Letters to the Editor

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Grown quarterbacks crawling around? Football players watching soccer players decide games? Field goals must go.
  • Well, now I'm blushing...

    ...since I didn't get the joke, but I have to admit that saying "it has the word 'cheese' in it but it isn't made of cheese," wouldn't have been nearly as funny as the joke I didn't get the first time around.

    As for soccer vs. baseball vs. whatever, I'm reminded of a trip to Toronto I made a few years back. I arrived early one Thursday morning to discover that my meeting was pushed back to Friday. Suddenly with a day on my hands, I cast about for something to do and discovered a Business Day special at the dome. I bought a ticket from a scalper and sat 10 rows up on the third base side, and watched a fun game. Blue Jays beat the Orioles 3-2 on a ninth inning homer by Joe Carter that almost went into one of those hotel rooms or whatever they are in the outfield.

    I caught a cab back to my hotel, which was out by the airport, and found myself in highway gridlock for over an hour. No biggie. I had nowhere I had to be. Except for one thing. My cabbie was a soccer fan.

    He asked where I'd been and I mentioned the ball game. He then spent the next 45 minutes explaining what a degenerate I was because I liked baseball. Only soccer is a true sport. Only soccer has virtue. Only through soccer can I find my way to nirvana. By watching baseball I was participating in a debased culture and would surely soon find myself committing crimes or ravishing virgins. The fellow even tried to sell me a book about soccer, in hopes of achieving my salvation. It was worse than being pinned down by a Hare Krishna or a Scientologist.

    And I was stuck in the middle of what felt like a dozen lanes of traffic. For what felt like one million years.

    So, King, please make as many jokes about soccer as you like. I got yer back.