It's been a while.
And I'm not sure I'm ready to let The Sweetest Thing join the internet dumping ground of abandoned blogs.
Last night I had a free Whitecaps ticket thrust upon me. I like to think that this is because I am such a big deal in the GR area that the West Michigan Whitecaps are eager for me to check out their facilities and drum up some excitement for the 2012 season.
Of course that's not true... but let's pretend it is.
Now, the whitecaps are nothing spectacular, but I like to watch 'em because that's where Brandon Inge stumbled out of, along with Joel Zumaya, Ramon Santiago, Brennan Bosch, and my favorite, Don Kelly.
So somehow I ended up sitting next to a soccer fan. Soccer fans kind of suck. I'm sure many of them are nice people, but that doesn't downplay the suckiness factor. Soccer fans like to inform the world of their love of soccer. They also like to convince non-soccer fans to love it too. You can be talking about the latest episode of America's Got Talent and suddenly they're throwing out references to the Chicago fire, and it takes you 20 minutes to realize they're talking soccer and not Mrs. O'leary's cow.
So soccer fan, true to form, waits until the Whitecaps take to the plate to start talking about his life as a soccer ref. Because I made the mistake of telling him that "I don't really get soccerrrrr...", he took the time to walk me through the rule book and demonstrate various fouls on/to me (that slow-motion elbow to the trachea was eye-opening, ...stranger). Every soccer conversation I get sucked into ends with me stating "I just can't get on board with a sport where both teams can lose at the same time. What's the point of watching for an hour if it just ends in a tie?" and I slink away...
Usually this is effective, but in a stadium full to capacity of people anxiously waiting for post-game fireworks, my escape routes were limited. His response?
"Typical baseball fan..."