Pace my colleague Eugene Girin, I stand with Ann—and with Tom Piatak and with Aaron D. Wolf, who have fought for American sporting sanity for years.  We were country when country wasn’t cool.

For years, we have resisted the foreign invasion that is soccer, unmasking the imposition of the “beautiful game” for what it is: an attempt by tradition-hating leftists to internationalize American sport.  Soccer is a life-draining, coma-inducing, globalization friendly event, and watching it amounts to going to the gym to look at skinny men doing cardio and feigning injury.

Americans already have their sports traditions: Friday night lights, the Original Six, the Called Shot (at Wrigley Field), Bird Versus Magic, the Rumble in the Jungle (international flair!).  We also hunt quail and whitetail and fish for channel cat and crappie.  We don’t need to embrace leveling boredom to prove that we have made it and are acceptable in the sight of E.U. bureaucrats and Third World dictators.  I bet Uday Hussein, an obnoxious loony if there ever was one, couldn’t hit a free throw or throw a tight spiral or track down a coon with his hound and blast him out of a tree to save his life.  Yes, exactly.