Yesterday morning I wandered around Laramie, Wyoming looking for a bar with ESPN to watch the World Cup.

I end up at the Ranger–a combination motel, bar, and package store. Soccer is on and there are five guys watching, eating donuts and drinking Bloody Marys. Three of them played high school soccer in Cheyenne; one of those wears a Germany shirt.

I order an orange juice and when I go to my pocket for money the bartender tells me that if it doesn’t have booze in it, it’s on the house. This makes me feel like a pussy so when I finish the orange juice I order a Bloody Mary. He makes one for himself when he makes mine. Ten minutes later he tells me his isn’t spicy enough and adds two kinds of Tabasco to my glass, now half empty.

At halftime Dale, a plumber, never a soccer player, has a feeling that a goal is coming. He bets the guy in the Germany shirt five dollars that there will be a goal in the first ten minutes of the second half. Ayalya scores for Argentina off a corner in the 49th minute.

Dale, by all accounts, was drunk the night before. I was told that late last night a cop walked into the bar. By all accounts his presence was uncalled for because there hadn’t been a fight for months. So Dale ran up to the cop, a rookie, and says that three minors just ran into the bathroom. The rookie cop runs into the bathroom. Dale follows and sets his weight against the door. The cop tries to leave the empty bathroom but can’t because Dale is blocking it. He bangs against it a few times, but then lays off for a minute and Dale goes off to stand in a corner. The cop charges the door again and there is no resistance so he tumbles through door and onto the floor of the bar. Just then six more cops come running into the bar. The rookie had called for back up from the bathroom.

Dale is not a soccer fan, but with five bucks from Argentina’s goal, he stops belittling the sport. I think he even yelled earnestly when Klose put in the equalizer for Germany.

Everyone was upset by Argentina’s incompetence in the shoot out.

Between games I left to get lunch.

When I get back to watch Italy-Ukraine everyone is still there. They’d decided against work altogether; having progressed from Bloody Mary’s, to Coors, to Jack and Cokes, to half-Jack-half-Cuervo shots. Now, also in the bar is a baby playing with one of those tiny bottles of Schmirnoff, and two dogs.

By the time Toni puts in Italy’s second goal, the scene at the Ranger is sloppier than the Ukrainian defense; Canavaro takes a ball to the groin reminding someone of the time he hit a freshman in the nuts so hard that he pissed blood for three days and quit the team; the motel clerk hides drunk’s cell phones; people are genuinely pissed that ESPN’s Shelley Smith is so fat.

I don’t partake in the Cuer-Jacks but 85 cent Coors take their toll; I recollect a high school soccer practice where the coach didn’t show and where I or maybe someone else dropped a bowling ball off a bridge, made a freshman go get the pieces, and then dropped the pieces of bowling ball off the bridge.

The Cheyenne guys know some Ethiopians that play pickup in the park, I’m leaving tomorrow for Cody, but we make plans to take them on next Thursday.

Dear Evander,

We love you. You are one of the truly heroic warriors of the recent era. Your trilogy with Bowe will live forever in boxing lore, as well as your battles with Tyson, Foreman, and Lennox. You gave us many great nights and we are proud to have had you in the ring during our lifetime.

Please don’t fight any more. Your recent bouts have been humiliating. You are showing early signs of pugilistic dementia, and more punishment at this stage will only severely hasten your demise. They suspended you for a reason, Evander – to save you from yourself. If no one in your inner circle will tell you the truth, listen to us, because we say this out of enormous respect for your accomplishments. Your claim that you want to be heavyweight champ again is preposterous. Fat James Toney made you look like a cheap sparring partner, and then you lost a decision to Larry Donald in one of the most unpleasant bouts we’ve seen in years.

If you really need to spar, call Heidi Klum again. That’s just the kind of tete-a-tete we wish upon you. As for actual boxing, we beg you, throw in the towel. Your legacy is secure, and you’re a righteous motherfucker. Give your brain a break.

Love,

No Mas

Unable to sleep last night in this tropical swamp known as New York City, I decided to dip into the vaults and stoke my Wimbledon appetite. I did not shilly-shally with the riff raff , I went straight to Olympus. Borg/Mac final, 1980. It was a long evening. Just as he has done in several previous viewings, Borg won a thrilling match. Here are some observations:

-Borg in Diadoras. Mac in Nikes. Europe versus America in its truest form.

