I’ll admit it. I really started rationalizing my dislike for football (soccer) when I started writing about baseball. The two are connected and I live in a country where baseball was once the national game, but it no longer is because the people love football.

A few days ago at my apartment complex I saw some kids bouncing a soccer ball down the street. I decided to freak them out and yell “Soccer isn’t fun! Play baseball!” in Korean. In Korea older men (which I’m not quite) can still get away with yelling at kids in the street. After they got over the shock that I was speaking (yelling) in Korean and realized what I was saying they started giving it back to me:

“I don’t know baseball! I don’t like baseball!”

I turned and walked backwards toward my apartment, still yelling at the kids, them yelling at me.

And with that, I bring you this joyful little ditty…

One dead, 10 hurt in Vietnam football clash

Ah, yes. Fun loving football at it again. The world’s game. The fair game. The game of Marx and Engels.

One man died and at least 10 people were wounded in clashes between hundreds of football fans in Vietnam, state media reported Tuesday, in the most serious in a spate of similar incidents.

The violence erupted in the central city of Vinh on Sunday after a 1-1 draw between local V-League team Song Lam Nghe An (SLNA) and visitors Haiphong Cement, a team from Vietnam’s largest northern port city.

Fighting broke out after Haiphong scored an equaliser three minutes from time, which the 600 visiting Haiphong fans noisily celebrated with firecrackers, reported the state-run Vietnam News daily.

The hooligans then started to hurl bricks and bottles at each other.

Sorry folks. It doesn’t happen in baseball. Sure, once in a while people fall out of the stands and die, but you just won’t find this sort of crap happening at baseball games. I’d hazard a guess and say it happens in soccerfooty several times a year.

Vinh Stadium was also rocked by violence that left 10 people wounded in mid-April when local supporters clashed with fans of Hanoi-based The Cong following a 2-2 draw and pelted their fleeing bus with bricks and bottles.

If you’ve never read it I recommend Chuck Klosterman’s essay about soccer found in Sex, Drugs and Cocca Puffs. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“The truth is that most children don’t love soccer: they simply hate the alternatives more. For 60 percent of the adolescents in any fourth-grade classroom, sports are a humiliation waiting to happen. These are the kids who play baseball and strike out four times a game These are the kids who are afraid to get fouled in basketball, because it only means they are now required to shoot two free throws, which equates to two air balls…This is why soccer seems like a respite from all that mortification; it’s the one aerobic activity where nothingness is expected…Soccer feels “fun” because it is not terrifying–it’s the only sport where you can’t fuck up…However, the demand for such an oasis disappears once an outcast escapes from the imposed slavery of youth athletics…”

In retrospect this was very true in my life. I was always terrified of making the last out in a baseball game. But soccer didn’t offer that kind of pressure for an over-sensitive, under-sized kid like me. Thus, I was much better in soccer (Badlanders, 1984 — MVP).