soccer.

Wow, awkward doodle.  The child has a giant hole in his groin.

(It also has to be apparent at this point in my doodleography that these doodles were inspired by Michael Showalter’s doodles, which were probably inspired by Pablo Picasso’s doodles.  My point being, while other peoples’ imitation may perhaps be considered “unoriginal”, mine are instead “high art.”)

But what I really want to talk about is the fact that no one in America is talking about Charlie Davies!

Well, okay, the vast majority of America is not.  And if that’s not indication of the state of our national soccer culture, I don’t know what is.

For those who don’t know, US Men’s National Team striker Charlie Davies was seriously injured in a car crash on Oct. 13.  The accident killed the driver and injured the other two passengers, one of whom was Davies, riding in the backseat.  Davies suffered a broken femur and tibia, lacerated bladder and facial injuries.  And while you hate to speculate on career implications – you’d just hope for his return to good health first – the injuries are considered possibly career-threatening.  It’s a virtual certainty that he’ll miss the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Yet nobody really seems to know about this.  Or, beyond the immediate human angle, care.  And that’s really disappointing to me.  Especially after so much interest was stirred by the Yanks in the 2009 Confederations Cup, where they lost 3-2 to Brazil in the final game.

I guess it just points to our love-hate relationship with soccer in this country, though.  We love it when it’s cool to love it, when the team is winning and ESPN is hyping their performance.  We don’t love it when a World Cup qualifier is only available on closed-circuit television at select bars or, worse, Telemundo.  We love it when everyone at the water cooler is talking about Clint Dempsey’s diving header to spark a win over Egypt.  We don’t love it when the team loses or draws, because that’s inherently un-American!

What puzzles me, though, is that we seem to have raised a soccer generation.  I know mine is.  We grew up playing the sport, it’s widely encouraged to follow international club teams, particularly in the English Premier League.  People can rattle off the names of players from Chelsea, ManU, Madrid, Tottenham, Milan, etc.  But they shrug their shoulders at a rising star who had been dominating at French club Sochaux and was probably the Yanks’ best scoring threat looking forward to next year’s Cup?

Incredible.

I’m not trying to make this too much about soccer because of the respect I have for Davies and well-wishes for his recovery first-and-foremost, to enjoy a regular life, or whatever variation of it one could have after an accident as violent as the one on Oct. 13.  But this really does paint a larger picture of soccer culture in the United States, and I don’t think it’s a particularly good one.  Not at a time when soccer culture seemed to be gaining momentum, fans seemed to be tuning into the men’s national team and there seemed to be an extremely bright future for the Yanks.

Now, their 2010 World Cup hopes are at least dampened – if not altogether destroyed – by the loss of their star striker.  And so, too, might be our hopes for culminating a cohesive national soccer culture.

I guess I wonder what would happen if the world held something like a basketball World Cup.  Yeah, there’s Olympic basketball, but that always should be a one-sided event with the US taking home gold every year.  But if the talent base were more spread out internationally – and the talent base is spreading – and more nations cared about the results, if there was some sort of international tournament with the type of prestige associated with a World Cup.

I guess I would wonder how America would react if, say, Kobe Bryant were to be in the same situation Charlie Davies was in.  Not that I wish that on him or anything, knock on wood it doesn’t happen.  But how would America react then?  Very strongly.  Hell, they’d react strongly even now, without the existence of such a tournament.  The Lakers’ title hopes would go down the drain and an overwhelming number of bandwagon fans would be searching for the next jersey to buy.  Losing Kobe would have a tremendous impact on America.  As would losing Tom Brady if there were some sort of international football tournament held every four years.

You get the idea.

But Davies finds himself in a career-threatening situation, and it’s news for a day on ESPN.  Then America brushes it off.  I have wonder, why?  Especially if we claim to be fostering a growing soccer culture.  Because if we really cared about soccer in this country, we would care more about the Davies story.

The United States just lost perhaps their best striker.  That, in my book, is very big news in the national sporting community.

tyson.

I’ve been really meaning to see the documentary Tyson for quite some time now. I’ll have to get on that.