-Borg’s look was ill. The skin-tight Fila shizzle, the headband, the scruff, them Diadoras, the Donnay racket. Mac looked cool just because he was Mac. But Borg , no matter who he was, that motherfucker walks into the tennis club and bitches be swooning.

-Those BBC British announcers are the bomb. First game of the first set, the dude says something as Mac hits his first serve, something like ‘and we’re off…” and then doesn’t say another word until 40-15. Mary Carillo and Mac should have to study these guys like they’re Greek philosophers.

-Borg played incredibly fast. In retrospect it’s almost bizarre. He can’t get his serves off soon enough. Mac, in comparison, with his pouty faces and exaggerated service windup, was a human rain delay.

-Mac was brilliant in the first set, maybe the best a tennis player has ever been. Borg was in fine form, but there was just nothing that he could do with Mac’s serve and volley perfection. He won only seven total points on McEnroe’s serve.

-Serving out the set at 5-1, Mac sends a volley just long and then stops at the net in a pantomime of angry consideration, hand on hip, scratching his chin, head tilted. ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?” Meanwhile, the announcer shows his anti-Mac stripes. ‘I have to believe,” he says, ‘that any tennis player at this level knows from the feel on his racket if that ball is long. If he doesn’t, then he’ll never amount to much. And that ball was clearly long.”

-The second set, and thus the future of the greatest tennis match ever, turns on a single point. Mac remained untouchable on his serve in the second set, and Borg raised his game, and they started trading service holds. With Mac serving at 5-6, 15-0, he sends an easy volley into the net, and it clearly rattles him. He loses focus on the next point, chunks a volley and Borg slams it home, and then Borg hits a brilliant return winner to get to 15-40. He breaks at 30-40, and while the crowd roars, Mac crouches down and stares at his sneakers. Next thing you know Mac is spraying his volleys all over the place. The precision is gone. Borg breaks in the second game of the third set and that’s all he needs. He wins it 6-3 and goes up two sets to one.

-Both players start to play erratically in the fourth set. Borg breaks Mac with a monster cross-court winner to go up 5-4, serves for the match, goes up 40-15, two championship points. Mac saves the first with a pinpoint backhand passing shot (announcer: ‘that really was a brave pass”) and then gets to deuce with a see-saw volley exchange. He then wins the next two points, breaking Borg with a cross-court backhand return winner, and lets loose with a mighty ‘come on!” They trade two love games to head into The Tiebreak.

-Serving at 5-6 in The Tiebreak, third championship point of the match for Borg, Mac stretches out to full extension to send an improbable volley home (announcer: ‘however he got to that I do not know.”)

-Mac serves for the set at 8-7. Serves and volleys, Borg passes and Mac falls flat on his face trying to reach it. As he gets up, I notice the outline beneath Mac’s shorts , he’s wearing tighty-whiteys.

-Borg serving for the match at 11-10, championship point #6 , Mac hits a drop shot that catches the net cord and drops into Borg’s court. No gentleman’s “sorry” racket-wave from Mac, of course. He heads right back to the baseline like Frazier used to make for his corner at the end of a round.

-Mac set point #4, serving at 14-13, has the whole court open and pushes his volley just wide. Anguish at the net.

-Borg serves at 16-17 and nets a volley. Fourth set to Mac. Crowd erupts. As Borg walks to his chair, he looks thoroughly beaten. Mac meanwhile goes for his sit-down and grabs what looks to be a breath mint.

-Fun to watch the fifth set knowing what was in Borg’s head. I’ve seen him interviewed about The Tiebreak on many occasions. He always says, ‘I was devastated. I knew I was going to lose the match. But then, you know, I felt like, well, there’s nothing for me to do but keep playing and see what happens.”

-As they trade holds throughout the fifth, it becomes clear that Mac is wearing down. Borg serves a monster love game at 5-5 , the agony of the tiebreak seems forgotten. Another love game at 6-6. He’s in true cyBorg mode. Mac meanwhile is laboring, talking to himself a lot, taking a lot of time between points. Fitness was Mac’s Achilles’ heel.

