ArcaMax

Forty years ago, if you wanted to sound smarter than your stupid buddies, you looked thoughtfully at the football game on the TV over the bar, and you got a profound beer-related look in your eye.

"Ya know, soccer is probably going to be the next big American sport," you said. "They play it all over the world. In most countries, they don't even know what American football is."

"Maybe you should go home and lay down," your buddy Jake the Snake said.

But you stayed because you had a bet on the game, and if you didn't collect the $20 as soon as it was over, you might never see Jake again.

A little over 30 years ago, the Colombian national soccer team was practicing pretty close to the American city where I lived. They were in America to play soccer against some other teams from foreign countries. As a newspaper columnist, I went to a reception for the team with one of the sports writers from the paper where I worked.

"Look at these little guys," I said when we walked in. "What's that guy over there, 5'6?

"That's why soccer will never be big in America," I said to the sports writer. "Americans like big athletes. We like heavyweight boxers. We like 380-pound linemen and 6'8 basketball players with feet like pontoons. I wouldn't be afraid to fight most of these guys."

I wasn't bragging, either. I'd been hit by bigger guys when I was in high school.

And I wrote that in my weekly column, and I got angry letters from 14 recent immigrants.

The area where I live in Massachusetts is immigrant-heavy, so you always saw guys playing pickup soccer in the parks. This didn't bother anyone. You figured one generation of the American diet, and the kids of those soccer-playing immigrants would be big enough to play football. The kids would play football because high school boys couldn't get girls playing soccer. Like being in a band, or owning a Harley, getting girls is nearly the only reason to play high school sports.

Then, I started seeing white kids with American-born parents playing soccer out in the suburbs. This was because, unlike football, even the smaller kids could get on the team, and white suburban parents didn't want their kids to get so brain-damaged they couldn't make it through college and get a job with the state. You ruin your knee, you can make it through law school. You take a buncha hits to the head, you could end up with one of those jobs where you gotta wear a hairnet to work.

I regard all sports as vehicles for gambling. If you can't bet on it, I'm not interested, and for a long time, I couldn't figure out how to gamble on soccer.

"I can't bet on soccer," I told Jake the Snake one Thanksgiving when we were deep-frying a turkey in his driveway. "What am I supposed to bet on, which player has the smallest waist?"

Eventually I figured out at least one useful rule for getting a bet down on soccer.

In general, the worse a country is at war, the better they are at soccer. This is why France does so good in the World Cup. Soccer is the only sport where you can determine the betting line by checking both teams' World War II score.

Soccer is also a useful way to prove that racism is not solely an American disease.

"Oh, Europeans are so much more advanced than Americans," is what you hear. "They're not racist like we are."

Then, there's a Black player on the French team, and they're playing the Italian team, and the Italian fans start making monkey noises and pelting the Black player with bananas. I don't know what they call that in Roma, but I know what they call it in Arkansas.

This year, some of the 2025 World Cup games will be played a couple hours from my Rhode Island home. I won't be going, but there's a tacky little casino maybe 15 minutes from my house, and I'll go there and spread a few $20 bets around.

If America loses in Iran by then, I'm gonna have to move some of my bets around.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.