The Life in My Years

It was all going so well here in fortress America, where the formerly welcome from around the globe have become undesirables. The world, at least those who could afford it, arrived for the international crown jewel of sport, the World Cup, and almost everything that was anticipated to go wrong, didn’t.

Stephen Miller, America’s very own Joseph Goebbels, has remained quiet despite the fact that so many Muslims, people of color, and other forms of the unwashed masses have entered the country and brought with them their various wonderful cultural celebrations that give the MAGA-land the heebie-jeebies. Miller and his odious wife Katie who’ve combined to become the most horrible couple in America must be secretly fuming over the wave of “barbarians” who have the effrontery to come to America and charm Americans into being accepting.

While it’s true that the Iranian team was treated horribly, at least we’ve been spared scenes of platoons of masked ICE agents roughing up fans from Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and other African nations – the ones Trump has deemed to be “shitholes.”

For Americans like me, who have been enduring eleven tedious, wretched years of Trump and MAGA, the World Cup has been a cool, calming oasis in the middle of a godforsaken, fascist desert.

And then a barely known Brazilian guy named Raphael Claus gave the first domino a little flick that started the whole row to cascade in political calamity. It was the 64th minute of the U.S.v Bosnia and Herzegovina round of 32 match, when Claus, the match referee, reached into his pocket and held a red card in front of a stunned Folarin Balogun, the U.S. striker whose clete had caught defender Tarik Muharemovic’s ankle.

From my view the defender’s ankle was bent in a disgustingly awkward fashion but the foul, according to many former players and officials, did not warrant a red card penalty, one which disqualifies the player from the remainder of the current game and the following game. What makes a red card so onerous is the fact that, for the remainder of the game the team must play one man down.

For half an hour the U.S. team hung on for dear life to win the game. It was an inspiring story of resiliance and grit. But the U.S. team would have to play the next game, against seasoned, disciplined, and highly ranked Belgium, and the Americans would be going in with a spotty record against European teams. Win or lose though, it would have all the makings for a feel good Disney movie script.

If Balogun was some bench warming nobody, everyone would have shrugged and figured, next man up. But Balogun has been the go-to scorer on a team that is relatively deficient in that department. This was the equivalent of Shohei getting thrown out in the first inning of Game 7 of the World Series, or (as actually happened) the Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green getting suspended from Game 5 of the NBA Finals after getting his fourth flagrant foul.

Questionable calls are a fact of life in sports. Reactions run the gamut from harrumphs and cat calls from the bench, to mayhem (in 1983, when George Brett’s homer to put his Royals ahead of the Yankees in the 9th inning was nullified over an illegal bat, Brett went berserk, rocketed out of the Royals dugout, and came as close to an actual assault on an umpire as I’ve ever seen). In youth sports a muffed call can result in a referee getting punched by an enraged parent. And every now and then there’s the story of an aggrieved congressman, with nothing else to do but grandstand, who threatens a congressional hearing over a bad pass interference call.

But this is Trumpland. In Trumpland, the feel good Disney script gets cast into the shredder in favor of a Goodfellas kind of story. All that’s missing is Joe Pesci stuffing the referee into the trunk of a Buick.

In this story, no sooner had referee Claus put the offending red card in his pocket than Andrew Giuliani (son of, yeah, that Giuliani), the head of the White House World Cup task force got together with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to try and figure out how to get the call reversed (Lutnick is the clownish guy with chronic foot in mouth disease who can’t keep from spewing absurdities, like the time he envisioned millions and millions of Americans having the dream job of screwing little screws into Iphones once the Trump tariffs brought jobs back to the U.S.). Meanwhile, according to Giuliani, other White House staffers who are soccer fans formed discussion groups on how to tackle the issue. Of course, lawyers were dispatched. Because when things go sideways, either call in an airstrike, or unleash the lawyers.

“We put our heads together,” Giuliani said, “and kind of looked at it and said, well, there has to be a way to correct this injustice.” Would that they could have the same urgency when a soccer mom is whisked away by ICE agents to an undisclosed gulag.

Giuliani claimed that his task force was only assisting U.S. Soccer in the appeals process. According to CNN, “US officials were involved in a full-court press to try to convince FIFA to undo the decision.” From here, I see a chasm between “assisting,” and “a full court press.”

Meanwhile, an aggrieved hedge fund guy and soccer fan named Scott Goodwin got involved on the character assasination front (because you can’t have a respectable mob plot without a good dose of slander). Word went up the chain to Trump who claimed that Claus was “a little bit suspect if you check his past.” ​Said the man carrying 34 felony convictions.

FIFA shot back, “FIFA recognises Raphael Claus as one of the world’s leading professional referees ​and a valued member of Team One (FIFA’s elite group of referees) at the FIFA World Cup.”

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On Sunday the 5th, it came down from on high (or at least Gianni Infantino) that “the implementation of the automatic match suspension for USA player Folarin Balogun is suspended for a probationary period of one (1) year.” Balogun was in. It was unprecedented.

In defending the U.S. intervention, Giuliani made the preposterous claim that fans outside of the U.S. should rejoice that an “injustice” was undone, lending credence to the notion that delusion must run in the family gene pool. Because Giuliani’s assertion aged about as well as a day old trout under a Saharan sun. The international soccer community howled in outrage. By now, whatever good press that the U.S. had garnered from stories of Americans welcoming the world was being pissed away. America was once again a villainous, overbearing bully.

