I am in Japan right now. Is it possible for you to be more out of tune with the entire rest of the earth? World Cup? Had you noticed?

I mean, think of how really perfunctory the "World Series" is.

yours,

Joseph Murphy

Yes, soccer is the most popular sport in the world. Personally, I am a fan and love the World Cup. But there is nothing sacred or special about soccer that should keep people like King from being able to write about it. International soccer fans, as well as American soccer fans, need to get over their superiority complex.

However, there is still nothing worse in sports than someone who calls soccer boring and stupid (reference Jim Rome and 99% of his listeners) but will spend hours talking about Ricky Rudd's fender design. Now THAT is boring and stupid.

Is King obligated to be in tune with the rest of the world?

Heavens, he talked about the precious World Cup, and even admitted liking it. What the hell do you want? We're in the thick of the NBA finals, a sport I care nothing about at all, but at least I understand that in a publication with a significant U.S. audience, that event bears more words of coverage than a month-long event in its first weekend.

Personally, the more people get in a snit about soccer, the more I dislike it and ignore it. The more someone pitches a hissy about the freaking World Cup, the more irrelevant to my life I find it to be. And I LIKE soccer.

Geez, get over it already. If Americans aren't as into soccer as the rest of the world, oh well. Why do you care? Watch the freaking games and enjoy them, and read the literally billions of worshipful column inches about the World Cup that can be found all over the internet.

Good grief.

Soccer fans seem to revel in their cosmopolitanism and want American commentators to pay more attention to the sport, yet they also seem to deem these same commentators utterly unworthy of discussing "the beautiful game." I have nothing against soccer--in fact I am watching the USA/Czech Rep. game right now--but all of the elitism and self-pitying cries of dismissal are really tiring. I'd be willing to guess that the majority of King's readers are more interested in football, baseball, basketball, and college sports than in soccer. And don't forget that the name of the column is " King Kaufman's Sports Daily," not "(insert your name here)'s Sports Daily." He's not here to report on every sporting event that occurs around the world or to tailor his column to your personal tastes, which would kind of go against Salon's raison d'etre. Yet you act like King is committing some egregious affront to you and your family by--gasp--mentioning the World Cup on the second page of his column, or worse, that he is completely ignorant that other continents even exist.

do dives happen in soccer? yup. do flops happen in basketball? definitely. but one thing that goes unremarked upon in most cases with regard to this issue is that slow motion replays often don't do justice to exactly what happened. you'll often see someone get an elbow to the face and then not recoil instantly, but that's only because, in strictly biological terms, the injured party doesn't even know they've been hit yet. similarly, when they show frame-by-frame replays of a lot of soccer collisions they don't look that serious, but these players are moving far faster than the replays indicate. watch someone getting clipped in the arm by the side mirror of a car moving at 35 mph in slow mo, and it probably doesn't look like it should do that much damage. but it does. when a soccer player gets tripped up running at top speed and lands on his wrist because he can't break his fall, it's good deal more painful than it looks in slow motion.

given all that, though, at least they do tend to penalize players for flagrant dives in soccer at least some of the time, whereas king himself has noted that there is no penalty for flops in the nba.

First off, the reason the annoucers don't say anything about diving is that ESPN's soccer announcers are lame. They're so lame I always watch the Univision coverage, even though I don't speak Spanish. At least the Univision announcers sound like they're interested in the game.

Anyway, good for King if has managed to force himself to watch a few games, but hopefully this is the last we'll hear of the Cup from him. Ever. I don't see why he should waste his time or ours writing about a subject he doesn't know anything about.

I'm not one of those soccer fans that needs to convince others that they need to love, like or even tolerate the game. I don't care if anyone in the U.S. ever watches soccer ever again. The Jim Rome type stuff is so tired that I tune it out automatically. The truth is, soccer needs the U.S. like the proverbial fish needs the proverbial bicycle. Americans can go on hating soccer and it's no skin off my nose. What does get annoying is the "I've watched five whole games now, and here's my list of improvements" attitude. Soccer has nothing to gain by changing its rules to suit the tastes of a few ignoramuses.

Every four years, the American sports press suddenly notices soccer again (probably because it preempts the poker on ESPN2) and they crank out a bunch of lame articles. Next time, don't bother adding to the junk heap.

Sports bodies could give a "Greg Louganis Award" for the most prolific diver.

Full Disclosure: I'm an American and a huge sports fan (mostly NFL and NBA).

I've tried, but I just can't seem to get into soccer. I watched the U.S./Czech Republic game today, and the sport just seems to frustrate me. I keep asking myself if my lack of interest in soccer is arbitrary (I didn't grow up with it) or if there's really something about the game itself that turns me off.

I'm sure there are nuances to the game that went over my head, but what frustrated me about the game today was how futile it seemed. A guy kicks a ball into a group of players and two guys try to head it out of the air, usually colliding. They never seem to head the ball in any useful direction. A team might successfully pass the ball about three times, but then they inexplicably heave it all the way across the field for the other team to recover. The ball changes hands (feet) so often, there never seems to be any measurable momentum. At least in (American) football, you have clear possessions, yardage and downs to measure momentum. And of course, basketball has the score to measure momentum. But to a novice soccer observer, it just appears to be a random heaving of the ball back and forth across the huge green expanse. That's frustrating.

Do all sports appear this way to the casual observer?