On holiday.

THE HEADBUTT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD

“And why? And why?” the French announcer moaned in some mixture of bafflement and misery last week, after the great Zidane walked away, paused, thought better, or worse, of it, and then went back and rammed his forehead into Materazzi’s blue chest, leading the World Cup to its painfully ambiguous ending. It may be that the final score in penalties would have been the same without that geste, but the blow certainly changed the flavor and meaning of the French ascent: from something entirely wonderful and unexpected—a climb to glory—to something painful and all too human: a fall from grace.

American journalists, using that heavily facetious sacre bleu! tone that they still favor when they are discussing something as queer as foreigners, have already covered the incident with enough larksome analysis to make it into a kind of byword. (Overheard at a Central Park soccer match: “You hold their shirts and I’ll insult their sisters, and we’ll take care of the rest!”) But, for those involved, it was about as far from fun as anything could be. People in France have been thinking hard about why Zidane did it, and what it means, and have thereby been honoring the national belief that it really is not possible to think too hard about things. (People who tell you that it is possible to think too hard about things are always the ones who aren’t good at thinking about things in the first place, just as people who tell you that you can make yourself sick from too much exercise are always the ones who don’t exercise at all.)

The first theory was that Zidane was not a dignified paladin who had uncharacteristically submitted to a sudden rage but in fact an angry man who, for once—or, rather, once again: a trail of red cards follows him—let it show. Just as all architects who are any good are megalomaniacs, all athletes at this level are fuelled by anger when they play; even the seemingly disciplined ones tend to be driven, demon-ridden people who act out in unpredictable, self-destructive ways.

This point led to a larger question for French fans: can you forgive him, and can you still treat him as a hero? And this came to turn on what, exactly, it was that Materazzi, the annoying Italian, was supposed to have said to provoke Zidane. The press and the football establishment were severe with him from the beginning, making no excuses and offering no appeals to that last red card. The public was more charitable, inclined to believe that he had been provoked past reason. In an appearance on television three days after the game, a well-rehearsed Zidane said that the Italian had insulted his sister and his mother but had not called him a terrorist, as some had claimed. The insults, though not nice, seemed within the “Yo Mama” constraints of trash-talking, but Zidane believed that the remarks warranted their own red card, of one kind or another.

“I am a man,” Zidane said—meaning, unfortunately, that, being one, he could not let an insult go unavenged, rather than that, being one, he had the brains and the sense of proportion to walk away from a provocation. This is a lesson being taught to millions of French kids, and it should be taught to American ones, too.

The most interesting theory about the head-butt was a bit Camusian: Zidane, one writer said, was lashing out not just at the Italian who had insulted him but at the unlivable role that he had been slotted into by the French. Forced to play the part of an ideal national hero, and knowing that he could never live up to the role, Zidane (who is still an Algerian kid from the projects at heart, and one who has played most of his career outside France), consciously or not, butted his way right out of it. This view suggests a human explanation for the inexplicable act. One thing that kids around the world learned from the incident is that real games are not video games. An eleven-year-old New Yorker, a passionate supporter of Les Bleus, had been playing each of the French World Cup games over and over on his Nintendo Gamecube FIFA game and—with spooky accuracy—had been using the aggregate scores to predict the outcomes of games not yet played. But nothing in the video game could have led one pixel-constructed figure to turn around, succumb to an irrational animal urge, and bash another pixel-constructed figure in the chest. “It just never happened in the Gamecube,” he said afterward, bewildered. An inexplicable human act was the one thing you couldn’t program.That reminder may have been, in its way, the saving grace of this curious fall. — Adam Gopnik

CYCLING

On Floyd Landis and his Hip

What He’s Been Pedaling By DANIEL COYLE

“That’s the one,” Floyd Landis said, his index finger tapping rapidly on a glossy page. “That’s what I want.” It was a lovely June evening in Murrieta, a small city in Southern California, and it was 10 days before the start of the Tour de France, the most prestigious and grueling of all cycling races. Landis, one of America’s hopefuls in the race now that Lance Armstrong has retired from the sport, was sitting on his patio, eating a piece of Greek-style pizza and shopping for a new hip.

Actually, he was not shopping so much as hunting. As Landis looked through the pages, his lean 5-foot-10, 150-pound body shifted hungrily, his muscles flickering beneath his tan Harley-Davidson T-shirt and blue jeans. His gaze was sharp and intense; his reddish hair stuck out in spots, as if it were electrified.

Landis, who is 30, slid the booklet, an annual report from a joint-replacement manufacturer, across the table toward Brent Kay, his doctor. Together they gazed at the silvery ball-and-cup assembly identified as the Durom hip system.

“Nice, huh?” Landis said, and it was hard to argue. In the oversize photograph, the Durom was a glistening, precision-milled orb. It resembled a Henry Moore sculpture or perhaps an expensive set of drawer pulls.

“Sure, it might look good,” Kay said, drolly setting himself up for the inevitable bike-shop bon mot. “But do they make it in titanium?”

“They’d better!” Landis’s face beamed with a fierce smile, his voice rising with mock indignation. “I wouldn’t want anything to slow me down!”

Landis was being funny here, and like most of his humor, this joke works because it cuts two ways. First, it’s funny because in almost every situation in his life, Landis is slow. He walks with a limp. He sits as often as possible and cannot cross his right leg over his left. He takes elevators instead of stairs, valet-parks at the shopping mall and sometimes has difficulty sleeping. Running is out of the question. Like many of the 216,000 Americans who will receive hip replacements this year, his life is defined by chronic, debilitating pain.

