More soccer

Yesterday I ran a seven-miler during the noon hour at an 8:24 pace, the best run I've had in weeks. I ran across an office mate running on the Mall and I signaled for him to join me on a "Bridge Run" over to Virginia on the Memorial Bridge and back to DC on the 14th Street Bridge. He was game and we pushed each other. He's going to his H.S. reunion in Germany in a matter of weeks and wants to look good for it so he's working hard in the interim (he's faster than me). He said they won't be doing any running but they're going to drink a lot of beer. German beer out of steins.

My kind of reunion. My last H.S. reunion only confronted me with the fact that both of my high school roommates have passed on. Sigh.

Yesterday evening I went with someone from work to see a MLS game at RFK, the second professional soccer game I've seen in two weeks. It's a long story. (Whatever happened to the NASL?)

Anyway, the seats were highest up in the extreme corner of the lower deck. I could look down and see the top of the head of anyone taking a corner kick from that side. There was a foul pole in the way of my seeing some of the goalie box. (RFK is a baseball stadium.)

Good thing we arrived on time. DC United scored in the sixth and eighth minutes, both goals occurring right in front of us. It was pretty exciting. That was pretty much it. The other 82 minutes, the two sides swapped penalty kicks. DC beat the New York Red Bulls 3-1.

There were lots of balls the attacking team sent from inside their opponent's goalie box back to midfield, then back to their end of the field, then back to their goalie. This apparently is how you set up the attack in soccer, by slowly sending the ball backwards 80 yards.

The GK would hold the ball for forty seconds while everyone on offense and defense settled into their places on the long field nicely and then he'd loft a 50-50 ball back to midfield. This is as exciting as watching Mark Brunnell take snaps to throw passes.

But the DC United penalty kick was historic. You see, there's a guy on the United named Jaime Moreno. He's 33. In his eleven years in the MLS he had scored 108 goals.

He had scored three times this season, all on penalty kicks. His last goal was three months ago.

United Striker Luciano Emilio, this season's leading MLS scorer, was taken down in the box as he got free with the ball. Ignoring both the fullback's and Emilio's obligatory hands beseeching the heavens from their knees, the ref set the ball up on the 12 yard line and signaled for a PK. PK is referee shorthand for, I'm awarding this team an automatic point and probably the game.

Unlike the NBA where the fouled player takes the shot, anyone can shoot the PK. Moreno stepped up to the plate. (Sorry.) At the end of the season, if Emilio misses the scoring crown by one goal, do you think he'll remember this moment in a different light?

The dumb thing about PKs is that the GK can't move until the ball is struck. Motionless one moment, he's diving by guess and by golly the next. Yawn.

So Moreno took this PK and rolled his 109th lifetime goal inside the side of net two feet past one upright bar while the GK dove towards the other upright bar. Egg on your face! I swear the announcer bellowed "goal" as one word for ninety seconds. (Who is #19?)

You see, Moreno broke the record for the most lifetime goals ever in the MLS. Once the announcer had completely run down his copious breath pronouncing the one word "goal" for a minute and a half, he next announced that we could purchase "109, I was there" t-shirts in the concourse. How long were those suckers on ice waiting to be sold?

Here's the problem that soccer has in America as a major professional sport. Have you heard that Hank Aaron's lifetime homerun record was broken earlier this month? Did you hear that Jason Kreis's (who?) lifetime goal record was broken last night? See what I mean?

Next post: If there was $8 in cash lying on the floor in a crowded room that wasn't yours, would you claim it? Come on now! What if it was yours and somebody swifter than you claimed it and stuck it away in their pocket. What would you do? Come on now! It's a jungle out there!

Bend It Like Beckham

Ninety minutes, one-oh. That's my notion of watching a soccer game, reinforced by all those years I coached soccer when my three boys were growing up. As in 90 minutes of exciting runs across the midfield pitch with two or three wildly exciting breaks into the box (ohh!) and one ball that actually goes in (ahh!!). Delirium. What a game! But beware of the zero-zero tie. Because then they play sixty more minutes of overtime. And it ain't sudden death. Oh no, it's slow death.

I went to see English superstar David Beckham in his MLS playing debut at RFK on Thursday evening. It was a sold-out crowd. The LA Galaxy paid him $32.5 million to come rejuvenate soccer in America. This is a business model that was tried in the seventies when Pele was lured to America by the NASL to rejuvenate soccer in America. That league shortly became defunct.

The MLS has a problem. This is a major professional sports league that has been around for several years. I'll bet you can't even say what MLS stands for unless you figure it out for a few seconds. (Quick! Name one other soccer player in the MLS besides Beckham. Now name two hockey players in the NHL. See what I mean?)

I bought tickets for the match last month hoping that my estranged 21-YO son would go with me (a divorce, and PAS, situation). My oldest boy was a wonderful soccer player, swift and courageous with a good kick. He was a scorer on a travel (select) team.

It all slipped away from him as the boy took the easy and intellectually lazy route to adolescent comfort in the absolute familial destruction engendered by the berserker current American domestic law system. He quit soccer along with discarding his dad as he was grotesquely manipulated by all the social-work "professionals" who routinely murder the childhoods of children to achieve gain for their client or their agenda in the insane modern American divorce warfare.

I called NOS and left a message about taking him to this game. He ignored me. I wrote him about taking him to this game. He ignored me. His Mother (I think he still lives with Sharon Rogers, two miles away) was undoubtedly proud of him, again. I went to the game anyway.

