The recent article "Playing Right Wing" by Sasha Polakow-Suransky was fantastic. It summarized what many Americans understand about soccer in the United States but what unfortunately a handful of anti-soccer dinosaurs in the media do not.
Forget about soccer bashing in the United States -- it's too late to stop. Soccer is here and as American today as baseball was 100 years ago. (Soccer has been around this country longer than any other sport except baseball). Tune in MLS and WUSA on Saturdays, visit the Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, N.Y., and get on with it.
If America is to become a true world leader, a nation admired and followed by others (not a nation forced on others), we need to shed our illusion of sports supremacy (we dominate only the games we invented) and educate the blue bloods who represent us. They, along with the media quoted in Polakow-Suransky's article, may not understand the importance of America's soccer culture to the rest of the world. (Few in Europe or the Middle East or anywhere else in the world know, care or want to hear about the Lakers, Flyers or White Sox).
Sports culture is important and sports talk is a tremendous communication tool. It's time our leaders learned to speak soccer and bond with the rest of the world. Globalization anyone?
Will Lunn
President, CEO
National Soccer Hall of Fame
18 Stadium Circle
Oneonta, NY 13820
www.soccerhall.org
TAP Sees the Future
To the editor:
John Edward is psychic ["Back From Outer Space: With the end of The X-Files, the 1990s infatuation with UFOs may be dwindling. Will psychics take their place?," Matthew Nisbet, May 25, 2002]. You obviously did not do your homework before taking the position that he is a fraud. If you don't do your homework before you judge someone, you have absolutely no right to take anything more than a neutral position when you oppose him. You did not do your homework on him and yet you took the non-neutral position that he is a fraud. How dare you? Are you really so sure of the reality you live in? If so, point into the sky and tell me where the cosmos ends.
Gene Silvers
Los Angeles, CA
TAP Online responds:
Dear Gene:
Hey, while you're at it, we're psychic, too. We just knew some idiot would write in defending John Edward.
The Middling East
To the editor:
Everything Adam B. Kushner ["Mideast Misstep," June 27, 2002] and other critics of George W. Bush's Mideast "policy" speech have to say is valid. But the criticisms may be beside the point. The Bush team now has something it didn't before: the ability to say, "We have a policy, we've stated it." When the players or the world at large ask us to get involved, the administration can say, "We are. Read the speech." That this "policy" is built on air is its strength, if the purpose is simply not to be bothered about it for a while. If the conditions were realistic, the administration might actually have to work to maintain a course toward settlement.
Keep alert over the next year or two. I think we'll be hearing, like a broken record, "Just read the speech, that's our policy." While the killing goes on.
Russell Leach