-Borg is down 15-40 at 7-6. He wins it from there, closing Mac out with three straight picture perfect passing shots.

-Sitting after the match, both dudes look like they’ve been through a war, especially Borg. He almost seems like he doesn’t know where he is.

Greg LeMond was Lance Armstrong’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, his idol as a young cyclist, the man who paved the way for American cycling success in Europe. LeMond and Armstrong are the United States’ two all-time greatest cyclists, our only winners of the Tour de France.

And they just can’t get along.

LeMond has been anti-Lance since 2001, when he went public with his ‘disappointment” that Lance was associated with Italian doctor Michele Ferrari. Ferrari has been linked to blood doping scandals, and Armstrong finally severed his ties with him in 2005.

Greg and Lance have been at loggerheads ever since, and now, in the midst of the latest flurry of drug allegations against Armstrong, LeMond claims that Armstrong threatened him after he testified in a recent legal dispute against the famous Texan cancer survivor.

How are we going to settle this, lads? A winner-take-all bike race seems out of the question , Lemond is ten years older than Lance, who is only a year removed from his seventh straight Tour victory. Maybe a showdown on Jeopardy. Maybe a duel to the end while the Death Star slowly burns and a war for the future of the galaxy rages in the heavens behind you.

However you want to do it. Just so long as it gets done. The time to hesitate is through. Lance, Greg, do us all a favor and end this thing like men. Choose your seconds and name your poison.

Meanwhile, the 2006 Tour de France kicks off on Saturday, and for the first time since 1998, someone other than Lance Armstrong will finish with the yellow jersey. OLN will be covering the race start to finish, starting live at 8:30 Saturday morning. Click here for the full television schedule.

In Chinatown, at the field on Delancy and Chrystie a stray ball slowly rolled by a Ghanaian. He stood and watched it.

“I’m like Landon Donovan, I don’t move for no one.”

I stood and watched him, completely unsure how to craft an adequate comeback.

***

I think American fans feel a little left out of the World Cup and not just because the U.S. was eliminated without a win.

The problem for American soccer fans is that we don’t know how to talk about soccer.

My first exposure to soccer commentary was the video game FIFA 98. ESPN’s own, Irishman Tommy Smyth, did the commentary.

He was the realest soccer voice I’d ever heard. His most frequent comment was, ‘He put it in the back of the old ol’ onion bag.”

Exposed to an impressive variety of Smyth’s goal calls, the video game commentary became my soccer language. I remember saying ‘brilliant strike” in earnest.

Live at the 2006 Cup, Smyth is still quirky and Irish, and he is about as insightful as his 1998 Playstation 1 video game self. When Ecuador played Poland, he called Ecuador the Denver Broncos and Poland the Gonzaga of the World Cup. Like Quito is high altitude and no one wants to play Poland.

His yank-pandering analogies left my American soccer identity in tatters.

Now, when I am the lone American playing in Chinatown, I can’t quite bring myself to say, ‘football.” I feel like I’ll be recognized as a fake, as the Smyth imitator that I am.

And as a fan I am lost. In New York, I see Ghanaian, German, and Swiss fans and I want to understand soccer like they do. I follow these authentic fans to ethnic bars to take it all in.

***

Our home-grown league is as lost as I am.

Major League Soccer formed 10 years ago, and initially featured bad, but at least, original team names: Burn, Earthquakes, Mutiny. As the league expands, team names have suddenly gone sickeningly faux-euro:

-Real Salt Lake. What does it mean that Utahans root for a team called ‘Royal Salt Lake,” in Spanish?
-Houston Dynamo. Maybe the MLS means this to be subversive; Dynamo was originally a Soviet sports clubs sponsored by political police like the KGB.
-The Dallas Burn have been renamed Football Club Dallas.

These names are apparently designed to attract the kind of Americans who yell, ‘Come on lads” when Manchester United is on television.

ABC/ESPN’s World Cup commentary offers a different direction. Aside from Tommy Smith, the commentators are thoroughly American. They could be worse. Balboa, Harkes, and Wynalda might not have been world-class players, but they at least understand soccer and generally make reasonable points.

Unfortunately soccer knowledge alone is insufficient for adequate commentary.