These soccer players kick the ball very hard. But the goalkeepers (us soccer parents know them as goalies) can use their arms and hands, to everyone else merely using the rest of their body. That, coupled with soccer's oppressive and incomprehensible offsides rule, means lots of 1-0 contests. Any actual scoring is regularly waved off for being offsides.

Anyway, Beckham has been nursing a sore ankle even while his traveling road show has been selling out soccer stadiums. There was a sell-out in Toronto but he didn't play in that 0-0 nailbiter. Oops.

The DC United/LA Galaxy game sold out within two days of the tickets being put up for sale. But then started a month-long watch on how his ankle was. Would he play? Likely not.

He didn't start.

DC United scored in the 27th minute. Gooooooooooooooooooooaall!!!! Um, it was exciting for sure. The guy who scored whipped around the pitch like he'd just discovered the secret to cold fusion.

And that was it. It would have been a good time to beat the subway crush.

Beckham went into a warm-up routine late in the first half. The crowd roared. The skies opened and the rain came down.

The second half came and Beckham continued his warmups. A Galaxy player was red-carded and sent off the pitch. In the 72d minute Beckham came in. The crowd went wild. Beckham played center-midfielder and suspiciously was in open space the whole way.

Not many balls came to him. But when one did, you could see the promise. His kicks curled down to the pitch perfectly for a breaking teammate to run up upon and streak in on goal. But no teammates were ever there. I think they haven't discovered yet what he can do and so they don't "create." It takes energy to create. They give you millions in the NBA to create off the ball. In the MLS they give you tens of thousands. You can do the math.

Oh yeah, it ended 1-0. Beckham had a shot on goal, from 60 yards out, easily handled by the GK (no LA player was there). It could have been a 50-50 ball. His one free kick was a fine one. No LA player was where it came down.

The LA Galaxy was off to a sold-out crowd in Boston next, on Sunday. Beckham wouldn't play in that 1-0 thriller, won by New England. Oops.

Pele, meet Beckham. The result will be the same.

Changes

The Capitol Hill Classic 10K is one of DC's most hallowed races. Its 28th running was Sunday. The race is a journey around Capitol Hill, a trip where runners casually pass by several American icons.

Runners set off from Stanton Square near Union Station and bolt out past Lincoln Park to RFK. There they circle that multipurpose refuge from the seventies and return to Lincoln Park before running down to Pennsylvania Avenue near Eastern Market, the city's oldest continuously operating mercantile space. Then it's back to East Capitol Street where the runners take aim at the back of the Capitol, running past the Supreme Court Building on the right. A left turn takes them past the front of the Folger Shakespeare Library and a sharp right on Independence takes them down steep Capitol Hill alongside the Capitol.

With the Mall laying out in front of them, at the bottom of the hill the racers turn right at the U.S. Botanic Garden and run past a statue of the martyred president James A. Garfield. They pass below and in front of the Capitol with its innumerable stairs where, to their left, the busy Civil War statue with Grant bestriding his horse dominates the east end of the Mall. As the runners approach the Robert A. Taft statue they turn right one last time and come upon merciless Capitol Hill on the uptake in the sixth mile. After laboring up its quarter-mile length, runners enter Stanton Square from the opposite direction and cross the finish line.

Running up that long hill last Sunday in my first Capitol Hill Classic 10K was the toughest hill mount I have ever done during a race, bar none. (I am not counting a few spectacular hills I have walked up during races, like the Calvert Climb at National. The nineteenth mile of the first Baltimore Marathon also springs to mind, as does the 26th mile at Washington's Birthday Marathon in Greenbelt.)

Capitol Hill sucked all the energy out of my body on Sunday. Those two or three or four minutes I toiled up it are still vivid in my memory.

My splits dropped from the mid-sevens for the entire race up to that point to over nine in the sixth mile. Depleted, I ran the last quarter-mile on level ground to the finish at a pace of well over eight.

I have run up Capitol Hill plenty of other times and it has not bothered me before. I ran up it in the 2002 Marine Corps Marathon, the last of my five-hour marathons. The hill didn't seem so noticeable then, but I was five years younger and I also expended considerably less energy in marathons in those days.

At the tail end of a fast 10K, the hill is brutal. But that's all about to change.

Reporter and local running legend Jim Hage aptly calls it a "gut-check climb" in his post about Sunday's race. He also reported that this year's run up Capitol Hill could be its "last rites." Security, you know. (Don't you feel so much safer now than you did when the Decider declared war on shapeless amorphous terror oh so long ago?)

The course will be moved to eliminate its charge down and then back up The Hill. What?

That is the race's signature moment, it's defining experience. When you turn right and start ascending The Hill, you encounter the exquisite feeling of being so close and yet so far. Also, there is plenty of time to brood about the hill lying in wait as you first go flying down its other side, knowing that soon payment will be extracted for your freewheeling flight downhill in the fifth mile.

Here's what the race director told me about the impending course change. "The course will change next year. The Capitol Hill Police has a long standing rule preventing races from running entirely around the Capitol. For 28 years we've been exempted from that. However, I was told in late April that we were not going to be allowed to run this course. I argued that it was too late to change this year, and they relented, on the condition that we change it next year. I don't know what the course will be at this point, although we might be able to work out something that involves the Hill, just not around it."

The older I get the more I hate change. I am so glad I ran the 10K on Sunday so I could experience the hill's soul-sucking effect during an otherwise fast race. If I had not done the race this year despite some nagging injuries, I would have lost my chance at experiencing The Hill in its full form, possibly forever.

May the Capitol Hill Classic stay true to its origins.