Once Again, Soccer Courts Our Approval

This score just in from the coast: Clash 1, United 0. More later.

By my count, this is the sixth or seventh life of professional soccer, the stray cat of American sports. It depends on whether you count the outdoor Sting and the indoor Sting separately.

This would be Major League Soccer, not to be confused with Minor League Soccer, or Box Lacrosse, Team Tennis or Arena Football. They do share the same cable.

This is the promise that was made when the World Cup used our stadiums and indoor plumbing a couple of summers ago. Soccer would try again to convince us that the rest of the world is right and we are wrong.

This seems very important to the rest of the world, as if only our affection can authenticate soccer, although I don’t think we have been as overbearing about basketball, and look how our native game has taken off.

I wish soccer well, as I have each time it has happened among us. I confess that I can even identify an offsides trap, a trick I have never found useful at parties.

At least this time no one is calling soccer the Sport of the Oughts, that being ‘01, ‘02, ‘03 and so on in the next decade. If soccer already has most of the world, it shouldn’t need its own decade anyhow.

This time, the effort is more modest than last, with the best players getting paid roughly the same as a bullpen coach.

There will be no millionaires in soccer, unless you count the investors, who all made their money some other way. As a baseball investor once said, the way to become a millionaire in sports is to start out as a billionaire.

Corporate America is involved, credit cards, sneakers, cars, breakfast foods, the usual suspects. You could say, in fact, that just in sponsorship, this soccer fling is as American as light beer and processed cheese.

All teams are owned by the league, which is supposed to prevent the kind of cannibalism other sports resort to. Seems to me it would also prevent competition, but one greedy bully - the Cosmos - killed the last league, so maybe this will work.

The key ingredients are the players, the first bunch of native-borns with soccer identity, the same lads who knocked off Colombia in the World Cup.

This would be the Cobis and the Tabs and the Tonys and the star of the bunch, the Alexi Lalas. Lalas is semi-famous as a woolly and goateed late-night TV guest and funky free spirit.

In fact, in that opening match between the Clash and United - 90 minutes of poor passes and sloppy shooting - there was a breathless anticipation for the halftime interview with Lalas, as if Napoleon had just returned from Elba, when in fact it was only Padua. Lalas said he was happy to be home.

Hair seems to be as big a thing in soccer as it is an invisible thing in the NBA, the similarity being that neither uses a comb.

Well, no one has to shoot a basketball with his head, though I wonder if Shaquille O’Neal has ever thought of trying that from the free throw line.

So, on the strength of losing the World Cup, our national team is spread out among 10 localities and charged with making us like the game.

This would have been like taking the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team and starting a whole new league by placing its members around the country.

And the ice hockey team did, incidentally, win a gold medal, as well as whip the Red Army. Chances of that working would seem to be better than this. Still …

This score just in from Manchester: United 3, City 2.

Different United, I think.