BAD GAME, GOOD BEER:

Fair trade: A dull sport for a bland beer (Paul Mulshine, June 22, 2006, Newark Star-Ledger)

I turned on the TV to give the World Cup a try. Portugal was playing Mexico. People were falling over a lot and the ball was going everywhere but into the goal. The announcer seemed excited anyway. It turned out that Angola was playing Iran at the same time, he said. "If anything happens in that game, we'll switch over to it," he told us.

Well, there you have it: A direct admission from an expert that, during most of the typical soccer game, nothing happens.

Yet that nothing seems tremendously exciting to the fans. Throughout the game, they kept up a din so loud that it must have awakened the scorekeeper from the long naps he takes between goals.

Hence the need for beer. It is impossible to imagine sober people working themselves up into such a lather while nothing is happening on the field. And up till this tournament, European soccer fans had access to great quantities of high- quality stuff. The English have their wonderful ales, the Germans their lagers and so forth.

That all changed this year. It seems that Anheuser-Busch paid $40 million to become the exclusive beer sponsor of the tournament, which is run by a group called FIFA, one of the initials of which stands for "football" even though it's a soccer tournament. [..]

In Europe, Bud sells at premium prices. And the Europeans gladly pay, says Dave Hoffman, who runs the Climax Brewery in Roselle Park.

"When I went to London, I was appalled," said Hoffman. "Half the people at the bar were drinking Bud, Coors or Miller."

So Franklin Foer got that wrong too--not even soccer can resist Americanization. Fortunately, he was quite right that we easily avoid soccerization.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2006 9:00 PM