In terms of style, the TV Americans are lost. They waver between the tone of a baseball announcer and British inflection, they aren’t very funny, and they are prone to repeated dramatic overstatement of the obvious. On the knockout round:

‘And remember the losing team is sent home after today’s game.”

***

The MLS is lost, ABC/ESPN is lost, and I am lost, because there is no American soccer vernacular. To be a soccer nation, the U.S. not only needs a more creative intelligence on the field, we need a new kind of voice in he booth to show fans a way to talk comfortably about soccer.

My friend Gene invited me to join him and his friend Nina in watching a contest between the Swedish Bikini Team and the German Girdle Squad in Roppongi, Tokyo’s foreigner ghetto.

I was disappointed when it turned out to be a soccer game.

Nina’s blonde enthusiasm quickly cheered me. Swedish to the core, she took us to Legends Sports Bar, which was standing room only two hours before the midnight match. The Swedes came correct in blue-and-yellow jerseys, Viking hats and flags worn as capes. One flag was as large as my bedroom and the Swedes held it over their part of the club like a tent.

There’s 1,000 Swedes in Japan and 5,000 Germans, one told me. But one Swede is enough for five Germans. Skol!

An hour before match time a group of young Germans tried to stake out a spot between the Swedes and the bar and had to be edged out. One wore the German flag over his shoulders and I was close enough to catch sparks when a woman wearing a Swedish flag unwittingly backed into him. There was talk of burning the defiled flags, but tempers cooled and the two eventually posed for a photo together.

The Swedes were quite open-minded. They deliberated about how to translate their fight songs so the Germans could understand them.

Why don’t we just sing Sweden Uber Alles? one suggested.

No, said another. You’ve seen Fawlty Towers, right? Don’t mention the war…

They taught me their songs and translated them for me. The most important chant translates as ‘Put in the goal!” Genius. We began singing the fight songs in earnest half an hour before the match. There were only 40 or 50 of us, but we shook the walls. Thor would have been proud. The Legends Sports Bar belonged to us. All of Tokyo could not be far behind.

Or so we thought. The German fans turned out to be as efficient as their team, saving their voices for the first, heart-stabbing goal, when they erupted. Suddenly we realized that everyone else in the club was German. No fight songs, few team colors and little spirit, but the Germans had us five to one.

At that moment, the Swedes realized what they were up against. Another goal at 12 minutes. Then Lucic’s bullshit red card. (Did you register the undisguised schadenfreude on the referee’s face when he pulled the card? Or the congratulatory pat on the back he received from a German player? Here in Tokyo, we call that ‘a little home cooking.”)

Down 2-0 with 10 players, my Swedish compatriots changed their game plan. They surged forward and made the space in front of the serving area a wall of blue and yellow, making sure that not a single German was able to buy a beer for the rest of the match.
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This post comes to us from Craig Coley, currently in Japan heading up No Mas’s Tokyo office. Craig is a longtime journalist and editor of note who’s pounded the beat in both Brooklyn and Tacoma, so you know he’s paid his dues. One time the motherfucker rode the subway for almost two days, went to every stop in NYC. And it wasn’t even on a bet – he was just lost. Check out his freakydeeky website, georginabush.com, and check out Craig’s dispatches from the Far East right here at No Mas.

I want you to read this very closely….Kevin Garnett will be traded to the Lakers before the 2008 season. You heard it here first….I don’t make predictions like this everyday – the last time I felt this strongly about a trade was when Piazza went to the Mets from the Dodgers (via the Marlins) – but this is a no- brainer. Think about it:

A) Garnett doesn’t need $$$

B) The Lakers have the players to offer. Odom’s recent playoff performance can make him the main piece. Add Kwame Brown (the Lakers have Bynum to replace him) with either Luke Walton or DeveanGeorge, and the trade could work.

C) Minnesota is going nowhere. Garnett’s huge contract (which the Lakers could handle or restructure) is an albatross for the T’Wolves. They need to start over.

D) Garnett is hungry to win and his game (which is supremely ill) would be PERFECT for the Lakers. He is the ideal match-up for the key players on the other Western Conference powers (Dirk, Amare Stoudamire, T. Duncan). KG and Kobe would work well together offensively as well.

