World Cup Fever Has Yet to Kick In for This Sports Fan

Longtime readers of this column know I am nothing if not hip. You can’t name the last time a major social trend escaped my attention, unless you want to be a stickler and count slam dancing. The occasional half-baked idea may slip past me, but when it comes to keeping up with what’s really happening, I’m plugged in, baby.

But along comes something called the World Cup and suddenly people of many colors and languages are wildly cheering and gaily laughing and hugging and weeping with joy . . . and that’s just here in The Times’ cafeteria.

What’s going on here? Norwegians and Italians and Bolivians and Cameroonians are all going nuts over a game where the final score is always 1-0. Surely there’s more to this game than I’m seeing. Surely I can muster interest in a sport where one of the competitors is named Oyvind Leonhardsen.

I feel like there’s a big parade going on, and I’m being left behind.

Average Americans are excited about soccer. I didn’t think it was possible to have a sport where they keep score that I wouldn’t like (I’ll even watch bowling on TV), but soccer sorely tests that. I know I’m missing something, but what? From what I can tell, soccer looks like hockey with teeth--and I love hockey--so why can’t I get excited like everyone else?

My detachment wouldn’t matter if our doughty American lads hadn’t knocked off mighty Colombia this week in a triumph that apparently rivaled that of the colonists over the redcoats for its sheer historic consequence. This is the victory, according to the news accounts, that is going to catapult soccer in America to unheard-of levels of popularity. To underscore the magnitude of the upset, a Colombian newspaper headlined “What pain, what grief” after the loss.

So if the Colombians are experiencing pain and grief, I as a loyal American should be experiencing pride and glee.

And yet, I feel nothing.

Never have I felt more out of touch with my fellow Americans. I, too, wanted to jump up and down and hug the first stranger I met after we beat Colombia, but the feeling just wasn’t there. How could the United States beating Colombia in anything be a cause for celebration?

We’ve been hearing for years that soccer was going to replace baseball as the national pastime, but I long ago put that in the same category as going metric. During my solitary travels in recent years, I’ve even pulled up to a park once or twice and watched kids playing soccer, until their moms began eyeing me nervously and I had to mosey along.

The game looks like a lot of fun for 8-year-olds. They can run toward one end of a big field and then turn around and run the other way and fall down if they want to. They don’t have the pressure that goes with hitting a baseball or catching a football, and that’s good.

So, I understand children’s enjoyment of the game. But adults watching on TV?

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In trying to get in the swing of things, I browsed news reports of this week’s World Cup action. One writer described Colombia’s play in its loss to the United States with phrases like “spooky gutlessness” and “eerie incompetence” and “cosmic dreadfulness.”

He went on to note that Colombia “went down limply, reeling, writhing and fainting in coils.”

Clearly, there are some subplots going on that are eluding me.

Much of my indifference, I’ll concede, stems from ignorance of the game.

Here’s a sentence from another press account about the World Cup: “Rushfeldt won his only other cap in a warm-up friendly against Sweden earlier this month.”

I have no idea what that means.

However, I was more than a little interested to learn that the Colombia coach is a professor of dentistry.

What little I do know about soccer originated with Pele. (Aside: I thought he was marvelous in “Victory,” a movie several years ago starring Sylvester Stallone in which Nazi prisoners play a soccer match against the guards.)

Anyway, soccer superstars apparently become known by single names only. First there was Pele and, more recently, Maradona from Argentina. Maybe that’s why the sport hasn’t caught fire in America. It’s hard to conjure up an image of an international superstar named “Jones.”

It’s still early in World Cup competition. Maybe the sheer onslaught of the coverage will win me over and I’ll become a soccer fanatic. Or, at least a fan.

Maybe I’ll come to appreciate a header and the nuances of a corner kick.

Maybe, but I doubt it.

Bring on the World Series.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.