Turd of the Week
6/12/99

Earth to MLS Referees: This is a foul

Opponents will be fouled. Survivors will be fouled again. England forward Paul Scholes was dismissed at 50 minutes of the Euro 2000 qualifier versus Sweden for a second bookable offense. However, he ought to have been dismissed in the opening minute for his assassination attempt on Hakan Mild, who suffered an 18-inch gash on his torso. "I have never been shot but that is what I would expect a bullet hole to look like," said the lucky survivor.

Is it just me? Or does Roy Lassiter wear more gold chains than Mr. T?

Ack! Ack! Thppt! Acting as if he is paid like a pre-teen Indonesian garment worker, trying to make up in volume what he earns for each crap idea, Sepp Blatter coughed up the following hairball: Quotas for foreigners. Yes, FIFA, much like the US government usurping States rights, would dictate to national federations that their club teams could have no more than six foreigners per side. (The fact that the rule would violate European Union law didn't seem to cross the addled minds at FIFA or UEFA.) MLS, which has a four foreigner limit, for once seems to be ahead of the power curve. But that is to be expected of MLS and crap ideas. No word yet on whether FIFA has contracted Louie 'the Legbreaker' to strong-arm this vomit into place.

Maracana stadium to get facelift: Brazil announced it will spend $34 million renovating the world famous Maracana stadium. Once a glorious facility that hosted 200,000 fans for the 1950 World Cup final between Brazil and Uruguay, the Maracana has been reduced to a fetid, decrepit stadium permeated on match days by the stench of urine and stale beer -- much like Chicago's Soldier Field. Requiring a facelift that would put Michael Jackson to shame, the alterations include a museum, car park, new ticket windows, 120 executive boxes, and the stadium's conversion to an all-seater.

There's one born every minute: Follow me closely, here. The MetroStars traded midfielder Roy Meyers to the LA Galaxy for forward Welton. They also received crippled Eric Wynalda from the San Jose Clash in exchange for "past considerations" -- i.e., being relieved of midfielder Marcelo Vega's bloated ass. (Vega was last spotted appearing as "I lost 250 pounds in only 20 days" on a Richard Simmons Deal-A-Meal infomercial.) The MetroStars then turned around and dealt the dynamic duo, plus defender Arley Palacios, to the Miami Fusion in exchange for a "marquee player allocation", a secret decoder ring, some marbles, and a map to the leprechaun's gold. (MLS owed the Fusion the allocation in exchange for their kidnapping of Carlos Valderrama.) And what have the Fusion done with their new found bounty? Why, lose 1:3 to a DC United team playing without most of their first choice players. There is no truth to the rumor the Fusion have also acquired rights to the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Courtship of Lothar Matthãus: Lothar Matthãus' coy, eye-lash batting, hiding-face-behind-fan, catch-me-if-you-can, courtship with MLS is apparently on again, and the nuptials are now scheduled for early next week. In a league where the maximum salary is supposed to be $250,000, and where team wages are supposed to total no more than $1.7 million, the ancient one will make $1 million over 18 months while propping up the flailing MetroStars. When asked about the impending signing, MLS media relations director Dan Courtemanche said, "It's news to me." Good to see Dan's staying on top of his job.

Sporting News hack Jerry Trecker as usual comes down on the wrong side of nearly every issue in his June 7 column:

• "... there clearly are folks far brighter than me trying to figure out what makes for soccer success in this country ..." No there aren't. Even you are smarter than Doug 'The Centrifuge' Logan. Darwin Award winners are smarter than The Centrifuge. Vegetables -- the plant kind, not the human kind -- are smarter than The Centrifuge. The hairy, crumby goo under the keys on my computer is smarter than The Centrifuge.

• "... Blatter wants to create a coordinated world calendar, a move which probably is too logical for it ever to happen." Logical? Maybe. Right? Wrong. Every federation ought to have the freedom to decide when it's domestic league and cup competitions occur. They shouldn't have to bow and scrape before some pudgy Swiss gnome with the delusional notion he is the Oracle at Delphi.

• "... Blatter's radical World Cup-every-two-years actually makes sense if you see it cutting down on the number of regional tournaments which fill the players' schedules to bursting." Doing a shot of heroin also makes sense if one wants to come down from a cocaine binge, but it's better to avoid pounding Peruvian alkaloids up one's nose in the first place. Again the Law of Unintended Consequences rears its ugly head: Rather than simply reducing the number of regional tournaments, the direct solution to the actual problem, some sort of wussy, kinder-gentler, touchy-feely, indirect solution is implemented, which only tangentially deals with the problem at hand, if at all. And in so doing unintentionally screws up something else. Which in turn needs to be solved. Which screws up something else. Which needs to be solved, etc. The fact is that the more common something is, the less valuable it is. Either economically, or sentimentally. As it would be for a World Cup every two years. Which is more special to you, the Senior Prom or Bubba's Sports Bar every Saturday night?

