The Temptress

In my 7th grade Physical Science class, Molly McMann dominated my thoughts. How was I supposed to memorize the 3 basic rock types when she was sitting across the table from me? As soon as Mr. Marks said igneous, I went into the Molly Haze. Molly was hideous. Acne hit her early. She physically smelled - the formaldehyde was an upgrade - and she wore the same two outfits on alternating days.

Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday - Pepsi Sweatshirt (obviously she was too poor to get the Coca Cola sweatshirts us cool kids wore)
Tuesday-Thursday - Gotya (knockoff of Gotcha - whatever happened to those shirts, anyway?)

I could go on and on about Molly. She stole people’s paper and pens. She picked her nose. She had hot lunch stuck in her braces every day. She was awful. But she had boobs. Not just the hint of boobs that made us 7th grade hormone tornadoes wonder. Molly’s boobs worked all of us into violent F5s in a Kansas trailer park. We’d talk about them. We’d ogle them. A couple of guys got in serious trouble because they developed instant Parkinson’s and accidentally, uncontrollably, handled them.

Now is the point where I should say there were never any guarantees this blog would hold itself to a standard of class, dignity, and political correctness. If you’re a man and can’t remember what boobs did to you in 7th grade, you probably should be reading a newspaper anyway.

The MLS All-Star game is, to me as an adult soccer fan, the new Molly McMann. It’s hideous, tacky, and repulsive, but yet I still watch and enjoy the spectacle every year. It has boobs. I can’t help myself.

The temptation of the All-Star game is that we can believe, for one night, that our little domestic league with our little domestic players can stack up to the rest of the world. That belief is the boobs of the hideous spectacle. We see past the pathetic cheerleading of ESPN announcers. We ignore the Beckham hype. We turn the channel when the god freakin’ awful half-time pimple faced homeless man’s wannabe Nirvana embarrasses the sport on National TV.

But during the game, if you’re like me, you set aside logic and watch our players rip one of the most ardently followed teams in the world to shreds. You let yourself believe that Dwayne DeRosario is an undiscovered jewel, toiling under the Houston Refineries’ smoke where the world can’t see him, and enjoy watching him embarrass the Celtic midfield. You imagine he could be doing this in any league in the world, and you wonder why he isn’t signed immediately after the game.

It isn’t just DeRo, either. Ricardo Clark, Michael Parkhurst, Shalrie Joseph - a number of MLS players looked head and shoulders above their preseason Celtic counterparts. I know this would be a different game, with possibly a very different outcome, if Celtic were in midseason form and acclimated to Denver’s altitude. But the boobs are all I can see when I’m watching and enjoying MLS players dominate a meaningless game, and there will be time for logic later.