On ESPN radio the argument was whether football had taken over from baseball as the national past time. Baseball takes place, not just in the major cities, but in the single A, double A and triple A teams in small-town America. It takes place in the high schools and grade schools all across the country. It takes place in Little League, Pony Leagues, and between any kids that have a ball and a bat and a few gloves. One guy's shirt is used for first base, a piece of cardboard is second, third might be a paper bag with a rock on it, and home plate represented by a trash can lid. You didn't even need a field; often a street would do with a Chevy as first, the power pole as second, a Ford at third and home plate was the manhole cover. In Cuba, baseball is the national sport and it's the only sport played there, with the exception of boxing. But it's not like the United States where baseball is played mostly for fun and something to do after school and on the weekends.

In Cuba, baseball is a possible way out; many Cuban baseball players have made great money in Major League Baseball after successfully making the 90 mile swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys. You have to give them credit, there aren't too many successful baseball players from Turkey or Iran where soccer is the national past time and a good soccer player can make anywhere from $10 to $25 per game and all the falafel they can eat, being a pro soccer player for the national team.

Basketball was a little tougher, because you needed a basket and a ball. The ball usually came from a couple of books of S & H Green Stamps your mom let you have after a few months of rigorous shopping, and in Midwest America, there's a basketball court outside every schoolyard or, if nothing else, someone always had a peach basket from the local grocery store nailed on the front of their garage or on a tree.

Football wasn't played much where I came from because you needed to spend most of your time playing baseball in summer and in Chicago it was too damn cold in winter to play much of anything besides some good snowball fights, which would just be the warm ups for the up-coming baseball season. But no one, I mean NO ONE played soccer. Soccer was usually reserved for school sports class along with dodge ball and gymnastics, and hockey, at least for me, ended in 1961 when the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup with Bobby Hull and Stan Makita and never won it again. It was a sport that you could only play outside in the winter, you needed to buy skates which were expensive since you could only use them on ice in the winter anyway, and that and the cost of a hockey stick made it an expensive sport.

I've tried to watch soccer a few times on TV, but any game that can end in a 0-0 tie with no goals scored after sitting there watching for three fucking hours, and everyone just gets up and goes home happy is ridiculous. And a 1-0 game is considered a blow out. FORGETABOUTIT!! This game had to be invented by the same guy that invented the stop watch for chess to try to make it a more exciting game. There is nothing more boring than soccer except maybe water polo, because water polo is just rich soccer players in the swimming pool and just as exciting. Thank God Germany beat the U.S. in World Cup Soccer so I don't have to hear about it in the news anymore! Now I don't have to hear how Senegal did against Paraguay or have to set my alarm for 4:30 a.m. so I can watch Brazil kick French ass, although, I have to admit, I'd wake up any time of the day or night to watch the French get their asses kicked in ANY sport. (One of my proudest American moments was the big cigar and wine tasting at the MGM when the California wineries kicked the French's asses bottle for bottle in every wine category, and when California's Mondavi Red Table Wine won the best red table wine category over the French's best. The crowd went crazy, we cheered and we all wept like it was V.E. Day (You can e-mail me if you don't know what V.E. stands for). God Bless American winos.

Then the question was asked of the ESPN host: "Soccer is the national game in every country of the world with the exception of the United States and Cuba, so why is that?" The answer was simple and perfectly answered in two words:IT SUCKS!! BUT I have to admit, knowing my American history, as much as I hate soccer, SOCCER SAVED THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, literally.

Here's the little known story:

It was in early 1963. Just four years earlier, Russia kicked our asses by beating us into space by launching Sputnik. It was nothing more than a steel ball with some small insignificant gauges inside like a thermometer and a transmitter that sent out a small beep that forever became seared into our minds when they played it over the television and radio to remind us how irritating the Russians were back in the Cold War days. We stood outside to watch the sphere streak across our sacred country in the black starlit night. It was just another star streaking across the sky, but we cringed as it passed over the United States. We feared it was watching us, taking pictures of our most top secret installations like Disneyland or Sea World. Or worse, they could now deliver a nuclear bomb like we did over Japan only fourteen years earlier. But at the same time, they also demonstrated to us that it was possible to put a satellite into orbit only thirty miles above the earth and transmit pictures of whatever lied beneath in great detail back to earth.

This was invaluable to the U.S. military and by 1962 we had several satellites orbiting over our worst enemies, namely the Russians and the Chinese and of course, Cuba. Cuba back in the Cold War days was a puppet of the Communists and as Russia traded with Cuba they also sent Russian troops as well as Russian armament along with the caviar and borscht on their boats. One day, while flying over Cuba at 150,000 ft., our little satellite watched as two bulldozers began to clear a patch of rain forest in northern Cuba. Each passing of the satellite revealed the patch of cleared land began to take on a large rectangle. Colonel Harper of the Air Force didn't watch too closely, since he just figured at best it was the Cubans clearing another baseball field. After all, the Russians didn't play baseball; the Russians only played soccer, but with nothing better to do, he did a daily check of the new baseball field. Two days later the bulldozers left the field, but something wasn't right to Col. Harper. He knew baseball, and what a baseball diamond looked like, and this was too long and not wide enough to be a baseball diamond, this looked more like a football field, he struggled with it that night and the next day had the cameras zoom in on the new field and his worst fears were answered, there on each end of the new field were two netted goals. "Shit" he said to himself, "Them little fucking Cubans don't play football; they only play baseball, and those aren't football goals anyway, those are fucking soccer goals, and the only ones on the island of Cuba that would be playing soccer are the fucking Russians." The next day the chalk lines were set and there in the middle of the field was a large white circle with a vertical white line through it and two half circles in front of each goal. The Russians had landed in Cuba and brought their soccer balls with them.