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Enter the capo di tutti i capi. Of course Donald Trump himself managed to get involved. Because Donald Trump just can’t help himself. If there’s a party to be pooped on, he’s Donnie on the spot.

The day after the announcement that the Balogun red card had been suspended, Donald Trump owned up to having inserted himself into the controversy. The story carried the usual stench of Trumpian bullshit. Over the course of a few sentences Trump managed to put contradictory nonsense on full blast. “I saw the play, and I’m a person that loves sports … that wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction . . ,” said Trump. At the same time he admitted that he didn’t know what a red card was, and then asked, “How do you penalize them for a game that hasn’t been played?”

Because them’s the rules Donnie. We all know that for you, rules, like the Constitution, are a minor inconvenience to be swatted like gnats, but the honest world tends to play by rules. Even when they do seem unfair.

Further fueling the notion that the fix was in, Infantino is known to be tight with both Lutnick and Trump. It was Infantino who became a charter member of the Trump sycophant club when the soccer boss presented Trump with the first of its kind “FIFA Peace Prize.” This was after Trump hosted an international pity party over not getting the real deal.

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Bad officiating is the mother’s milk of sports talk radio, and on Monday morning, sports talk was lit like Times Square on New Years Eve. Everyone who, just last June, thought that the beautiful game was effete boredom, had become a soccer expert. There was outrage against referee Claus and his “unfair” red card, and twisted rationalization for possible political pressure that resulted in Balogun’s red card being suspended.

On the mostly juvenile KNBR morning program the hosts clumsily tried to turn the swamp water of corruption into a fine Pinot of justice based on the claim that the original red card was unjust; their vintage carried putrid notes of, the ends justify the means, horse manure. One wonders if they would have had the same opinion if the U.S. were coming up against France and French scoring machine Kylian Mbappé had been the recipient of a similar ruling.

The reactions on social media ranged from praise for the red card suspension to the laughable idea that Balogun, in the name of good sportsmanship, should voluntarily sit out. By now I was feeling sorry for the American star. When he got the red card he was clearly devastated. And then his own government put the weight of the nation on his shoulders by appearing to finagle the suspension on his behalf.

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On Monday night the U.S team was routed, losing to Belgium 4 – 1. It seemed as if the Americans were sleepwalking through the game. All four goals resulted from American players being late to the play or out of position. One goal was scored when the goalkeeper found himself in no man’s land twenty yards from the goal and then whiffed horribly on a kick, allowing a Belgian player to shoot into an open net.

For his part, Folarin Balogun was a nonentity in the game as his teammates never managed to feed him a decent ball to shoot.

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The wrong was all made right on the field when Belgium won, but the greater damage had been done. The whole avoidable mess cast a pall on the international party.

In the end the only winner was the Belgian team, and they made certain that Trump heard about it by trolling the president on social media. The United States, both team and nation, came out of it all looking foolish. By all appearances the administration had managed to stack the deck, and still, the team lost – and badly.

Many Americans who had been rooting for their team (me included) were appalled by Trump’s intervention and started rooting for a Belgian win. It was a no-win situation. A U.S. win would’ve caused immdiate outrage and forever carried an asterisk. A loss would be a pie in the face. The only question left is, was it banana cream or vanilla cream?

Giuliani, Lutnick, and Trump will forget the whole incident and be ciphers in soccer lore; as if they’ll ever care. After the loss there’s been a deafening stillness coming out of the three meddlers; no thank yous to the team for bringing together the country, and being an inspiration, albeit a short one. Trump, Lutnick, and Infantino garnered yet another stain of corruption that they’ll shrug off as a minor cost of doing business.

For his part, Infantino is facing a crescendo of calls for him to resign. And FIFA? It can’t step out from the shadow of corruption.

There is a possible silver lining to all of this. After all of the shame, maybe, just maybe, Trump will recuse himself from the remainder of the event. Hopefully he’ll be too busy turning the White House into a tawdry, Walmartish Palace of Versailles to give out the trophy. But the shameless know no shame so I’m not holding my breath.

In the end, even sport itself lost. The slippery slope for these kinds of appeals happening in future tournaments has been laid. The Olympics are just two years away and Trump will still be in office. Olympic judging, with a history of controversy, will provide a target rich environment for Trump to make late night, strong arm phone calls.

The saddest characters in this story are the members of the U.S. team. They were thrust into a lose-lose situation by petty politicians who impulsively thrust themselves into a place where they had no business. But that’s how this adminstration works; shoot first and hide the body later.

On Tuesday morning, the knives were out. The American team was largely savaged in the media for its disappointing performance. Yes, they lost. But the dearth of appreciation for the two weeks of harmony that the team gifted a nation that, for over a decade has been arguing about everything, was disappointing. Sports pundits came off as personally insulted over the loss.

The two weekend warriors on 95.7 The Game morning show determined that U.S star Christian Pulisic, who took himself out of the game after suffering an ankle injury, was a malingering softie. Because hobbling around the field was going to help the team how? It’s amazing how a group of golden boys on Monday morning became dog meat 24 hours later.

Most of the criticism was aimed at soccer itself. Now that Team U.S.A. was eliminated the soccer haters were out in full force. On 95.7, the mid-morning hosts who had been soccer enthusiasts on Friday were, three days later, in full throated agreement with the callers who were back to labeling soccer as that boring, feeble, low scoring game, with weird rules, played by a bunch of whiny, flopping Euros.

That was more or less expected. Even if the United States had won the World Cup, it would all be forgotten in a matter of weeks when American football training camp begins.

America doesn’t deserve soccer.