It if was not enough to have to listen to Michael Wilbon gratuitously ping soccer for no good reason on ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption – which I watch religiously – now comes CNN’s Rowland Martin not only to demean the world’s most popular sport but to advocate violence against gays. Wilbon is quite sane on the gay matter but civil rights pressure groups are after Martin’s head.
Tag Archives: soccer
All the World’s a Soccer Ball
The sight astounded my friend Tony. He had entered another world far, far different than anything he had experienced. I had warned him. He did not believe it when I told him what to expect. He had been to stately Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., before, but not for anything like this. In many ways that day for me in 1978 was when the modern era of globalization became real, although its forces were already underway.
Little did we know then that the arguments among the Chinese elites were underway on whether or how to bring China out of its communist shell into the real world. Only six years prior, Richard Nixon had astounded the world by travelling to Peking to set off the debate. Three decades later, the world has changed, so that Beijing ranks as important as Washington. Continue reading