On May 7th Dodger fans were stunned to find out that one of their heroes was a fraud. Manny Ramirez was suspended for fifty games after testing positive for an illegal drug. Manny was the guy who single-handedly revived a moribund organization with his hot hitting and flamboyant personality, leading them into the playoffs last year. This season the team anointed a special section of seats in left field as "Mannywood" and sold numerous souvenirs with the same moniker. Now those seats should be called "Fannywood" because that's what the slugger will be sitting on until July 3rd. It's enough to make a long-time Dodger fan sick.
I began to wonder if there is a sport where athletes don't cheat with steroids, and I started to think about football, but not the American kind. In the NFL you've got bozos shooting themselves in the leg at a nightclub or training dogs to fight one another. It's an exciting game when the players are actually playing, but how come it takes over three hours to play a game that has sixty minutes on the clock? Not only are there countless commercials but now there's the dreaded "referee replay" time-outs which can delay a game for several minutes. It's extremely frustrating to be sitting in the bleachers when it's 30 degrees outside while the players stand around on the field doing nothing. The NFL has made a bloated spectacle of itself.
Pro basketball is a fast-paced game with incredible athletes. The only problem is you have to look at these guys. Most of them have more tattoos than a circus freak. They travel around the country with their posses and act like rap stars. Even the biggest star in the NBA-LeBron James-has overshadowed his team's success by crowing about his upcoming free agency. For some reason the NBA loves to draw out the playoffs, making them almost as long as the regular season, which adds to the tedium of an already ridiculously long season.
So I think about football, the kind that takes 90 minutes to play and two hours to watch. There's only one other major sport that takes so little time and it's college basketball, perhaps the purest game left in the USA. The football I'm talking about takes place across the pond, played in historic cities like Liverpool, Barcelona and Milan. I'm talking about soccer, a game I've grown to appreciate more and more as I get older.
My first attempt to understand the game started out poorly. In 1994 the USA hosted the final match of the World Cup, just down the road at the Rose Bowl. I gathered with a group of similarly curious fans only to watch Brazil and Italy play to a 0-0 tie. How can you end up with a tie in your sport's biggest game? (Brazil eventually won on penalty kicks). That ended any interest of mine in the sport that just seems boring whenever it's played on US soil-something even David Beckham couldn't fix!
However, two trips to England in 1997 and 1999 and watching matches on TV with the locals spiked my curiosity once again. A couple of years later I began working side by side with a football fanatic whose favorite team was Manchester United. I began to watch the Sunday morning matches on the Fox Soccer Channel, usually featuring my favorite team Liverpool. As a life long Beatles fan it was a logical choice. Someday I hope to be at Anfield Stadium so I can sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" as The Reds enter the stadium. Hearing it on TV gives me goose bumps!
In time, I discovered that many football matches can be dreadfully boring - usually due to conservative play when a team is trying to protect its aggregate lead in the standings (or fixtures)-but at least that kind of "prawn sandwich" only takes up two hours of my time. There are no TV time-outs or replay time-outs to bog down the action. When there is action, it can be breathtaking, and that kind of play is usually found in the Champions League.
A series of matches from fall to spring, the Champions League is exactly as it sounds: the best of the best competing for the coveted title awarded at the end of May. This is where you'll see legends like Lionel Messi, Didier Drogba and Ronaldinho on the pitch. This is the title that Liverpool won in 2005 with one of the greatest comebacks in sport history. Down 3-0 at the half against AC Milan, the "scousers" (led by my favorite player Steven Gerrard) came back to tie the match and eventually win on penalty kicks. It was the match that finally made me a fan of the sport I'd disdained for so long.
So I'll be watching on May 27th when heavily favored Manchester United takes on Barcelona in the Final at Stadio Olimpico in Rome. United will be led by arguably the best player on the planet, Cristiano Ronaldo and his all star teammates Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs.
Barcelona will counter with Messi and Thierry Henry as one of the biggest TV audiences on the planet looks on. That audience won't have to worry about one of the sport's biggest stars serving a fifty game suspension and missing out on the action. That audience will be watching one of the last "pure" sporting events on the planet. That audience is in for a hell of a match.
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