  That wet, smacking sound you hear is Jerry Trecker planting sloppy, slobbery kisses in and about the region of Sepp Blatter's bunghole.

• The above are, in the Great Scheme of Things, irrelevant. Then there is evil, moral wrong, and among those immoralities is punishing the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. I will leave it up to you to decide who the criminals are in the Balkans, but unless they are toting more weapons onto the pitch than a Feyenoord or Millwall supporter, the criminals do not include the players on the Yugoslav national team. And so, of course, Jerry thinks the Irish government "should be applauded" for denying visas to the Yugoslav players so they play their Euro 2000 qualifying match, a home match, on the road. Yes, UEFA feels Ireland is actually relatively bomb-free compared to Belgrade. Jerry tries to dismiss the wrong visited on innocent footballers by saying that, "Sure it's hard on the Yugoslav players, but trying to pretend nothing is going on in the Balkans is not the answer ... Sport can be used very effectively for political purposes as we all saw in South Africa. Bans against the old regime's cricket and rugby teams cut deeply; we will never know exactly how much they had to do with bringing down the apartheid regime, but we know they were effective." Ooh, ooh, whip Milosevic with a wet noodle! While boycotting South African cricketeers and ruggers may have disappointed Afrikaaner politicians, it was 30 million pissed off black people who really got their attention. Sports boycotts affect governments not one damn bit. All they do is screw up the dreams of athlete's who have worked their whole lives for a few brief moments of glory, glory that is thus snatched by grandstanding politicians hoping seize the 'moral high ground' by scoring a few brownie points in the Holier-Than-Thou wars. The same politicians, by the way, who are the ones with the power to wage war in the first place. Pretty convenient, isn't it? We all saw how Jimmy Carter keeping the US Olympic team home in 1980 over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan really put the fear of God into the commies, didn't we? It didn't have anything to do with blood-thirsty mujahideen wielding rocket launchers, did it? It just took the doddering old alcoholics in the Kremlin ten years to realize how the deeply affected they were by the US Olympic boycott.

You people are morons: That Marco Etcheverry is leading MLS All-Star balloting with 9,501 votes is not suprising, but who are the 8,476 cretins who voted for Cobi Jones?! Maybe it's all the soccer dads, bored to tears and filling in little circles with a No. 2 pencil while waiting to take their crumb snatchers home from the game so they can make their 3:00 p.m. tee time? You know, the 'casual fan' MLS makes it a point to attract? The ones who know Cobi Jones because he's that "pleasant young colored fellow" with the weird haircut they see in the rare soccer-oriented advertisement or TV commercial? Hello, people! I suppose you could consider participating in half your team's goals to be an All-Star level of play, but not when your team has only eight freaking goals! In twelve games. Yes, the league's worst offense is lead by Jones' heroic 2 goals and 2 assists -- which ranks Cobi even or below such scary scoring threats as A.J. Wood, Ivan McKinley, Chris Klein, Brian Kelly, Jay Heaps, Jeff Aunger, Jamie Clark and even Alexi Lalas! This is scary. MLS is starting to resemble Major League Baseball, where a player who should be on social security, like Pete Rose, is voted into an all-star game because he happened to break a hits record after eeking out one per year for the last 4,000 years of his career. Jerry Trecker is only one moron, who are the other 8,475 of you?

The US Women's National Team made their broadcast network debut on Saturday with a 4-2 come-from-behind win against Canada. Mia Hamm notched her world record 109th international goal, while Canada's one good player, Charmaine Hooper, scorer of the game winner at the US v. World All-Star game, continued to torture the US with two more goals.

Did I say they made their broadcast network debut? Forgive me, I spoke too soon.

It seems that forty-nine of the ignoramii that pass for Disney program directors decided their television stations would garner better ratings by airing yet another beg-a-thon, this one the Children's Miracle Network. The only miracle I want to see on TV is an LA Galaxy goal. I am sure CMN is a worthy cause, but face it, beg-a-thons are a one-shot annual publicity stunt. And not all the 'pledges' they trumpet are actually paid, as people skate on their verbal commitment. The real money comes in the rest of the year.

For continuing to rank soccer lower on the sports totem pole than the 20th Century's 50 Greatest (American) Athlete's, sumo, fishing, World's Strongest Man, billiards, spelling bees (!), and the shambling corpse known as major league baseball:

TotW 1999 Archive

© Copyright 1995-2011 by Preston V. McMurry III