E) Garnett would love to play for a real coach (Flip Saunders is/was a regular season coach only)

F) After 10 cold-ass years in Minnesota, LA has got to look like a paradise.

G) The NBA would love it. You think Stern likes having one of the league’s most unique players, (and darkest colored NBA superstar) in the middle of nowhere on a crap team? Players of Garnett’s stature should only be on either the Knicks (won’t happen), Sixers, Celtics, Pistions, or Lakers.

H) KG would look dope in Laker gold and purple

What? You think I’m buggin’?? Tell me why…..

If you get a chance, you should check out the ESPN Classic hour-long show, ‘A Forgotten Heavyweight: Jerry Quarry.” Narrated by Al Bernstein, it’s a pastiche of Quarry’s three most famous fights, his 1969 title bout with Joe Frazier, and his two fights with Ali.

I had seen the Frazier bout before, a punishing affair stopped by the doctor before the start of the 8th due to a bad cut over Quarry’s eye. And of course Ali/Quarry I is famous, being Ali’s first bout back after his Vietnam exile from the ring. This fight too was stopped due to a cut over Quarry’s eye, this time before the start of the 4th.

Ali/Quarry II, fought in 1972, I had never seen, and this particular print that Classic has is fascinating. First of all, the announcers are Mel Allen and, I believe, David Frost. Hearing Allen, who for so many of us children of the 70’s is forever the voice of ‘This Week in Baseball,” doing a big fight is a joy. He boils over with enthusiasm, going on before the first bell about how charged the atmosphere is and that he’s as full of adrenaline as either of the fighters. Frost, meanwhile, if that is indeed Frost (anyone know about this?), is all continental cool and witty analysis. They’re quite a team, a real poor man’s Mailer and Plimpton, much like CI and myself when we call fights together at my house.

Also great about this print is that the announcers’ mikes pick up a lot of noise from the ring, primarily the constant banter of Bundini Brown. Right after the opening bell, in a bizarre maneuver, Quarry actually picks Ali up off his feet and looks like he’s going to piledrive him. He definitely gets Ali’s attention with this move – his eyes go wide. And you hear Bundini yelling at him, ‘you just stay cool Champ, real cool, you do YOUR thing.” Later on, when Ali is opening up on Quarry, Bundini yells, ‘that’s right Champ, lay a Sugar Ray on him,” which Allen and Frost comment on.

The fight itself is gripping just for being such an exhibition of Ali’s skills prior to his mid-70’s decline. Quarry was a hell of a puncher (a poor man’s Frazier, let’s face it) and still Ali looks like he’s in a glorified sparring session, breaking a sweat, working on some moves. He clowns more than I’ve ever seen him clown, toying with the bullish Quarry through the first two rounds before letting fly in the third and putting the Irishman on queer street. Quarry wobbles out for the fourth and Ali tattoos him twice and then turns and beckons to the ref to stop the fight, much as Larry Holmes would do in his bout with Ali eight years later. After the fight, Ali said of this gesture, ‘I ain’t out to kill nobody.” Two more clean shots and the ref takes mercy on Quarry, who was out on his feet. TKO in the fourth.

This was a bad night on the whole for the Quarry family, as Bernstein explains in the show. On the undercard, Jerry’s younger brother Mike (who died just two weeks ago) was knocked out in a light heavyweight title bout with Bob Foster (that picture on the right is M. Quarry/Foster). It was a night Ali termed ‘The Soul Brothers versus the Quarry Brothers,” and the Soul Brothers had an easy go of it. Meanwhile, another Quarry brother was arrested for brawling in the stands. 0 for 3. Luck of the Irish, innit.

I watched the first half of the France-Togo game at a birthday party for the French graffiti artist L’Atlas. The geographical moniker is descriptive of his m.o.: he’s known for the labyrinthine compasses he pastes at the mouth of metro stops in a style inspired by the Kufi calligraphy he studied in Cairo. The birthday party was in the large courtyard of La Forge, a former key factory that was rescued from demolition by artist squatters and has recently been granted quasi-official status as a center for ’socio-cultural activities” in Belleville. Belleville is a honeycombed hill in North-East Paris, a multi-ethnic bastion of the working class since the days when those kicked out of the city by Haussmann’s works took refuge there. Artists’ studios and hipster bars shoulder Sephardic pastry shops and Chinese restaurants.

