops, golf and some others any of my time or dollars either. I don't think inviting certain jouranlists to games is going to spark their interest. They will write about it when people want to read and hear about it.
Yet until the early 90s, it was a league that was forced to play without a significant number of the best players in the world. Many hockey enthusiasts, myself included, believe that the greatest change in the NHL came thanks to the fall communism in Eastern Europe, most notably the breakup of the USSR. This not only allowed a great number of the world's best to come to the NHL, but provided the opportunity for the NHL to market to a large part of the world that truly loved hockey. I don't believe it's a coincidence that hockey's popularity (and finances) exploded at the same time that the NHL saw a massive influx of players from Eastern European countries. Another significant factor regarding the NHL is the college influence. Prior to 1990, playing NCAA hockey was seen as a poor option for players with professional potential; today it's considered an equally valuable option to Major Junior. There's also the fact that the NHL has existed for a long, long time in this country, and while it may have gone through long periods of fan apathy, the league never disappeared. More importantly, hockey was always prominent in the core hometowns of the sport such as Detroit and Boston. Despite soccer being responsible for some of the first professional sporting clubs in the history of the USA, it has never had a long-running pro league in modern history. It has never had core teams and fans that refused to let it die. And after 11 years of MLS, we're only now seeing the first opportunity for teams to go after whatever players they want. So long as they only sign one of them. I agree that the NHL and MLS do share some parallels, but MLS has a long, long way to go before it'll be accepted by the average fans and sports writers as a "major" sport in this country. It's going to take a lot longer than the kind of turnaround the NHL experienced.