Overcompensation

As the FIFA World Cup is scheduled to begin this week, the strange North American inferiority complex with football comes to the forth again. It is perhaps telling that people in the rest of the world does not care about what sports we play over here. Some play basketball, some baseball, some ice hockey, and even some American football, but no one is concerned, much less laugh uneasily about any of them. Somehow, in North America, mostly the States but some Canadians too, most people acts towards soccer like a little boy leaning on the fence murmuring about the big boys on the field playing without him. It is rather pathetic really. So, I am not going to call it the soccer world cup but the football world cup. This is not because I have anything against North American football, American or Canadian. After all, I am a fan of the Detroit and the B.C. Lions. The problem is, and it is well documented, that North American Football is a misnomer. You cannot call a game football when 99% of the time kicking the ball is prohibited. When it comes to other major sports around here, the names tends to be very logical, basketball and baseball are named after the objectives of the game, and hockey the tool of the game. If North American football is to be renamed to be more logical, it may be called lineball. It is, after all, a game that moves from line to line until the goal line is achieved. The Lineball Lions may not sound very macho but come to think of it, neither is football. Oh, well, if kicking a ball is sissy, then calling a game football is hypocritically sissy. No wonder it is such a violent game.