Cruel Summer

All signs today are pointing toward pen meeting paper on a new collective bargaining agreement and the return of football. If you're like me, it's the final nail in the coffin to what has been an excruciating last few months. The Summer of 2011 will be remembered, regardless of how August shakes out, as the season of labor strife. Not only did we have to deal with the potential loss of an upcoming football season, but the NBA had to go on strike as well.

Even sadder than that was the fact that, without non-labor related NBA and NFL headlines, we were forced to compensate for the loss of two hot stove offseasons by paying more attention to other sports. The problem with that is, nobody stepped up in football and basketball's absence. Golf has been ho-hum with Tiger Woods on the mend. Tennis didn't have any epic Federer-Nadal clashes or dominant performances from the Williams sisters or even another match along the lines of last year's Isner-Mahut showdown. Baseball has generated the typical buzz befitting a season midway into 162 games, which is to say minimal. Nobody cares about 16-inning sagas like the Rays and Red Sox had last week when it's being played in mid-July. The attention starts to get paid when we get closer to the postseason and there's something on the line. As great of a story as the Pittsburgh Pirates showing a resurgence after nearly two decades of mediocrity has been, it doesn't have significance until we get to September. It's like watching the first hour of "Rocky". You're not riveted until you watch Balboa trade punches with Apollo Creed.

Women's soccer, however, gave Americans the chance to do what they like to do every so often: Feign patriotism. With their unlikely run to the World Cup final, the U.S. women's soccer team compelled their countrymen to reach back into their closets and dust off those American flags they've had locked up since the Olympics(or maybe even 9/11, depending on where you live) and unleash chants of "USA!" while pretending to have an interest in soccer. It was a good moment of solidarity for a country that seems to be at odds with each other as of late, even if the mutual agreement was an admission that Americans are front-runners. Look, I'm not trying to take anything away from "our girls", as some have called them, or take jabs at the few who have an actual interest in futbol. However, the spirited efforts seem to only come out when the home team is winning.

For as great as U.S. beating Brazil was in the history of U.S. team sports, many in this country didn't give "our girls" a shot. Once they beat the Brazilians, however, the hyperbole machine made sure to use its pent-up overdramatization to compare U.S. over Brazil to the famed "Miracle on Ice" and Americans with nothing better to do used the upset as a springboard onto the bandwagon(Further driving home my point is the ratings numbers: U.S.-Brazil did a 2.5 in the Nielsen ratings, the equivalent of a episode of "Monday Night Raw" or a Royals-Tigers tilt. The World Cup final did a 7.4, which is solid but pales in comparison to the 11.4 from 1999, when Mia Hamm and company won it all. Naturally, there's going to be a rise when there's more at stake but it says something that the '99 team, which were dominant favorites, drew more viewers than a classic underdog story like the 2011 ladies.) That's where people like me get a bit ticked. I'm not a hockey fan. I'm not a soccer fan. I don't pretend to be either just because my team is making a championship run. Was Hope Solo and company's run a nice story? Sure, but people who have been around sports long enough can tell real fans from those who are cheering to be a part of a fad and, if you're reading this and getting offended then, chances are, I'm talking about you.

I said this in the Michael Jackson tribute two years ago and I've made mentions of it in the past: Americans are fad-jumpers. We spend on our day-to-day affairs complaining about how we hate our jobs, or our President or our government or our society.....and then our national team gets on the cusp of winning the big one and we start exclaiming how America is the greatest country in the world(which, it is, but still...). Now that the women's team has lost a heartbreaker to Japan, phony soccer fans will tuck those Stars and Stripes back into their closet, hop back into their Prius and head over to Starbucks for their overpriced Caramel Macchiato, crack open their Wall Street Journal, bitch about Obama and go back to not giving a shit about soccer. I know that might be blasphemy for me to say, but it's true, and there are people out there like my wife and my friend Linger who bleed red, white and blue....but those people are few and far between in this country. For the most part, the attention paid to the World Cup was due in large part to the lack of newsworthy headlines from other sports and Americans' self-absorbed need to feel relevant by doing what all the cool kids are doing and that, moreso than the OT loss to Japan, is the most sickening.

REAL football is back now. In a matter of days, we'll have preseason, free agency and hot stove buzz. We'll have Cam Newton zipping passes to Steve Smith. We'll have Adrian Peterson bulldozing Brian Urlacher. We'll have American's true favorite pastime back. We'll be able to go back to talking about the game instead of civil suits and unions. The impact of this new CBA won't be realized for a couple years as we still wait for the dust the settle. The immediate thought process amongst fans, both casual and committed, was that this labor strife was based on greed. After all, the three biggest terms that were forced down your throat these last few months have been "salary cap", "rookie wage scale" and "revenue sharing". For football fans, most of which hard-working, blue-collar Americans, the lockout came off as a fight between millionaires and billionaires. Maybe that's an ignorant way of looking at things but amidst all the negotiating and back-biting, NFL owners and the NFLPA lost sight of the one big thing with fans: We just want football. Sure, the rookie wage scale is nice and keeps teams from giving large contracts to first-year, college snots who haven't taken a pro snap and it's cool to have the salary cap back to level the playing field between the "haves" and the "have nots", but we would be ok with the old system if it meant we could have avoided these last two months of torture.

Of course, that's a moot point now as we wait for the players to recertify and dot the I's and cross the T's on a deal that took a maddening few months to culminate. The NFL is back in our lives and other sports can return to the backburner and basketball fans now have football to soften the blow of what will probably be a lost season for them. The worst is over now, people. You can tuck those flags back into your closet and get your jerseys out again.

As you were, America.