Mike Tyson is a fascinating subject. To me, it’s like the whole Ron Artest scenario, but even crazier. There’s just something about the guy that I find endlessly entertaining. And really, it’s mostly societal. The guy is clearly insane. Like, there’s not a shred of sanity in him, there’s no doubt he’s off the deep end, for whatever reason(s) that may be. And we, collectively as a society, keep putting him in situations insane people clearly should not find themselves in. Then when he does something batshit crazy, we act all shocked. How could he do that, we ask? Well, probably because he’s crazy.

I find it amusing. Iron Mike never ceases to be interesting.

tila.

Probably one of my more crass doodles.  But you can only listen to an ethics professor drone on and on about virtue theory and deontology so long before you’re forced into sketching a crass doodle.

For the record, though, Shawne Merriman would like you to know that Tila Tequila is not his girlfriend!

tennis.

Boy, do I hate tennis.

(When I say “boy”, I do not mean it in a derogatory master-addressing-slave sense.  I’ve been forewarned that I should clarify this before it becomes a national issue that induces race riots across the nation.)

(I mean Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em.  And its only a coincidence that he’s African-American.  I’ve also addressed Fat Boy Slim as “boy” and he is straight up Ritz.)

Tennis is one of those sports that, theoretically, I should be good at.  Not just because I’m white.  Actually I’m bad at most “white” sports, like golf, frisbee golf, mini-golf and mailbox golf.  Never played croquet.  Beat a man to a most excruciating death with a mallet once, but never actually played croquet.

I “should” be good at tennis because it shouldn’t really require a lot of skill to perform.  If you have the strength of a third-grader, you should be able to launch the ball over the net.  If you have the athleticism of a World War II vet, you should be able to move laterally quick enough to return serve.  If you have to eyesight of a cornea transplant patient two days off surgery, you should be able to see the area of court to which you desire to serve.  You shouldn’t, however, end sentences in prepositions.  That’s just a bad thing to do.

Can I do these things, though?  Besides the prepositional part, no.  I cannot.  I often hit the net.  I sometimes hit it too hard and rocket the tennis ball out of the complex entirely.  I do not arrive to the opposite side of the court quickly enough to return serve.  I rarely if ever serve the ball to the appropriate side of the court.  If tennis is indeed a finesse sport, I possess all the finesse of Mike Tyson tap-dancing in combat boots.  Which, admit it, is a reality series waiting to happen.

Just today, I was walking home and watching a woman who weighed north of 250 pounds play tennis 42.3 times better than I ever could.  One of her thighs weighed as much as I do, and she was mopping up out there.  She was playing against a very small Asian woman who was holding her own on the other end of the court.  It made me sad that both of these people were far better at this sport than I could ever strive to be.  The only redemptive thought was that I was a far better driver than the Asian woman could ever strive to be.  I would have had a smart-ass, derogatory thought about the hefty woman as well, but since fat people can hear your thoughts, I feared a beatdown if I dared do so.

I’m not even good at watching tennis.  During the US Open, I distinctly remember somebody telling me to turn the channel because there was “a really good match” going on.  I imagined in my head (and a little bit in my pants too) what “a really good match” would be like.  In my head, I had visions of Bowser playing Sonic with an army of Oompa-Loompas in the stands singing inflammatory songs about the opposition and a bunch of really hot girls running around with t-shirt cannons that launched out free pizza and hundred dollar bills.  But when I turned to the channel covering the US Open, there were none of these things.  There were just a bunch of fairy-haired white dudes smacking a ball back and forth.

If I wanted to see hippies locked in a heated struggle, I’d march downtown and throw a tofu burger into a pack of them.  Because they travel in packs.  The alpha male is always the one with the salt-and-pepper dreadlocks and tie-dye shirt that’s been through the wash so many times it’s more or less just an expended wad of green and blue that reeks equal parts homelessness and reefer.

So I don’t understand the appeal of tennis.  Nor do I understand the skill required to play it.  Generally speaking, I don’t really appreciate anything about the sport of tennis.  Except the smell of a freshly-opened tube of tennis balls.

Does that make me gay?