Soccer and Tennis

As much as I love to play tennis, I hate soccer. Even though I lived part of my life in South America where that's almost like a religion, I never liked it. While all my friends where having heated discussions about which team was better and who's team was gona kick who's ass, I just waited for the results and went celebrating anyway. I never woke up on Monday waiting for Sunday -or was it Saturday?- for the national league to play and glue my little self to the TV set for almost two hours watching a game. I could care less about soccer.

In South America, soccer is not only a passion, but is also pretty much the only sport everybody plays. When I was a little kid I'll go out to play with my friends on the street and besides breaking things, we'll be playing soccer. That was good fun and back in those days, and on the street we where pretty much as good -or as bad- as everybody else. Once we started growing up and the games and players became more serious, I started really hating soccer. I was a very bad player and got excluded of most of the games; or sometimes when there wasn't an even number of players, I'll have to wait for the first team to score, and then I'll be like a prize for them. I usually played defense; I'll be hanging close to the goal keeper and whenever someone will come with the ball, I'll kick him in order to get the ball.

That's why I moved to tennis, and I loved it from the very beginning. I was never really good at it, but I always enjoyed it so much. As you find here in the US many public tennis courts, in South America and China there's none. That's a sport that you can practice only if you have a membership to a club or league, plus you need to buy rackets and balls and all that stuff. Maybe that's the reason soccer is so popular around the world: you don't need money to practice it, just a ball and a group of friends.

And maybe that's the same reason why is not popular in the United States, because you don't need to buy all kind of equipment in order to play it. It may be close to basketball, but for soccer you don't even need a particular court, you can just play it on the street, on a park, in the backyard of your house, in your living room -I did and it didn't went well-, in the country side, on the beach, etc. just name it.

But I don't like it. What is funny is when people learn that I grew up in South America and I don't like soccer. They always go like "what?! Someone from South America that doesn't like soccer?! Are you serious?". I always reply by asking them how many red haired guys from South America they know, and usually the answer is "none". Then I said "well, I guess that makes me unique in many ways". End of the topic, let's move to blonde hair girls.

And if someday someone says that he knows a red haired from South America, I have plenty of "mixes" to add to the recipe until they say "none", including that I'm part French, that I lived in China (Beijing) for a while, my little story in Russia and so on. No matter what, there's no human or divine force that can make me change my mind about soccer and tennis.

Anyway, what I wanted to say when I started writing this post is that I played tennis this morning, and I kick ass!