Second, it’s funny because there exists a singular situation — which is to say, when he is on a bike — in which Landis is extremely fast and strong. He is so fast and strong, in fact, that this year he has won three world-class races and, as of July 7, was among the leaders in this year’s Tour de France, which ends July 23 in Paris.

But perhaps the funniest part is that Landis has been successful at keeping his hip condition a secret from teammates, rivals and the media for 20 months, confiding it only to a small handful of doctors and close friends. This maneuver has involved what Landis, who was raised as a Mennonite in Lancaster County, Pa., calls “a few adaptations.”

“I always have to get on my bike putting my right leg over first,” Landis told me. “If I tried to get on the other way” — tilting his pelvis against his damaged hip — “I’d be lying on the pavement. Then people would be standing around wondering what the hell’s wrong with that guy?”

Landis’s right hip — his original, in the car-mechanic parlance of the joint-replacement field — is afflicted with osteonecrosis, or bone death, a degenerative condition caused by lack of blood supply. (The condition, which forced Bo Jackson, the star football and baseball player, to get a hip replacement in 1992, is also called avascular necrosis.) Essentially, the ball of Landis’s hip has withered and collapsed, resulting in bone that his doctors liken to a chunk of rotten wood, a sunbaked desert and a half-melted scoop of ice cream.

The Tour de France’s status as the world’s most physiologically demanding event is largely unquestioned. The riders cover 2,272 miles at an average speed of 25 miles per hour, roughly the equivalent of running a marathon almost every day for almost three weeks. In the Pyrenees and the Alps, they climb a vertical distance equal to three Mount Everests. They take in up to 10,000 calories per day, the equivalent of 17 Big Macs, elevating their metabolic rates to a level that, according to a Dutch study, is exceeded by only four species on earth. All of which transforms Landis into the embodiment of an intriguing question: Is it possible for someone with a ruined hip to win the Tour de France?

Kay, who has worked closely with Landis for four years, and Dr. David Chao, Landis’s orthopedic surgeon, are in the best position to address that question. When asked, they swiftly list a few factors that work in Landis’s favor: the hip will be replaced, so it cannot be damaged any further; cycling is a nonimpact sport (that is, it doesn’t place weight on the damaged hip); Landis possesses a high pain tolerance and an unusually strong work ethic.

When pressed further, however, clinical rationality gives way to hapless shrugging. “This is uncharted territory,” says Kay, who runs the Ouch Sports Medical Center in Temecula, Calif. “I expect that people will freak out a little when they hear about this; they’ll say it’s dangerous to let him compete. Well, before they say that, they need to know Floyd. The only way to stop him would be to literally chain him to his bed, and even that probably wouldn’t do it.”

Chao, who serves as team physician for the San Diego Chargers, says that he sees “a lot of injuries, a lot of guys playing with pain. But if I were a betting man, and you showed me Landis’s X-rays, I would bet my house that he could not be competitive in the Tour de France. This is the hip of a guy who, if he were just a weekend warrior, would have problems with everyday living. But to be a top athlete? Where a 1 percent performance loss is a big deal? No way.”

As for Landis, he responds to the question in his customary fashion, which is to question it. “Well, I’m doing it, so it must be possible,” he said, his face flashing into the sharp, faintly incredulous expression he often gets when he talks about his hip. “All the doctors have ever been able to tell me is that I should get a replacement when the pain gets to be too much. O.K., that sounds fine, but how much is too much? Can anybody tell me that? How much is too much?”

andis jokes about his hip a lot. As Kay puts it, he’s a one-man comedy show. During my visit last month, the Floyd show consisted mostly of vivid, darkly funny monologues, most of which spring from his hourly epiphanies.

“I got it!” Landis said. “When this is over, I’ll have the surgeons give me my old hip, and I’ll sell it on eBay. I’ll mount it on a trophy.” He pantomimed lying on a stretcher, talking to an invisible surgeon. “Excuse me, could I please get a to-go bag?”

“I need a cane!” he blurted out another time. “I’m going to show up at the tour with a cane, diamond tipped. Or maybe I should just go straight to the wheelchair. Motorized, with rims. Now that would be classic: drive up to the start, get out of my wheelchair and get on the bike! Yes!”

Yet when Landis was asked what his hip feels like, he fell silent. “It hurts a lot,” he said after a while. “Mostly, it stops me from doing things.”

How much? What’s it feel like?

Landis squinted. He rubbed his hand over his face.

“It just hurts,” he said finally. “Some days are worse; some are better.”

Part of his ineloquence is job-related. Bike racers, like test pilots, don’t like to talk about crashes or pain. Least of all Landis, whose distaste for excuses is well known in the professional ranks. As he concisely puts it, “You’re either good enough to win or you’re not, period.”

Fortunately, a survey begun in 2005 by the Osteonecrosis/Avascular Necrosis Support Group International Association offers a measure of insight. Respondents wrote that their pain was like “sharp stabs,” “crunching bone,” “labor pains,” “electrical shock” and “grinding your bare feet into hot broken glass and jagged shards of metal.” Another respondent invoked the labors of Sisyphus; still another wrote: “You lose everything even yourself in the pain. It consumes everything.”

Landis is better at describing a different sort of ache: the uncertainty of deciding when and how to swap out a painful-but-still-usable body part. In one of our first conversations, which took place after he revealed his condition to me in mid-May, Landis spoke about the process. “It’s so hard, deciding which way to go,” he said. “Some days I just wish the thing would collapse just so it would get resolved one way or the other. It’s too stressful, not knowing what’s going to happen. It’s a big weird gray area, and I’m tired of it.”

Landis officially arrived in that gray area on Nov. 19, 2004, after he came to Kay complaining of deep hip pain. “Just the fact that he admitted he was in pain meant in my mind that this was serious,” Kay recalls. “I saw the X-ray and felt sick to my stomach.”

