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Just some personal thoughts
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SpaceRaider Offline
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Posts: 3,720
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I Root For: MiddleTennessee
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Post: #21
RE: Just some personal thoughts
(07-05-2010 09:27 PM)MTPiKapp Wrote:  
(07-05-2010 08:44 PM)Hilltopper2K Wrote:  
(07-05-2010 03:02 PM)MTPiKapp Wrote:  Did you read my feelings on this? It's not that we can't compete, it's that our best athletes choose other sports. Jeremy Evans isn't anywhere near the best example of this, like I said in my post, Kobe Bryant learned to play soccer in Italy and had he been in Italy a few years longer, he might be a world class soccer player right now, rather than a hall of fame basketball player.

Like I said, it's not that we can't, or even that we don't care, but that our best athletes choose to play other sports and as I pointed out previously, soccer is the game of the masses in other countries because it's cheap to play and you can play anywhere, in America, soccer is a game of privileged suburban white kids. If Rucker park(and other inner city parks like it around the country) was a soccer pitch rather than a basketball court, we'd be a world class soccer nation.

I did, and I agreed with you. I have heard / read the argument that the reason that America does not get into soccer is that we can't compete. I am saying that is not true and I agree with your reasoning. We are both saying that America not being dominant is a symptom of America's disinterest in soccer, not the cause of America's disinterest in soccer.

Gotcha. I must have misread what you wrote as I thought the "we can't compete" argument you debunked was in debate of what I had said. Whatever caused the disinterest years ago when the professional sports leagues were forming is the problem. If there had been interest in it then, there would be big bucks in it now and our most naturally gifted athletes would be soccer players.

In the sixties it was not something we even thought about growing up, we kids all had bats, baseballs, gloves, footballs, and basketball and just about every block there was someone who had a basketball goal in their backyard or over their garage door. There wasn't any soccer clubs in high school IIRC. Occassionally in college in the early seventies, we'd see some foreign students kicking one of those soccer balls around on campus. It was just something we were not exposed to. Heck, growing up in Nashville back then I had exposure to ice hockey with the Flyers. Soccer was something europe and the third world countries played and if I ever saw it on tv when I was young it was likely on something like wide world of sport.
07-05-2010 10:04 PM
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