When Kasey Keller had a Mullet

Patton Oswalt wrote an article fairly recently about the rise of the geek.  It's a great piece that really points out the glory and fallacy of geek chic culture.  On the one hand it is no longer shameful to be a geek.  You can fly that geek flag with pride!  On the other hand, anyone can be a geek without trying.  This is anathema to the whole point of being a geek really.  A weekend of Netflix watching and someone can talk like a Star Trek veteran, but the geekiness was never incubated.  Instead of a fine wine we have this fast food wine that only some people can tell is inferior.

Miles Raymond: [while tasting wine] It tastes like the back of a fucking L.A. school bus. Now they probably didn't de-stem, hoping for some semblance of concentration, crushed it up with leaves and mice, and then wound up with this rancid tar and turpentine bullshit. Fuckin' Raid.

Jack: Tastes pretty good to me.

My lens for viewing this is from being a soccer fanatic growing up.  It's hard to explain to people who are into soccer now just what that meant in the 80's.  The Pele fueled NASL league died a horrible, writhing death on the floor of the early 80's (Once in a Lifetime is a great documentary on this!), the US couldn't qualify for a world cup, and American soccer became a wasteland.  There were few stations in the US that showed soccer.  The ones that did usually showed soccer from Mexico or Argentina; good leagues, but not close to the star powered European leagues.   There was no internet, so your only hope of getting league standings was from strange English magazines that made little sense to an American teenager.  The closest I got to seeing a pro soccer match was professional indoor soccer, a bastardized version of soccer manufactured for people with attention deficit disorder.

Most high schools did not offer soccer programs or (even more degrading for a guy) only offered girls soccer.  Football coaches or worse, baseball coaches (from a soccer point of view, baseball seems the physical exertion equivalent of having a picnic), would mock soccer as anti-American and encouraged their players to do the same.  Hell, some of them openly felt that getting kids to play soccer was a communist plot.  You had to be strong of character to play soccer back then.

This started to change when Paul Caligiuri launched the US into the World Cup for the first time in 40 years.  I remember reading a big, newspapery profile of every US World Cup player in the first issue of Soccer America featuring, as backup goalkeeper in a picture he likely wishes was banned from the internet, a young Kasey Keller, the man now synonymous with Northwest US soccer.

Business in front, party in the back of the goal.

We sucked.  It was damn near impossible to find these games on TV, but I found the games, watched them suck, and watched with pride.  From these ashes of suckiness arose Major League Soccer.  Twenty years later and here I am in the Northwest, unable to buy tickets to soccer matches due to games selling out at high prices.  People who don't know who Tab Ramos, Claudio Renya, or even Steve Cherundolo are, who couldn't tell you what NASL stands for, and some who only puzzled out what an offside trap is a few years ago are now screaming songs and waving flags at games.

In a lot of ways, I can't help but feel like how a grizzled 80's punk rocker must have felt when Green Day became big.  This weird mix of happiness and bitterness.  I like how popular soccer is and yet I feel like my passion has been co-opted; that years of service to the sport should entitle me to buy tickets to the game when I want and at a discount.  And yet... it's so nice to have people to talk to about the sport... even if I do have to educate people with green painted faces on what aggregate goal count means.