It wasn’t a complete surprise. Landis and Kay had been dealing with this hip since January 2003, when Landis fractured it in a crash. But since July of that year, the story line had been his gutty, two-surgery comeback to help his U.S. Postal Service teammate Armstrong win the 2003 Tour de France. Seemingly fully recovered, Landis had followed it up with a breakout 2004 season that saw him join the top ranks of the sport. But that story ended with the radiologist’s blunt report: advanced osteonecrosis, 25 to 50 percent femoral head collapse, with superimposed osteoarthritis. It was a textbook case: cut off from the blood supply, the femoral head was withering into a cauliflower-shaped knob that was already grating away at the remaining cartilage.

Landis’s situation was complicated by the fact that he had just left U.S. Postal to sign a three-year, $700,000 contract to lead the rival Phonak team. Worse, his new team had just been hit with a series of doping scandals — among the riders fingered was his fellow American Tyler Hamilton — which endangered the team’s spot in professional cycling’s ProTour. “Those were very, very dark days,” Landis’s wife, Amber, told me. “Floyd was all over the place mentally.”

Landis explained: “I finally had everything the way I wanted it, and then suddenly it was all going to go away — my team, my health, my career, everything. I got paralyzed by the whole situation. So I just told myself that it was going to be all right and blocked everything else out.”

He began researching his options. (“Floyd spent three straight days at the computer,” Amber recalled. “I don’t think he slept.”) Kay posted pseudonymous queries on cycling Internet forums, trying to locate professional cyclists who had successfully returned to competition after a hip replacement. (He found none.) Landis studied medical literature and haunted chat rooms and after a few days came to a decision. He would approach his hip as an experiment. He would ride on it for one or two years, then get a new one.

“Odds were, a replacement would work O.K. and take away the pain, which would be a huge thing,” Landis says. “But it’s still an unknown as far as performance goes. I basically decided to treat the hip like an old car — if it still works, you may as well run it into the ground.”

He also decided to tell only his coach, his trainer, his agent, his financial adviser and a few other close friends, swearing them all to secrecy. “I was worried about people finding out and somebody stopping me from riding,” Landis says. “In retrospect, I probably should have been more open. But I didn’t want anybody thinking I was damaged goods. And I had this idea that if I could just keep riding, everything would be O.K.”

Just before Thanksgiving in 2004, three days after the initial diagnosis was confirmed, Landis underwent a medieval-sounding palliative procedure called decompression, in which his hip was drilled with a dozen or so small holes that relieve pressure and help renew blood flow. Leaving the hospital on crutches, Landis employed a decoy, placing a large splint on his healthy right ankle. When asked about his limp, Landis said that he had tripped on some stairs, nothing serious. A few days later, the experiment officially began as Landis flew to Europe to meet his new team and to begin preparation for the 2005 season.

When Landis saw the Swiss doctor in the white lab coat, his heart sank. It was 10 days after his decompression surgery, and Landis was standing in an exam room near the Phonak corporate headquarters outside Zurich, wearing only his underwear.

At first, Landis hadn’t been worried about passing the physical. In his experience, the exams were perfunctory at best, designed to fulfill the “physically able to perform” boilerplate contained in every rider’s contract. But Phonak, as it turned out, was relatively new to the cycling game and eager to display their Swiss thoroughness and efficiency. All riders, it was announced, would be receiving full orthopedic examinations. “When I heard that, I figured I was screwed,” Landis recalls. “I’d be packing my bags, looking for another job.”

The Swiss doctor began by eyeing Landis’s posture and announcing that his right leg appeared to be five millimeters shorter than his left. (The difference, because of the collapse, is actually on the order of 15 millimeters.) Then, as Landis lay back on the exam table, the doctor began to pry and rotate his legs. Landis did the only thing he could think of: he stiffened his good left leg so that it came close to matching his right.

To Landis’s disbelief, he passed. “What was that guy thinking?” Landis told me, almost offended at his good fortune. “At that point, I couldn’t walk up stairs without a handrail!”

Temporarily rescued, Landis spent the rest of the winter as he would spend much of the 2005 season: pretending not to hurt. Unable to press hard on the top of the pedal stroke with his right leg, he pedaled harder with his left. To ride his time-trial bike, which required a hunched aerodynamic posture, Landis was forced to ride on the nose of his saddle, a near-proctological position that drew amusement from his fellow riders but which, because it created a wider angle between his trunk and his femur, permitted his hip to work. “Everything’s a compromise,” he says. “You get one pain or you get the other pain. No way around it.”

He adapted in other ways, acquiring a shoulder-rolling, stiff-legged walk to disguise what a trained eye might identify as an externally rotated antalgic gait. Landis was assisted in his subterfuge not only by his offbeat reputation but also by cycling’s social structure. As a rule, professional riders live and train apart from one another, gathering only at races and occasional training camps. Phonak, like most ProTour teams, consists of 25 riders, an ever-changing handful of whom are chosen by coaches to compete in each event. At races, when Landis’s teammates noticed his walk, they saw it only as an invitation to tease him about his rap-star strut. “I’m not quite as cool as they think I am,” Landis says archly.

His friends came up with codes. In phone calls, his coach, Robbie Ventura, referred to Landis’s hip as “the finger.” Another friend would ask Landis how “his bad back” was doing. As the season wore on, the secret held.

“I was kind of amazed at first that nobody noticed,” Landis says. “But then I realized that it’s such a weird thing, that you’ve really got to look for it. Everybody’s ready to look to see if you’ve got a cough or if you’re two pounds overweight, but they’d never look for this.”

