Change the Channel Like Beckham

In the past, dear reader, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” have remarked on our hatred of soccer. If you ask us, the game is mind-numbingly boring. What’s worse, snooty Americans attempt to seem cosmopolitan by pretending to esteem the sport. For some reason, liberals believe that faking enthusiasm for soccer (pardon us: Football) demonstrates great concern for poor Paraguayans.

This renders the game the athletic equivalent of the UN. Gosh: No wonder we loathe it.

As such, we’re a bit embarrassed to admit that we got mildly swept up in the whole David Beckham Arrives with his Ridiculous Wife to Play in America fiasco. We can’t help it: Every darn news report focused on the squillions of dollars the LA Galaxy is paying him. How could you ignore this incessant press?

Well, when we say we have been “swept up” by this David Beckham business, we really mean that we’ve become suitably interested to watch a few seconds of soccer on the television in order to spy Mr. Beckham on the field. That might not sound like much, but, given our healthy disdain for soccer, believe us when we tell you that it means a fair amount.

Accordingly, the other day we magically found ourselves sitting in front of the boob tube, about to take in a soccer match. Weird, isn’t it? Broadcast on ESPN 8 (“The Ocho”), the game featured the LA Galaxy (Beckham’s club) and their rivals, the Dubuque Mudhens. Or some such. Frankly, we already forgot the name of the opposing team.

Anyway, much to our surprise, Mr. Beckham actually failed to dash all expectations by taking the field at some point. By this time, we had begun knitting an advent calendar, sucking down a few bottles of cough syrup, and doing grout work in the bathroom, because the soccer was so excruciatingly dull.

Still, Beckham kicked the ball a couple of times, earning the noisy adulation of the LA Galaxy faithful. Oh, the roar of the crowd: The dramatically overpaid British pseudo-hope for soccer in the States ran around like a ninny for a bit. Be still our collective heart.

Last we checked, Mr. Beckham didn’t score a goal. Not one. Nor, we might add, did anyone on his team. You can count all their goals on no fingers. Though we didn’t catch the end of the game—for surely that much soccer would have brought on a particularly nasty seizure—we think that the final score was 1-0.

You know what that means, dear reader. It means that someone actually scored a goal during the course of the entire match. One whole goal. In one game.

Man, no wonder people dig this soccer so much.