To be completely honest, I didn't bother watching the United States' men's national soccer team's game against Trinidad & Tobago last night. Because I couldn't really care anymore.
If the players don't exude passion, neither do I.
This isn't the cranky old sports columnist bit about soccer never mattering in this country. I'm not that guy. I give a damn. I really like the sport. I want to see it do well here.
But, I've been hearing for half a century since CBS began force-feeding the nation NASL games in the dead months of summer how soccer was the sport of the future in America. I guess, to paraphrase Curt Gowdy in Stengelese: "Its future is still ahead of it."
And I know there is a core of USMNT fans around this country who care deeply and are distraught today. I used to be one of them. I rose at 5 a.m. EDT to watch the American men in the 2002 quarterfinals against Germany. I'm still pissed about the German hand ball on the goal line and Tony Sanneh's point-blank header that went wide. That squad had me sold.
But the fact is, news of this team's elimination from the 2018 World Cup was met this morning with mainly yawns around the nation and I am now one of them. I saw the result in passing on a cable news ribbon last night while flipping around to try to find a trash-conference college football game. Then, I went and found the highlights online and went, "Hmm." At this point, I've just seen enough.
Now, had it been the U.S. women on the precipice of elimination - not that such would ever have happened, but if it had - I sure as hell would have watched. Know why? They so obviously give a damn. That team is a cause for those women, bigger than their sport, larger than their country. Playing in that USA kit is the pinnacle of their existence.
The women's team is rooted in something more than competition. It's borne of a fight for gender equity, a dearer love of the sport, an ownership of a quest to make what they do matter in this nation.
It's 1999 and Brandi Chastain spontaneously ripping off her jersey in fall-to-knees ecstasy.
Who from the men's team can claim an equivalent iconic image? Brian McBride scoring the third goal against Portugal in 2002? Landon Donovan's goal in extra time against Algeria in 2010? Sorry, no comparison.
When the U.S. women came from behind to score the tying goal in the 103rd minute against Brazil six years ago in Germany in the World Cup quarters, it was because every fiber in Megan Rapinoe and Abby Wambach said a play had to be made. When they lost to Japan in the final, they might as well have lost in love, so clearly were they destroyed of spirit.
And when they finally reclaimed the Cup two years ago in Canada, it was in emphatic triumph. Carli Lloyd scored a hat trick inside the 17th minute because they didn't just want to beat the Japanese, they wanted to beat them 10-0!
Now, of course, the American women have had a century-long head start in a sport they essentially germinated. But that's not what we're talking about here. The point is, women who are really good at soccer in this country weren't just encouraged to play it, they weren't merely guided toward it, there wasn't an organized, heavily funded machine built behind them.
They played it because they needed to as much as eat and breathe.
Christian Pulisic is the U.S. women's blood brother. He emits lightning bolts. He's not only talented, but he clearly loves playing the game more than anything else. Forget that he was sent to Germany when he was 16 to properly cultivate his skills. He is the spiritual comrade of a kid in a Panama City slum.
When you see the same passion in all of our men, the fearlessness, the disregard of consequence, lemme know. I'll tune in. Because what we have right now is a country club sport built around huge money, cases of Capri Sun packets and traveling club teams of white suburban kids who want for nothing. When they fail to even qualify for the World Cup from the easiest region on the globe, they are... disappointed. The coach calls it... a blemish.
Maybe Pulisic is the start of something. But I don't think you can build it around one guy. And you can't throw money at it. It must be organic.
And he's only 19. And everyone else around him is the Wonder Bread dough of Michael Bradley.
Show me a sport at which any region or nation excels and I'll show you kids who play it without money or equipment or community associations or team moms. Because the talent isn't fabricated with funding and parents driving their darlings around in travel leagues. It grows without nourishment like weeds through cracked asphalt.
Great players in any sport are most often borne from poverty. They have nothing but their sport.
Kids in South America and Africa and much of Europe will play on dirt pitches with a plastic bag wrapped around a clump of garbage. Here we wring our hands about how to "grow the game." Everyplace else, it grows by itself.
In virtually every other nation of the world, the best male athletes play soccer. Here, ours play basketball and football. Because soccer is a sport of the 'burbs. It teems with helicopter parents who never miss a game but sometimes watch from their BMW X5s. Y'know, if its raining.
Which brings us to the elephant in our well-appointed rec room: Our black kids don't play soccer. Many of the ones who would are locked out by ridiculous pay-to-play expense. With apologies to Jozy Altidore, it's pretty much a lily-white sport in America. It might as well be lacrosse. On the world scale, we're a 1957 college football team trying to compete with a world full of 2017 squads.
Wrap it all up and what you have is half a century of fabricated advocacy without a grass-roots passion. If Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was a sport, it would be American men's soccer. Lots of money poured into an initiative without a cause.
That's not gonna get it done. Because our opposition around the world? They care. They are eternally hungry for soccer. And no one is trimming the crusts off their sandwiches for them. They're happy to have the crusts.