The World Cup

Here's my confession: I don't care about the world cup.  Like, even a little bit.  But I really wish that I did.

I don't ever follow soccer, so it seems silly to follow it now just to jump on the bandwagon.  I can't speak intelligently about any team--though I'm familiar with Ronaldinho, Ronaldo, Beckham and...well...Pele.  And I've heard of the Premier League, and I'm pretty sure that Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea are all a part of it.  And maybe something with "Black..." in it?  Yeah, I'm pretty much illiterate in the soccer world.

I kind of wish I could get into soccer, though, because the whole entire world seems to be absolutely smitten with it.  But, alas, my heart is won over by football...er, American football.  And, as for soccer, well, I am pretty much only interested in watching when there's a fight.  Or when everyone's wearing binoculars, as can be seen here (prepare to laugh your head off).

Football, though, is fantastic.  I didn't always feel that way--I used to be quite a cantankerous little child when we'd have to watch football all day Saturday and then again on Sunday afternoon--but, even then, my school journals talked about how I didn't like John Elway because he beat the Browns in the playoffs (my heart still breaks a little each time I think about it).  And, of course, there are the WVU Mountaineers.  Every ounce of my being has been trained to root for "them 'eers", no matter what.  I just feel like there's much more going on in football.  Tackling and fumbling and such.  Don't misunderstand me: I don't for one second think that football players are better athletes than soccer players.  They just play a much more interesting game (to me, anyway).

With all of that being said, I'm pretty sure that, were I in South Africa at this very moment, I could scrounge up enough interest in soccer (which I imagine is eons better in person) to be enthused by the event at hand.  But it will definitely not hold a candle to last December's Browns v. Steelers game, when the Browns finally pulled a victory--and a convincing one, at that--out over their archenemies.  That was exciting.  Even riding the Rapid (Cleveland's public transportation system) with a bunch of rowdy-verging-on-obnoxious folks back to our parking spot was pretty fun.

I do have to watch, though, because I never want to let myself become too emotionally invested in things like the Browns, particularly because there are far more important things in life.  Plus, the Browns haven't been good for several years, and I don't exactly live in a Browns-friendly environment.  Plus, when I have let the emotions get the best of me, it's never pretty.

Take this story:
It was mid-November, 2006.  I was in grad school, and was trying to edit one of my final papers, to be submitted the following day.  However, I was doing this in the corner of a room in which I was the sole Browns fan, surrounded by 20+ Steelers fans.  The Browns and Steelers were playing, and the Browns had dominated most of the game (this was the season where they went 10-6, but were ultimately shut out of the playoffs because Derek Anderson played so poorly against both the 49ers and the Bengals, so Tennessee got the 6th seed ahead of them).  I was trying very hard to contain my excitement, both because it wasn't all that fun to be excited while receiving a room full of angry stares, and because this is the Browns.  Things change in a heartbeat.  But there we were, with under two minutes left in the game, and the Brownies were ahead by 5. However, Pittsburgh had the ball, and Cleveland's run defense had been abysmal, to say the very least.  Ben Roethlisberger handed the ball off to Willie Parker, who easily found a seam, and he galloped his way into the end zone, crushing the hopes of every Browns fan on the planet.  I responded by immediately grabbing everything I owned, immediately beginning to sob uncontrollably, and immediately heading out the door and to my car for a long 15 minute drive home.  Joe and I were engaged at the time, and he came running after me  to make sure that I was okay, to which I responded (between sobs, mind you) that "I just need to go."  Yeah, talk about dramatic.  And, to be perfectly honest, I ended up having to sit in my car for a few minutes before I could actually see well enough to drive AND I punched my radio when the Browns loss became official.

So, yeah, I need to watch those emotions.  And, I need to very very carefully guard my competitive nature.  I hate to lose.  I'm terrible at it, frankly.  So often, I make even the most mundane tasks into competitions.  Sometimes, this is a positive thing, in that it motivates me to do my very best (and I tend to not do so well in the self-discipline area all the time), but, at other times, it just makes me kind of a nasty person.  It's not my most treasured trait, that's for sure.

I think I have a solution, though.  Maybe, from now on, when my emotions start to get the best of me, I'll just turn on some soccer...