Free Kicks

By: Robert | June 7th, 2007

Sorry this wasn’t up earlier, I had computer trouble of epic sized proportions among other things, which almost forced me to quit writing this twice.

I think I’m going to stick with the title “Free Kicks” for now, the best real submission I got was “Dribbling” from new reader Angela and I kinda like “Free Kicks” …that is unless of course something better comes along.

A couple things, I appreciate the rise in readership but I guess my new readers haven’t gone back and read my previous posts. Understandable this ain’t college, so I can’t expect people to do background research. So let me catch my new readers up on what they missed because I got a couple comments that left me bewildered.

I only decided to follow MLS this season, before then I treated it like global warming, it either didn’t exist or I just ignored it (Ha, pretty clever, I satisfied both sides of the political debate there.) I became an FC Dallas fan after playing the FIFA ’06 video game because Eddie Johnson and Carlos Ruiz seemed too much fun to resist and in retrospect that team was loaded (Simo Valakari, Ronnie O’Brien, Richard Mulrooney, etc.) But I’m learning on the go here, I say that because one of the comments I was recently left asked me about my feelings on the “Brimstone Cup” and I’ll be honest, I had no clue what that even was.

The commenter in question was a Chicago Fire fan and I had no idea how to reply to his question until I thought of an apt analogy, college football (trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.) In college football everyone wants their team to win the conference title and possibly the national one as well, but there are many smaller trophies played between rivals that are contested every year. For instance, my alma mater plays for “the Little Brown Jug.” (+1 if you can guess where I went to school.) Now, no one ever starts the season off and says “I want to win the Little Brown Jug,” but on gameday you don’t want to let that trophy go. It’s because that trophy is a symbol, a symbol of victory, to lose that symbol means you’ve lost a game and no fan wants their team to lose a game. Now I know I’m going to get replies like “it’s a contrived rivalry,” but if they build a mini-mall, we’re going to build a bigger mini-mall and if they make the world’s largest pizza, we’re going to burn down their city hall and if they swear to get even by spiking our water supply, we’ll know they don’t have to guts to go through with it (incredible reference there.) So we’ll celebrate this fabricated derby (or is it darby…I’ve seen it spelled both ways) and next time we’re in Chicago we’ll bring the Brimstone Cup down Lake Shore Drive and back up Michigan Ave so you Chicago fan’s can see it because its headed back to Dallas where the FC stands for “Frustrated completely” (it probably stands for something different but this has been a really hard day.)

HOOPS PRIDE!

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