Musings for a Monday morning on different standards for different sports and our passing quadrennial romance with soccer . . .
• Imagine, for instance, if the Broncos did what the Avalanche just did, selecting a player in the first round of the draft who was generally expected to be selected later.
Oh, wait.
Here were the first few reactions on a popular Avs message board to the club’s selection of Joey Hishon with the 17th pick of the NHL draft:
“Who the **** is that?”
“Who?”
“Who??????????? Trade down, you stupid (bleeps)!”
“Well this (stinks).”
“Wow . . . I am in shock . . .”
“Coulda had this guy at 47.”
And so on.
The truth is nobody knows whether Hishon will develop into a better or worse player than Austin Watson or Emerson Etem, who would have been greeted more enthusiastically because experts generally rated them higher. Unfortunately, it turns out that experts don’t predict the future much better than your neighborhood tarot card reader.
In the same way, football fans don’t really know whether Tim Tebow will be a successful NFL quarterback, although they may think they do because they saw him play in college. But in the case of football, this fact doesn’t stop anybody from having an instantaneous, inviolable, highly emotional opinion on the subject.
In the case of hockey, once the message board denizens cool down, we seem mostly willing to wait and see if the Avs knew what they were doing.
• Bad signs for the North Korean soccer team after its elimination from the World Cup: “We failed to reach our goal,” coach Kim Jong-Hun said. “I want to apologize for this to our people. I do not think that we will be punished.”
• Like the Avs, the Nuggets seem to have gotten a mulligan after their odd NBA draft day lament. They wanted to trade into the second round to select a big man, vice president Rex Chapman said, but weren’t able to do it.
This was odd because a year ago the Nuggets had a second- round pick with a talented big man sitting there (DeJuan Blair, who went on to average 7.8 points and 6.4 rebounds as a rookie for the Spurs) and chose to trade the pick away, as they often do.
This year marked the third draft out of the last four in which the Nuggets had no pick. Their voluntary abandonment of the talent pipeline has produced no civic unrest to date.
• Bad signs for the North Korean soccer team following its elimination from the World Cup: After returning from a sporting event in South Korea seven years ago, 100 North Korean cheerleaders were sent to re-education camp, but only 20 were sent on to a gulag.
• Which brings us to soccer and the quadrennial complaint that the USA should not settle for mediocrity at the World Cup. After all, pretty much every yuppie’s kid plays, doesn’t she?
Alas, participation by the affluent doesn’t equate to sporting success. As a meritocracy, sports represent one of the most direct escape routes from poverty, which helps to explain why so many star athletes come from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Young football and basketball prodigies are recruited from early ages in the U.S. because of the vast revenues those sports produce. Not so with soccer, where a “pay to play” system prevails. The better the kids are, the more it costs their parents to provide elite training and competition.
Most of the rest of the world does the opposite, plucking promising young players as early as 7 or 8, subsidizing their training and getting the investment back by selling players’ rights to pro teams when they grow up.
As long as a kid’s ability to get elite soccer training is based in part on economic status, the U.S. will not be a soccer power.
• In the meantime, maybe soccer can figure how to get goal calls right. Considering how seldom they happen, you’d think FIFA could manage this.
• Bad signs for the North Korean soccer team after its elimination from the World Cup: “The players and coach are rewarded with huge bonuses when they win,” a German tabloid quoted a former coach and defector as saying. “But they have to atone for losing by being sent to work in the coal mines.”
Dave Krieger: 303-954-5297, dkrieger@denverpost.com or
