In which I snub world opinion

I've been mulling this one over for a couple of weeks now. Finally I think it's time ...

Call me a narrow minded, ethnocentric American, but I detest the World Cup. There, I said it. Note that it's not soccer itself that bugs me; rather it's the World Cup. Why does this grand spectacle of sports bug me so much?

Well I've got to string you along for a little while, so I'll start with the common complaints that DO NOT bother me -- low scoring and perceived lack of action. These are two oft-voiced complaints about baseball and my blog title should tell you that I'm okay with a slow-paced, low scoring game. In fact, I love to watch a good 1-0 or 2-1 baseball game.

So if it's not that watching soccer is about as exciting as watching paint dry, then what is my complaint? My complaint is that the referee seems to decide way too many contests with arbitrary calls (or non-calls) in the box. I know it wasn't every match, but it SEEMED as if every contest in the most recent Cup was decided, in very large part, by whether or not the referee awarded a penalty kick on some questionable play. The end of the Australia/Italy game drove me over the edge. What really riled me up, though, was the general reaction to the end-of-game call. The commentators all seemed to indicate it wasn't really a foul, but the Australian guy still was at fault for sliding and giving the Italian guy the opportunity to "sell it" to the referee. This was the final stages of the self-proclaimed greatest sporting event in the world and games were being decided on the basis of whether one player was a good enough actor to get a call from an official? WTF?!?!

See, that's what gets me -- the arbitrary nature of the outcomes of the matches. It just seemed to me that many games were won, not necessarily by the better team, but by the team that was fortunate enough to get a call. That's it -- 90+ minutes of hard fought action and the outcome is decided by one whistle.

Think about the 4 "major" stick and ball sports in the U.S. and think about what these events have in common:

• Franco Harris' Immaculate Reception. [Ooh, or the 2003 Fiesta Bowl between Miami and OSU.]
• Don Denkinger's call at 1st base in the 1985 World Series.
• The 1972 Olympic basketball gold medal game. [Also game 6 of the '98 NBA finals -- the Jordan push.]
• Brett Hull's questionable goal in the 1999 Stanley Cup Finals.

Okay you might not recognize all of them at first glance, but if you're a sports fan you can quickly figure out (if you care to click through) the significance of those events. Those were times when officiating decisions (or non-decisions) had MAJOR impacts on the championships of the major sports leagues. John Madden is still upset 30+ years after the Immaculate Reception and I'm still madder than hell at Don Denkinger. Heck, someone (ESPN or HBO, I think) even made a movie not too long ago about the 1972 Olympic basketball thing. These events stick in our minds because it just seems so blatantly unfair and wrong that a questionable bit of officiating should decide the final champion. In one World Cup, conversely, there seemed to be multiple games "decided" by the referees.

I won't deny the World Cup is the biggest sporting event on the planet, yet the outcomes remind of nothing more than the Saturday morning "rasslin" shows I watched as a kid. Who would win the match depended on whether or not the ref saw Masked Avenger pull that chain from his trunks. Seriously, that's what all the diving and writhing around on the ground reminded me of. I'm sure these guys (the soccer players) are very skilled and I'm sure theirs is not an easy game. It seems a shame that their games come down to which side has better actors.

I'm not going to be arrogant enough to suggest changes that might improve the spectacle that is the World Cup. Instead I'm just going to make the point that it is a spectacle more so than a true quest for the world's best soccer team. If people want to participate in all the pomp, circumstance, and drunken revelry that go with such a grand spectacle, more power to them. If, though, you're going to argue that my apathy toward future Cups shows me to be an ignorant or biased sports fan, you'll have to come up with a more compelling argument than, "Everyone else in the rest of the world loves it, hence you're wrong." That argument hasn't convinced me that Jimmy Stewart was a great actor, nor did it convince my mother than I should be allowed to have a motorcycle when I was a young lad. It's going to take more than that to get me excited about South Africa in 2010.