Landis’s most useful adaptation, however, came in the form of an idea. It was planted in his head by Kay, who, as fate would have it, suffered osteonecrosis of the shoulder from a college car accident and had gone on to complete six Ironman triathlons. Kay’s idea was that it might be possible, through repetition, to wear a useful groove in the bone and cartilage of his damaged joint. “Floyd really liked the groove idea,” Kay says. “He never wanted to look at the hip or any X-rays or even talk about the clinical part of things, but he kind of fixated on that idea.”

Landis explains: “When the hip does something weird and it hurts, I always imagine that it’s cutting a better path in the joint. I’m probably fooling myself, but I may as well imagine something good is happening, since it definitely doesn’t help to think that it’s getting worse.”

The secret also supplied psychological fuel. During races, Landis cataloged riders and their favorite excuses. “Every time I heard somebody talk about how bad their stomach ached, I thought, That guy will be easy to beat when I get in shape,” Landis says. “And that works pretty well, because sooner or later, everybody makes an excuse.”

To outward appearances, Landis’s 2005 season fell below expectations. He finished 3rd at the Tour de Georgia, 11th at the Dauphiné Libéré and a hard-fought 9th in the Tour de France behind Armstrong. The true results, however, could be found in another number. According to his estimates, Landis rode 250 days for 5 hours per day at a cadence of 90 revolutions per minute. Which means that the damaged femoral head moved 6.7 million times back and forth along a narrow track within the cup of the hip joint.

n my second day with Landis, we traveled with Kay to Chao’s San Diego office for Landis’s pretour cortisone shot in his hip. (Cortisone, a non-performance-enhancing hormone with a variety of anti-inflammatory and other beneficial effects, is a banned substance. Landis’s condition, however, which his doctors have selectively described as “bursitis,” has allowed his team to obtain a therapeutic use exemption from the Union Cycliste Internationale, cycling’s governing body.)

After administering the shot, Chao gathered us at a conference table cluttered with a hardware-store jumble of ersatz bones and hip-replacement samples, testament to an expanding industry fueled by two trends — an aging, active generation and an increase in obesity. By 2030, hip replacements in the United States are expected to increase 174 percent, to 572,000 a year, according to a 2006 study by Exponent, a Philadelphia technology research firm. Artificial-knee implants are expected to increase 673 percent, to 3.48 million, over the same period, combining to create a rise in demand so abrupt that some wonder whether there will be enough qualified doctors to perform the required implants and the inevitable reimplants, called revisions.

The explanation for this increase lies partly with an ever-younger population of joint-replacement patients, some of whose arthritic conditions are accelerated by running and other impact sports, and partly with better technology. New, more durable plastics, along with improved metals and ceramics, promise to lengthen the 10-year life span of current replacements. These developments are not lost on the $4.3 billion joint-replacement industry, which has begun to develop niche products, like a knee designed specifically for women, and has also enlisted celebrities like Jack Nicklaus and Angela Lansbury to market directly to patients. In a similar fashion, Landis plans to raise the profile of osteonecrosis and hip-replacement issues through the charitable organization he intends to start during this year’s tour, tentatively called the Floyd Landis Foundation.

Conversation eventually turned back to the groove theory, specifically to whether this groove might actually exist. Chao, a brisk and cheerful surgeon who trained at Harvard and Northwestern, smiled knowingly and reached for Landis’s X-ray. As we leaned in, Chao pointed to a cloudy, half-moon-shaped blur on the rim of the femoral head, just beneath the pelvis. It was 1.5 centimeters long and a centimeter deep; it looked like a tiny pearlescent goblet.

“There’s your groove,” Chao said, tapping the film with a pen. “It’s soft, and the pelvis is pushing down on it. It’s a dent.” Landis looked at the X-ray intently, faintly pleased at this revelation but distinctly unsurprised.

When I ask him about it later, Landis said: “It was good to see, but it also makes sense to me. There’s a lot of friction, a lot of pressure. Logically, that pressure has to go somewhere.”

Geographically, Farmersville, PA., is situated in central Lancaster County, close to New Holland and Paradise. Spiritually, it is located close to 17th-century Europe, from which the Mennonites emigrated in order to escape persecution and follow the mandate set out in II Corinthians 6:17: “Come out from them and be separate.” As a young man, Landis obeyed the dictum, but not quite in the way his parents would have preferred. “That boy put us through the mill growing up,” Floyd’s mother, Arlene Landis, told me. “Just doing the normal thing, that’s boring to Floyd.”

By Lancaster County standards, however, the Landises were middle of the road. Floyd, his four sisters and his brother enjoyed the comparative luxury of being able to listen to the radio, attend public high school and ride in cars. And yet, to the young Landis, being Mennonite seemed to involve an unusual number of rules: no dancing, no television, no uncovered heads for women and no mingling with the unrighteous. “It wasn’t all the rules that got me, so much as the fact that they didn’t seem logical to me,” Landis says. “We weren’t allowed to wear shorts in gym class. Does God really care if somebody wears shorts or not?”

In Lancaster County, Mennonite children who test limits are said to “stretch” their parents. For Paul and Arlene Landis, the elastic started to fray when Floyd bought a mountain bike at age 15. At first, he used it to travel to remote fishing holes. Soon Landis was entering races, some of which took place on Sunday, a day when vigorous exercise was expressly forbidden. Landis kept riding, dominating regional races and then, at 17, winning the Junior National Mountain Bike Championship. Pressure was building, from both sides. “They basically told me I was going to hell if I kept racing my bike,” Landis says. “I love my parents, and they’re good people, but that didn’t make any sense to me. So I knew I had to get out, and the bike was the way.”