Against the backdrop of enormous graffiti pieces, L’Atlas set up a television on a carved iron pedestal while his friends made under-breath remarks to downplay their commitment to such unsavory things: television and, for goodness’ sake, football. Jean explained to me that one doesn’t really root for the team before they play – ‘besides, we’re not that into winners.” Another guy in one of an endless series of hipster T-shirts, most of them graffiti-themed, sidled up to me to tell me that he found soccer fans distasteful. Still, the Black-Blanc-Beur (Black-White-Arab) theme that emerged in ‘98 wasn’t bad. Meanwhile, African kids from the neighborhood ran wild in the courtyard and one beanpole of a girl (apparently of Togolese origin) attempted a meager ‘Ouais, les Togolais!”

Despite the prevailing too-cool-to-care attitude, I noticed the dudes (the females of the lot were mostly off parading their outfits, starting a bonfire) itched as the French had one near-goal after another in the first half. They betrayed a curious mixture of pessimism (’eh oui,” said the blasé TV commentator as a goal was discounted, the French off-sides again) and guilt, linked no doubt to the fact that so much of their cache is bound to the diversity of their hood.

At halftime, I took off south and settled in a small café near the Square M. Gardette, in the middle of the 11th arrondissement, between two poles of branché (trendy, literally ‘plugged in”) Paris, the Bastille, and Oberkampf/Belleville. I ordered a Perrier at a sidewalk table with a view of the television. The café was mostly filled with beurs (a slang word for Arab, used for French people of North African extraction), although there were a couple of white guys, one wearing a Frank Ribéry jersey. This crowd was more unabashedly enthusiastic, exploding with shouts as Vieira and then Henry scored the goals that delivered France to the second round.

Even here, though, there were signs of ambivalence. One drunken beur, clearly embarrassing his compatriots, observed at one point that there were ‘gens colorés” (colored people) on both teams, so what difference did it really make who won? The support for France seemed continually on the verge of crumbling into more sinister emotions.

In other news, NYU professor Assia Djebar, the first Algerian to be elected to the Académie Française, pronounced her acceptance speech on Thursday, and President Jacques Chirac inaugurated his most recent pet project, a museum dedicated to the ‘first arts,” indigenous works from all over the world (except the ‘Occident”), which has sent the price of African masks sky-rocketing. To say that France is struggling with its colonial past, in football and beyond, would be putting it kindly.
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This post comes to us from our Parisian correspondent, Nicole Asquith. Nicole has taught courses on French hip-hop at Johns Hopkins and given lectures on French rap and graffiti, both on the university circuit, and to me, over coffee. Her dissertation was all about Rimbaud, and yet was also about graffiti, which should tell you something about Nicole. She smart, but she down. Not to mention, she likes her football, this lass. In the fall, she begins a position as Assistant Professor of French at UC Davis. We’re lucky to have her on the No Mas side.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Argentina’s World Cup triumph, our man Shane over at the The Wade Blogs has created a new work in the grand retro-simulo style pioneered by BSOULS1211, celebrated auteur of “‘86 Word Series Game 6, RBI baseball”.

For your consideration: “Hand of God Goal Nintendo replay – Maradona vs. England 20th”

While “Hand of God Goal” is certainly an admirable attempt and worthy of both kudos and multiple viewing (I especially like the team selection screen), it does not unfortunately soar to the Olympian heights of BSOULS1211’s Biennial-worthy masterwork. It hurts me to belittle the creation of a friend, but if BSOULS1211 is the Michelangelo of the Nintendo medium, my dear Wade Blogs must content himself to be the Lucia Della Robbia. From the promise to take “angry girlfriend pissed at NES obsessed boyfriend” away for “a nice weekend” included in the closing credits, one wonders if Wade Blogs will ever equal the work of BSOULS1211 until he is willing to rid himself of such a creativity crushing sense of obligation to the fairer sex. If only Cyrill Conolly were alive today, he would surely have much to say on the subject.

Another look at promise realised and true greatness attained:

“Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising.”
–Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (1938)