TERRY MOSHER
I’m not a big soccer fan. Ok, ok, I don’t like soccer. But I do understand it. Like other sports, I can go to a soccer match and within five or 10 minutes identify the best players on the pitch. And I can figure out the strategy of the game pretty quickly. But I still rank watching soccer low on my priority list.
Still, I did watch the USA stun Ghana, 2-1, in its first round game of the World Cup. It looked to me that Ghana may have been the better team, and the much more physical team. Ghana looked like it wanted to go at an up-tempo pace and the USA wanted to slow it down, avoiding getting into a dangerous up and down fast game that might have led to a bad conclusion.
But the Yanks won on a stunning corner kick that was headed in by John Brooks in the 85th minute to snap the tie and provide the game winner. What I find amazing is that Brooks headed the ball into the ground and watched as the ball on the rebound got past the Ghana goalie. What a remarkable goal! If Brooks would have headed the ball straight in it might have been stopped by the goalie. To do what he did in real time took a lot of skill, and a lot of guts.
The reason I dislike soccer probably stems from my young days in middle school. I was a very gifted athlete who was primed to be good by competing against three athletically gifted older brothers who took no mercer on me, forcing me to find extraordinary means to be able to keep up with them.
So it was that I stood out on the athletic fields and gyms. Unless, of course, we had to play soccer in PE. Then these non-athletic kids who were quicker and faster than me would run circles around me. I hated them. I secretly wished I could catch them so I could throttle them. No such luck. So I learned to dislike it when we had to play soccer, and that has burned in me since.
The funny thing is that in my early years at the Bremerton Sun – I started there on Feb. 2, 1970 – we really didn’t cover soccer. I took many years before we seriously considered sending somebody out to actually cover a high school soccer match. And that was more than fine for me.
In those early years of local high school soccer, the teams were fielded, I believe, by non-athletic students who were my nemeses in those middle school PE classes. But in the last 10 or so years more and more gifted athletics have been playing the sport in local high schools, and that probably has come about because of the chance for young kids to play the sport year round with various clubs. So the sport has been elevated to heights I would not have dreamed about in my youth.
It really is a good sport for kids because there is little investment in equipment. You just need to be able to run and run and run and to learn foot skills that I also could never dream about.
Just don’t expect me to join in. I can’t run, I don’t have foot skills, and if I’m forced to play I will be trying to throttle those I can catch, which likely is no one.
It is fun, though, to watch these world-class soccer athletes do things with the ball that seem impossible, including taking a ball off the head and bounce it into the goal. Why don’t those guys get concussions, by the way?