Two years later, he moved to California, having never tasted alcohol or caffeine or seen a motion picture. With the help of mountain-biking pals, Landis soon enacted a kind of Mennonite Pygmalion, receiving an education about music, movies, TV and dating. Landis returned the favor by supplying a few lessons of his own. “He did monstrous workouts no one else could do,” says Will Geoghegan, a former teammate on the Chevy Trucks mountain-bike team. “He sought out the pain and embraced it. Floyd worked so hard that we all had to decide about him — either he had a screw loose or he had a calculated plan to get what he wanted.”

In fact, Landis had a plan, an eight-year training regimen that he had drawn up with the help of his coach at the time, Arnie Baker. Some years called for Landis to log 24,000 miles, or about once around the globe. The level of training diminished Landis’s performance in races, but he was focused on more long-term goals.

In 1999, Landis switched over to road racing and three years later was signed by U.S. Postal, which at the time ranked as the sport’s version of the Yankees. Landis was quickly drawn into the orbit of Lance Armstrong, who was impressed by the newcomer’s unconventional sensibility and his toughness. The two trained together often as Landis grew into one of Armstrong’s top support riders and perhaps his closest friend on the team — at least until 2004, when Landis’s outstanding season drew offers from other teams, and he decided to leave U.S. Postal for Phonak. From there, the friendship deteriorated fast. Armstrong considered Landis’s move traitorous, while Landis considered Armstrong unreasonable, pointing out that Phonak had doubled Postal’s contract offer. The two spent most of 2005 in an occasionally spiteful feud, partly fueled by the fact that with his hip in such bad shape, Landis felt he had little to lose.

“There aren’t many guys in the peloton” — the main pack of riders in a road bicycle race — “who are willing to tell Lance to go screw himself,” says David Zabriskie, a top American who rides for the Danish CSC team. “Floyd just didn’t care.”




It was late afternoon, and Landis was reclining in the front seat of Kay’s Lincoln LS, the seat slid all the way back for comfort. We were on our way to the mountains north of San Diego to see the spot where Landis crashed in 2003. At the moment, however, Landis’s mind seemed focused on the future: specifically, on how the disclosure of his hip problem might play out at the Tour de France.

Historically, the spectacle of the injured rider who refuses to quit ranks as one of the tour’s most reliable sources of gloire, starting with Honoré Barthélémy (broken shoulder, dislocated wrist and eye injury, 1920), Eddy Merckx (broken jaw, 1975), Pascal Simon (broken shoulder blade, 1983). But Landis had a hunch that his disclosure might inspire a less worshipful reaction, at least among his rivals. “I better bring the X-rays, because some of them aren’t going to believe it,” he said, going on to recount the memorable drama at the 2003 tour, when Hamilton, riding for CSC, was forced to display X-rays of his cracked collarbone to quell intimations of fakery. “Most of the guys, though, will just not care. Which is fine with me — why should they?”

While Landis’s disclosure might surprise his rivals, his performance most likely won’t. The 2006 season — season No. 2 of his experiment — has so far been a resounding success. More interestingly, Landis is not sure why. “The hip doesn’t hurt any less,” he said. “It doesn’t feel all that different. I’m just going faster now.”

This past winter, Landis returned to Murrieta looking forward to his first surgery-free off-season in three years. He spent six weeks off the bike, underwent ultrasound therapy, trained a bit less than usual and watched in surprise as his power numbers ticked upward. (Power, the key measure of a cyclist’s ability, is measured by sensors mounted to the pedal cranks or wheel hub.) In 2005, Landis could maximally produce 900 watts for five seconds. By this spring, he could push 1,250 watts, a 39 percent boost.

His year started brilliantly. In February, he won the Tour of California. In March, he won Paris-Nice, and in April he won the Tour de Georgia. All told, it amounted to more than 1,900 miles of world-class competition. Landis was so dominant that until a below-average performance in early June’s Dauphiné Libéré, some in the media speculated that he might be doping, a rumor that entertains Landis to no end. Though not quite as much as the reports that some rivals have begun to copy his uniquely painful position on the time-trial bike. “Maybe they should break their hip, and it would work better for them,” Landis told me with a smile.

Kay attributes the improvement to a combination of increased rest, lack of stress and the fact that the joint seems to have stabilized. “It’s encouraging,” he said guardedly. “Something bad could still happen — some soft bone could break loose, maybe. But basically, it seems like he’s been able to remodel the joint and make it functional.”

I suggested to Landis that given this new stability, he might put off the hip replacement another year. As he suggested, run it into the ground. “No, no, no,” Landis said. “This hip gets used up, an athletic career gets used up. At some point, things are done, and this thing is almost there. Plus, Amber would kill me.”

Landis plans to schedule his hip replacement surgery for a few weeks after the Tour de France, to give himself maximum time to train for the following year’s race. While Landis’s position with Phonak appears secure for the near future (he has an option on his contract through 2007), the level of his post-operation performance is an open question. “We’re completely in unknown territory,” said Chao, pointing out that when Bo Jackson briefly returned to baseball after his hip replacement, Jackson, formerly one of the league’s fastest players, slowed noticeably. “In baseball, you can lose speed and still perform, but that might be harder in cycling,” Chao went on. “On the other hand, the thing going for us is that Floyd’s sport is not impact-loading like baseball or football, so the replacement won’t loosen. And also of course that he’s Floyd.”

