Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) by Dave Barry Read Free Book Online Page A

parents of the opposing team yell, “Offside!” Offside is an important soccer rule that nobody really understands, so everybody yells it a lot. When the tournament ends, the parents experience either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat, while the girls resume taking selfies.
    I enjoy watching Sophie’s games, because she is my daughter and I love her and I would happily watch her peel turnips. But I am frankly not interested in watching youth soccer unless one of the youths playing is my child. Whereas I think that big-time international soccer—the kind I saw for the first time at that 1998 World Cup—is the best sport there is.
    I realize that many Americans disagree with me on this. Many Americans think soccer is awful. Among the main criticisms are:
It’s foreign.
Many foreigners are involved.
These people call it “football.”
It’s not football!
Football
is football.
You can’t even use your hands!
It’s boring.
Nobody ever scores.
If anybody ever
does
score, it doesn’t count because he was “offside.”
Whatever the hell THAT means.
It’s SOOOO boring.
Seriously:
Nobody ever scores
.
Sometimes the games end in ties.
TIES, for God’s sake.
Why do they even bother using a ball?
Despite the fact that nothing ever happens, the fans spend the entire game jumping up and down like prairie dogs on cocaine, while bellowing allegedly clever songs in foreign languages to the tune of “Oh My Darling, Clementine.”
The players are foreign.
They sport haircuts that were apparently administered by a blind heroin addict in the men’s room of a Bulgarian disco in 1978.
Some of the players use only one name. There are famous Brazilian players named “Fred,” “Hulk” and “Kaka.”
Kaka
, for God’s sake.
Also they are complete wusses. Whenever they collide with something, such as another player, a tallish blade of grass or an unusually dense patch of air, they try to draw a foul call by hurling themselves dramatically to the turf, grabbing a random knee—it’s always a knee—and adopting the agonized facial expression of a man being castrated by irate lobsters.
If they don’t get the foul call, they’re back on their feet seconds later, miraculously healed from their near-fatal pretend injury.
On those seemingly random occasions when the referee
does
call a foul,
nothing happens
. The players simply resume running around and falling down.
But sometimes—for what appears to be exactly the same foul—the referee makes a big show of sternly displaying a yellow card to the player, looking not unlike a person brandishing a crucifix at a vampire. When this happens, the result is: Still basically nothing.
But on certain very special fouls—which, again, often do not appear to the naked eye to be any worse than any of the
other
fouls—the referee shows the player the dreaded Crucifix of Doom red card, and the player receives the most feared punishment in all of soccer: A normal haircut.
No, seriously, the red-carded player must leave the game, which means his team has to play the rest of the game with fewer players, which means it is
even less likely
, if such a thing is possible, that they will ever score a goal.
Sometimes the referee squirts a line of what appears to be shaving cream onto the field and the players line up behind it holding their hands protectively over their family jewels, looking like the waiting room at an express vasectomy clinic.
The scoreboard clock counts
up
, instead of down, as God clearly intended.
Also, unbelievably, the scoreboard clock
doesn’t show the official
time
. The official time is a secret known only to the referee, who keeps it on his special referee wristwatch that
nobody can see except him
.
Also the referee has the power to add some semi-random amount of minutes at the end to compensate for time wasted by players suffering comically fake injuries,