With that, the alert went up in the Pentagon which immediately went to DEFCON 3 and a U-2 spy plane was sent up to photograph the area even closer. Less than a week later, near the soccer field, large Quonset huts were set up to house the Russian "soccer players." Then a week later the biggest alarm went off and the U.S. armed forces went to DEFCON 2, which is the next-to-the-highest alert status for the military. The reason: three long white cylindrical-shaped Russian nuclear missiles were spotted by the U-2's cameras, sitting on flatbed trucks less than a mile from the new soccer field. Just after that, the fuel trucks showed up and President Kennedy realized they were only days away from launch capability. It was time for action and for the first time in NORAD's history, the U.S. went to DEFCON 1, the United States' highest military alert status, only used for the possibility of invasion or nuclear attack. Plans were set up for an immediate invasion of Cuba as a pre-emptive strike to blow up the missiles before they could be launched against the U.S. East Coast. They could destroy everything from Miami to Washington D.C. but the problem was, by now there were too many nuclear missiles and we couldn't be sure we could get them all before they could launch, and if just one or two got through, they would devastate America.

They were arriving by ship from Russia and that's when the military came up with the idea of a naval blockade. That eventually backed down Nikita Khrushchev and the Russians removed the nuclear missiles from Cuba. It's now known through the Freedom of Information Act forty years later, that at one time during the blockade a Russian submarine captain ordered a nuclear tipped missile to be loaded in the tubes to blow the blockade. But at the last minute, he was ordered to stand down by Khrushchev himself who knew Kennedy would not only destroy the island of Cuba, but had several B-52 bombers flying the border of Russia as well as the land-based missiles we had in Turkey aimed at Moscow. And all this was averted only because Colonel Harper knew and HATED Soccer, but thank God, he knew a soccer field from a football field, and also knew damn well that the Cuban kids had no intentions of growing up to be big-time soccer players so they could someday move to Moscow to play for the Russians for a few Rubles and a bowl of borscht. After all, George Steinbrenner and the New York Yankees don't pay a million bucks for goddamn ball kickers that can't even use their hands. (Unless they can kick a baseball 97 mph).

You can have your soccer; frankly, I'd rather watch the chili cook-off at the Iowa State Fair (much more exciting, and you can eat the winner when it's over; try doing that to a soccer ball). If you're like me and can't tell an American from a third world Commie, just ask him who his favorite football player is. If he answers Joe Montana, give him a big hug and buy him a beer, but if he answers Pele, take his picture, get a set of his finger prints off his vodka bottle, and call the F.B.I…. and don't answer any questions.

--Ken Pearlman

A Post Script from the author:

Although I gave a rub to soccer as well as their fans, there's no doubt soccer is a hell of a lot more fun to play than baseball or football or basketball, all of which Americans seem to appreciate watching more than playing, a statement to our couch-potato attitude.

Nothing like cheering for your teem laying on the couch in your living room with a Budweiser and a Pastrami sandwich. I played baseball as a kid and it's not always fun. Being short I was always picked last, the big kids with the ball and bat chose the teams and the popular kids always got picked first, that's the American way. Then you're either sitting on the bench waiting hours to come to the plate just once swinging this huge bat that's so heavy you can barely get a good swing before it takes the back of your head off when you strike out, or ground out if you're lucky to make contact, then the other half of the game you get to stand in the outfield waiting three innings before one ball finally makes its way out to you and then you either drop it or worse make a bad throw over everyone's head or even worse than that, you can't even get the ball to the infield on a fly trying to get the guy at second as every one watches the ball hit the grass half way to second base and rolls to a dead stop in the outfield as the kid trots home for an in-the-park home run. In football as in basketball, again, only the big guys get picked, and then you're just told to run way out while the q'back throws it to the same guy every time, or you're getting hammered by some guy twice your size.

Or basketball where the better players just pass the ball over your head and shoot and leave everyone else standing with their thumbs up their asses waiting for their chance to play.

But in soccer everyone plays, kicking the ball doesn't depend on your size or weight, everyone's in the game the whole time, everyone has just as good a chance to score and the little guys even have an edge on the big guys being faster and quicker to the ball. No bats or gloves or expensive balls or equipment to buy, everyone just needs to pitch in for one soccer ball, find an open field, or even someone's back yard would do. There isn't an American sports star playing pro sports that can keep up physically with any pro soccer league player which requires their players to constantly run up and down the field for ninety minutes without getting a rest. Their physical stamina is incredible. So as boring as soccer is to watch on tv, it's nothing compared to trying to watch a bad baseball game for three hours on tv where the only thing moving is the pitcher throwing the ball and the catcher throwing the ball back... the bottom line to the article, although the story itself about the soccer field and the Cuban missile crisis is a true story, is....It's just entertainment, lighten up everyone...Kenny