We left the thronging highway and drove into the hills, gliding through a classic Southern California landscape of avocado trees, Hearst-like mansions and large, impeccably clean sandstone boulders. After 15 minutes we made it halfway up a steep incline, and the car stopped at the intersection of Calle Vista Lejos and Sunset Terrace. Landis climbed out, moving in his usual strut. “I hit right here,” he said, pointing to a spot in the center of the road. He walked us through the crash: his decision to turn right instead of going straight, his front wheel skidding out, his body slamming the ground, his 30-foot skid, his abject crawl off the road.

Then he showed the reason why: a thin, barely visible sheen of dark pebbles exactly the color of asphalt. The pebbles apparently came from an adjacent hillside. It was a fluke of topography, a happenstance of pressure, time and wind. Landis picked up some of the pebbles and shook them in his fist like tiny dice.

Later, back at his house, Landis would finally open up a little about the pain. He would say: “Everybody thinks you can overcome pain if you want to enough, and let me tell you, you can’t. This isn’t some Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, where somebody can get shot in the leg and keep going. There’s pain that makes me stop, makes everybody stop.”

He would keep talking, his voice growing softer. “My parents would look at everything that I’ve gone through and say that all this is God’s plan, which makes it sound like a good thing. But I can’t do it, because I have to work with what’s true. Things end. We’re all going to die. But until that happens, there’s really a lot you can do. Especially if you realize this is your last opportunity.”

But for now, standing on a sunny road in the middle of nowhere, Landis was looking for something lighter to say. Which he found. He should buy a plot of land next to the crash site, he said, then build a giant house and erect a lemonade stand to sell T-shirts with a big stylized picture of his hip bone on them.

“I should really do that,” he said, smiling as he limped and strutted back toward the car. “That would be perfect!”

Daniel Coyle, who has written for Play, the Times sports magazine, is the author of “Lance Armstrong’s War.”

FRIENDS

Confidant Crisis
NY Times

By now, I bet almost everybody knows somebody who has joined a social networking Web site like MySpace.com, with more than 90 million members, or Facebook.com, a college-based Web site that has become a high-school favorite, too. That means most people probably also know that “friend” is no longer just a noun, but a verb, one that entails minimal exertion: “to friend” a person involves an exchange of mouse clicks, one to request a spot on someone’s (often very lengthy) list of people granted access to his or her online profile, and a click in response to accept the petitioner. If you’re too old and busy to be logging on obsessively to this Internet social scene, you’re doubtless enmeshed in your own way, e-mailing far-flung acquaintances or anticipating the spread of free Internet telephone service.

Americans, in other words, aren’t exactly suffering from anomie. If anything, a surfeit of connectivity is the curse of the moment. (Take a trip in a nonquiet Amtrak car if you want vivid evidence.) No wonder a recent study, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades,” published in the latest American Sociological Review, made it into the headlines and onto “Good Morning America.” Here was surprising news that touched a nerve. Who would have guessed, in our gabby tell-all culture, that people interviewed in the 2004 General Social Survey would report an average of only two “core” confidants with whom they “discuss important matters,” down from the mean of three close ties elicited by the same question in 1985? Just as startling, given an ever more interwoven world, was the decline in the percentage of Americans — to 57 percent from 80 percent — who named at least one non-kin person as part of this inner circle.

The media, predictably enough, were spooked by the specter of “social isolation”: though we may bowl alone, we’re always ready to join a chorus of concern about fraying communities. But before rushing to conclude that Americans have simply gotten lonelier and more insular, why not consider another possibility? Perhaps, as the study’s authors themselves hint at one point, we’ve also gotten better at demarcating what constitutes truly intimate communing — expecting more of our confidants, we have, in effect, defined intimacy up. That is not exactly what you would expect in an era of constant communicating. Yet could it be precisely because we’re more plugged in to a disparate array of people who supply us with information when we need it, offer advice and keep us intermittent company, that our standard of genuine closeness has become more exacting? It’s not just that we’re too busy for more than a select few confidants. We may be choosier too.

Look at Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” or at junior-high-school cliques, and it’s clear that discriminating among degrees of friendship can be a daunting task. The most tenacious of taxonomists, Aristotle thought pleasure and utility counted for less than the rare commingling of virtuous character as the basis for friendship. Centuries of varying ideals and fears ensued. Are our close ties becoming shallower and more instrumental? How many are too many, and what is enough? Is friendship a matter of spontaneous sincerity, heartfelt reciprocity, mutual understanding, deep loyalty, moral obligation or shared passion — and can it last? In his new book, “Friendship: An Exposé,” Joseph Epstein quotes the German sociologist Georg Simmel already worrying a century ago that we moderns are destined to drift among “differentiated friendships,” missing out on an all-encompassing connection.

Turn from philosophizers to recent empirical surveys, and it’s clear the challenge of categorizing confidants remains as complex as ever. In January, just five months before the General Social Survey appeared, a phone survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project set out to assess the impact of Web involvement on real-world social networks. The study emerged with a notably big figure for what it termed “core ties”: a median number of 15 people with whom respondents said they had discussed important matters, with whom they were in frequent touch or from whom they got substantial help. Here was a three-pronged conception of core ties that roped in friendships across the Aristotelian spectrum, from the useful to the pleasurable and beyond, rather than distilling out just soul mates. Add in the median number of 16 weaker yet still “significant ties” that the Pew survey also counted, and the findings left Americans looking anything but socially isolated.

