Monday, April 7, 2008

On Sports: Soccer and Curling

Popularity of football (soccer) around the world. The following colour codes are used:Image from Wikipedia1. Hooliganism, associated with Professional Football ( MLS-Soccer), will become a major problem even in the US. As Shaun Alexander predicts in What's Next, soccer is a major up-and-comer in the sports arena, as many kids are growing up playing and watching. European football (soccer is ALWAYS what non-united-statseans understand when they hear the word football) has been plagued for many years with wild, drunken crowds storming facilities in a frenzy of hysteric destruction, mowing-down whatever is in the way. I think this type of mass fanaticism will start to rear its head here in the US, causing the cancellation of games, and eventually the banning of football (soccer) as a sport, causing it to go underground. Before this happens, there will be at least one major incident where the Immigration and Naturalization Service will incite the crowds to riot and then arrest and deport illegals.

2. Curling with a US twist. If you've ever been to Canada in the winter and had insomnia, and tried to find something to watch on TV, you've probably been introduced to the sport of curling. This is a game that looks much like shuffleboard, except it it played on ice, with a bullseye as target, and sweepers with brooms who score the ice ahead of the stone to try and influence the direction. Now that it is an olympic sport, my prediction is that Curling will also become a mainstream sport in the United States, but with its own American (my apologies to non-US America for the incorrect use of this label) twist. At some point, the sports networks will notice that Curling as a spectator sport is not nearly as popular as it should be. Then, someone will be lamenting the demise of roller derby, and have a brilliant idea to make curling a mainly female sport played by buxom women in bikinis. This will become the tipping point which will end-up catapulting the sport of curling into the mainstream of US sports. You have to think, "only in the US!"

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