In the Spotlight: Soccer still looking to score in America

After an exciting World Cup rolled up record TV ratings, Sports Illustrated declared that soccer, its hour come 'round at last, is slouching toward the United States:

"American soccer now has its greatest opportunity. If those who control this burgeoning game in the U.S. have the good sense and the enlightened self-interest to discipline themselves and to take a decent posture toward soccer, we may yet have a shot at international recognition in a game that, thanks to an accident in sporting history, passed us by."

The only catch: Those lines appeared in Sports Illustrated in March 1967. The two new professional leagues the magazine ballyhooed were stillborn a month later. Certainly they still loom large in the memories of TV cameramen, who every week had to come up with breathtakingly acute new camera angles to disguise the vast expanse of empty seats at the games. If you're one of the 870 fans who attended the match between the Chicago Spurs and the Los Angeles Toros in Chicago's 61,500-seat Soldier Field in June 1967, bring your ticket stub to me and I'll buy you an ice-cream cone.

If Sports Illustrated was the first to sample the soccer Kool-Aid, plenty of others have guzzled from the same pitcher in the past four decades. As the joke goes, soccer is America's sport of the future - and always will be.

From carny hucksters trying to make a quick buck selling franchises to earnest assistant professors who are morally certain that world peace would be achieved if only Americans could be made to appreciate the intricacies of the corner kick, we've been endlessly bombarded with predictions that we'll feel the sudden urge to chant our allegiance to the scoreless ties and incomprehensible offsides calls that make soccer so enthralling.

Here's the cold blunt fact of the matter: Americans hate soccer, and we've been hating it for a century and a half. The British brought the game when they settled their American colonies, and we played it for a while ... and then, like their tea, we threw it overboard. Soccer's precipitous decline in the United States came in the 1870s and 1880s, when three made-in-America sports - baseball, basketball and fo