And now consider the fact that the General Social Survey finds that on average, individuals have only two close confidants. As we puzzle over what the decline means, perhaps we should be reassured that Americans seem clear-eyed about their connections. The study’s low figures may be stark testament that we value a deep bond when we find it and aren’t fooled when we don’t. When one-dimensional, functional relationships are ever more accessible, the desire to be known and to know another from all sides and from inside out may be lodged even deeper — and may thrive closer to home. A century ago, another philosopher surveying a modernizing world, George Santayana, had already concluded that “the tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient ideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage.” The General Social Survey data suggest an inner core that isn’t oppressively clannish but invites rising equality and diversity, narrow though it is. The percentage of people who include a spouse in their circle of closest confidants went from 30 percent in 1985 to almost 40 percent two decades later. And in 2004, 15 percent reported at least one confidant of another race, up from 9 percent in 1985. While to friend has become a frivolous verb, to bond might prove to be one that Americans are taking, if anything, more to heart than ever.

FILM

In order to understand what’s happening in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” it helps to have seen the first installment, “The Curse of the Black Pearl.” But it doesn’t help that much. The new plot has all the appeal of a seaweed sandwich, being dark, salty, and indigestible. Most of the characters from the earlier film return, their lives nicely endangered by fresh plights. Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) and his paramour, Elizabeth (Keira Knightley), are arrested on the orders of the small but poisonous Lord Beckett (Tom Hollander) and charged with aiding the flight of Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who himself is wanted by the Crown for falsely impersonating a Rolling Stone. New to the fray is Will’s father, Bootstrap Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), now toiling under the waves for Davy Jones (Bill Nighy). Both men could use an urgent trip to the Clarins counter. Turner, Sr., has a starfish clamped to his head, while the lower half of Jones’s face is composed of moist, writhing tentacles, so dexterous that they can play the keys of an organ. I don’t know if there is a Mrs. Jones, but if there is she must be a contented woman.

Jones is captain of the Flying Dutchman, a ship constructed largely of rag and bone, which can dive and surface like a submarine. Like the rest of the crew, Jones has the misfortune to be dead, but, within the fluid world of these movies, that is no bar to adventure. “Life is cruel,” he points out, adding, “Why should the afterlife be any different?” The blasphemous splendor of that question resounds through the movie, spawning a mass of morbid detail and thus bolstering one’s conviction that computer-generated images, while constitutionally unfit for certain textures—all seas look fake, as do all healthy humans—grow ever more attuned to the monstrous, the decaying, and the deceased. (One of Jones’s shipmates is Homo sapiens up to the neck, but beyond that he is all hammerhead shark.) Domestic drama has nothing to gain from the new technology; horror has nothing to lose.

Jack Sparrow, apparently, owes Davy Jones his soul. How and why this bargain was struck is something of a blur; the director, Gore Verbinski, is so cheerfully adept at the galvanic set pieces that the quieter incidents, or shifts of motivation, tend to slip his grasp. To dramatize a dice game, for instance, with Jones and the Turners each casting his lot, should hardly be the most taxing of setups, but it rattles by in mumbled confusion, and there were times, as the action zipped from beach to crag to poop deck, when I could have used one of those helpful maps with which Spielberg charted the course of his hero in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” On the bright side, we have so many people trying to steal Jack’s magic compass, rushing to unearth what Davy Jones keeps inside his chest, and wondering what, or who, makes Elizabeth’s heart flutter inside hers, that most of the movie’s encounters sprawl into overpopulated farce. One way to bring new mettle to a sword fight is to have three fellows slashing the air instead of two: Will, Jack, and Norrington (Jack Davenport), the naval officer from the first film, engulfed in a mêlée à trois. Nobody wins that particular scrap, but so what? Jack has already won the war, not to mention the favor of the audience.

This film was always going to be Depp’s baby. Both “Pirates” pictures (and there is one more to come) bear the signs of a creaking corporate enterprise—they are pure Disney products, culled initially from a ride at Disneyland. If they are relieved of that load, it is because Depp, as if pursuing a whim, or honoring a drunken bet, chose to float them into our eyes and ears as his own personal prank. He knows that, with the best buffing in the world, he would never cut it as a strapping roustabout. (He will also realize, if he scours his movie history, that as far back as 1952 Robert Siodmak delivered “The Crimson Pirate” as an affectionate spoof, trusting that piracy was too archaic, and too encrusted with legend, to be taken seriously—and that was in a movie with Burt Lancaster, the leading strapper of his time.) So Depp was left to concoct his own insouciance, and what he came up with was not so much a haze of hippiedom as the latest in a singular cinematic breed: the effeminate leading man.

At the birth of the breed, unsurprisingly, lies Chaplin, with his simpers, his balletic borrowings, and his bustling, wide-kneed run. Depp, too, has a special sprint, waving his arms in a helpless semaphore—not like a girl, but like a schoolboy’s mocking impression of a girl. From Bob Hope, Depp has stolen the notion of the lusting yellowbelly, out only for himself, and happy to leave any thrusting, mannish bravado to the fairer sex. When he smooches Keira Knightley in the new film, it is both a relief (anything to scoop her away from the invertebrate Orlando Bloom) and a nod to the fact that, while he piles on the mascara with a trowel, she has spent much of the movie clad in male dress; the gender swapping in this story pulls it close to pantomime. At two and a half hours, “Dead Man’s Chest” is far too long, but thanks to Depp—and to Bill Nighy, properly mean beneath his suckers and blubber—it swerves away from the errors committed by the other big movies this summer. If it swallowed a hundred and thirty-five million dollars in its first weekend, that is because of what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t bother to philosophize; it has nothing to report on perturbations within the human or superhuman condition; nor does it labor the nostrum, beloved of every sage from Gandalf to Xavier in “X-Men,” that with power comes responsibility. Instead, Verbinski’s movie trumpets the joy of irresponsibility, and, as for power, it never gets invited to the party. Hence the wonderful exchange in which Elizabeth assures Jack that one day, whatever his past sins, he will seize the moment to do a good and honorable deed. “I love those moments,” he replies. “I love to wave at them as they pass by.”

