Soccer dominates the sports world once every four years. It’s rarer than a blue moon. Enjoy it while it lasts. If the United States manages to last in the World Cup, the game’s limited time in the limelight may not be so limited any longer.
Portugal Wins, 2-2
Escaping the Portugal match with a point may have appeared as a victory to the U.S. team before Sunday night’s contest. It certainly didn’t feel like one after it ended that way.
When midfielder Michael Bradley turned the ball over to Portugal in the final minute one could almost see the game’s last play flash before the eyes. Ronaldo’s pass zipped across the goal in real time. But perception plays a trick. In slow motion, American viewers–even ones who think Maradona sings “Material Girl”–grasped the cruel fate awaiting Team USA. Silvestre Varela, with seconds to spare, sent Ronaldo’s pass off his head and into the net. Brazil exploded for the mother country.
Bradley told ESPN after the game that he plays every match with great intensity and that he left the field with “no regrets.” But his language, bodily and otherwise, said something else. When he told Jeremy Schaap that in soccer “the ball turns over”–in effect, an inanimate object, not people, make mistakes–it was Bradley’s way of saying the play so sickened him that he didn’t want anything to do with it.
One pick-me-up from the collapse after the comeback comes in the U.S. team’s prospects for advancement. They win, they’re in. They tie, they’re in. They lose, they still move on if their goal differential surpasses the Ghana-Portugal winner. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com pegs their chances of playing in the next round at 76 percent. The U.S. faces a superior German squad on Thursday at noon. But American eyes may be just as interested in the Ghana-Portugal outcome.
Despair Solo
Kirkland, Washington cops arrested Hope Solo for allegedly hitting her sister and nephew at a wild family party over the weekend. “[M]y mother, who had moved to Everett, Washington, as a young woman, married my father and became pregnant with me during a conjugal visit while my father was serving a prison sentence in Washington,” Solo writes in her autobiography, Solo: A Memoir of Hope. She writes elsewhere therein, “Clutter–plastic toys, yard equipment, bikes, an old jalopy–filled up our side yard. The neighbors complained, so my parents were forced to put up a fence to hide all our crap. My mom didn’t like thinking the neighbors had won some kind of victory, so she painted that garish yellow happy face as tall and as wide as the fence would allow.” It’s easy to overlook the struggles that go into stardom when the star smiles on Sports Illustrated, Dancing with the Stars, and in the Gatorade commercials. But there’s always a story behind the success. Sports offer athletes an escape. It’s tough to escape you or your family.
Reach Out and Touch Someone
A source tells me that tight-lipped Patriots players refer to their former tight end as “homeboy” and other euphemisms instead of by his actual name even in private conversations. So it’s hardly shocking that Aaron Hernandez’s phone list in jail contains the name and number of not a single current Patriots player. Instead, two teammates from the University of Florida appear to be the only well-known football players Hernandez seeks to speak to from jail. Steelers center Maurkice Pouncey, who infamously donned a “Free Hernandez” cap at a club last year, and Bills linebacker Brandon Spikes, a former Patriot who fell from Bill Belichick’s good graces, both appear on the alleged murderer’s phone list at Bristol County Jail. The Patriots organization, as evidenced by its recalcitrance in turning evidence over to Hernandez’s defense team, wants nothing to do with its player-pariah.
Wie Conquers, Tiger Returns
The ratings for the U.S. Women’s Open spiked 89 percent from last year. Dramatics, and a star such as Michelle Wie, tend to have that effect on Nielsen. The loss of Tiger Woods had an inverse impact on the ratings for men’s golf. “This PGA Tour season has sucked,” Kyle Porter writes at CBS Sports. “This is a sport that, like the NBA, is built upon the backs of its stars — and other than Bubba Watson the American contingent has taken a fat tardy in showing up for the 2013-14 season.” Tiger Woods’ announcement that he would play in the Quicken Loans National–and then at the British Open–brings ratings relief to the men’s game, but only temporarily. The surgically-repaired 38-year-old Tiger that returns to the British Open won’t be the one who won it back in 2006, 2005, and 2000.
Kershaw No-No Highlights Transition to Pitcher’s League
I caught Sox-Twins at Fenway last Tuesday. Phil Hughes pitched a complete game for Minnesota but ended up with the loss in the 2-1 Boston win. Bracketing the 2-1 Sox victory were a 1-0 win and a 2-1 triumph that required extra innings to complete the sweep. The night after I watched the Jon Lester-Phil Hughes pitching duel at Fenway, Dodgers ace Clayton Kershaw dominated the best-hitting team in the majors in a 15-strikeout no-hitter.
In 2000, MLB teams averaged 5.14 runs per game. The team that now leads Major League Baseball in runs scored, the Oakland Athletics, doesn’t even average that total per game. Across the major leagues, runs per game have declined almost 20 percent–about two runs a game–in that fourteen-year period. The Dodgers own two no-hitters this season. Back in 2000, no MLB pitcher threw one.
This isn’t Mark McGwire’s Major League Baseball. It’s Bob Gibson’s.