 
 
 
  
 
Hot weekend. 

BECK - THE GOLDEN AGE

MUMBAI V BOMBAY

Almost 200 people were killed on Tuesday when seven bombs exploded on a train in Mumbai, India. When did Bombay become Mumbai?

Officially, in 1995. That year, the right-wing Hindu nationalist party Shiv Sena won elections in the state of Maharashtra and presided over a coalition that took control of the state assembly. After the election, the party announced that the port city had been renamed after the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi, the city's patron deity. Federal agencies, local businesses, and newspapers were ordered to adopt the change.

Shiv Sena's leadership pushed for the name change for many years prior to 1995. They argued that "Bombay" was a corrupted English version of "Mumbai" and an unwanted legacy of British colonial rule. Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray once installed a marble plaque with the name on the Gateway of India, a famous sandstone arch. The national government objected to the renaming, though, fearing that Bombay would lose its identity internationally.

The push to rename Bombay was part of a larger movement to strengthen Marathi identity in the Maharashtra region. The Shiv Sena party also declared their intentions to do away with the term "Bollywood," a conflation of "Bombay" and "Hollywood" that refers to Mumbai's film industry. That name, though, has stuck around.

The name change didn't impact all of Mumbai's residents. Speakers of Marathi and Gujarati, the local languages, have always called the city Mumbai. "Bombay" is an anglicization of the Portuguese name "Bombaim," which is believed to derive from the phrase "Bom Bahia," or "Good Bay." (Portugal held territories in western India until 1961.) In Hindi, India's national language, the city is still called Bambai.

Several other Indian cities have changed their names in recent years. In 1996, Madras became Chennai. This name change was part of a similar effort by the state of Tamil Nadu to promote Tamil language and culture.

MUSIC

It may seem wimpy, but I am really enjoying listening to CSNY right now. The box set, released several years ago, is really quite an excellent overview. I remember borrowing it from my friend Jamie and immediately gaining a new appreciation for the non-Neil CSN songs, especially Music is Love, Lee Shore, Taken at All, Urge for Going, Used to be a King, Triad, and Laughing.

URGE FOR GOING - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town
It hovered in a frozen sky, then it gobbled summer down
When the sun turns traitor cold
and all the trees are shivering in a naked row
I get the urge for going but I never seem to go

I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I had me a man in summertime
He had summer-colored skin
And not another girl in town
My darling's heart could win
But when the leaves fell on the ground, and
Bully winds came around, pushed them face down in the snow
He got the urge for going
And I had to let him go

He got the urge for going
When the meadow grass was turning brown
Summertime was falling down and winter was closing in

Now the warriors of winter they gave a cold triumphant shout
And all that stays is dying, all that lives is getting out
See the geese in chevron flight flapping and a-racing on before the snow
They've got the urge for going, and they've got the wings so they can go

They get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in

I'll ply the fire with kindling now, I'll pull the blankets up to my chin
I'll lock the vagrant winter out and bolt my wandering in
I'd like to call back summertime and have her stay for just another month or so
But she's got the urge for going and I guess she'll have to go
She gets the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown
And all her empire's falling down

WOW

It took two days but Daniel Nestor is into the doubles semifinals at Wimbledon.

The Toronto left-hander advanced after he and partner Mark Knowles defeated Simon Aspelin of Sweden and Todd Perry of Australia 5-7, 6-3, 6-7 (5), 6-3, 23-21 in a six-hour nine-minute marathon quarter-final Wednesday.

The match started Tuesday but was halted due to darkness with the fifth set tied 11-11.

Nestor and Knowles are seeded third in the tournament. Perry and Aspelin are the No. 8 seeds.

The fifth set alone lasted 3:13. Nestor and Knowles had 28 aces compared to just five for their rivals, but were hurt by 16 double faults and 45 unforced errors. In comparison, Aspelin and Perry double faulted just once and made only 24 unforced errors.

Things won't get any easier for them in the semifinals, American brothers Bob and Mike Bryan, the top seeds, await.

Nestor and Knowles have two Grand Slam titles to their credit but have never finished better than second at Wimbledon, losing in the 2002 final. It's the fourth time they've reached the semifinals at Wimbledon.



The Borat movie trailer is now online. So good.

New Starbucks opening

I think France will win today.

WOW

It took two days but Daniel Nestor is into the doubles semifinals at Wimbledon.

The Toronto left-hander advanced after he and partner Mark Knowles defeated Simon Aspelin of Sweden and Todd Perry of Australia 5-7, 6-3, 6-7 (5), 6-3, 23-21 in a six-hour nine-minute marathon quarter-final Wednesday.

The match started Tuesday but was halted due to darkness with the fifth set tied 11-11.

Nestor and Knowles are seeded third in the tournament. Perry and Aspelin are the No. 8 seeds.

The fifth set alone lasted 3:13. Nestor and Knowles had 28 aces compared to just five for their rivals, but were hurt by 16 double faults and 45 unforced errors. In comparison, Aspelin and Perry double faulted just once and made only 24 unforced errors.

Things won't get any easier for them in the semifinals, American brothers Bob and Mike Bryan, the top seeds, await.

Nestor and Knowles have two Grand Slam titles to their credit but have never finished better than second at Wimbledon, losing in the 2002 final. It's the fourth time they've reached the semifinals at Wimbledon.



The Borat movie trailer is now online. So good.

New Starbucks opening

MISCELL.

The White House v. The New York Times

Johnny Cash's death in 2003 was a potent example of the exploitative and corrupt nature of the music industry. It wasn't the media blitz; that was perfectly suitable, particularly since the brief time span between June Carter Cash's death and her husband's made for a great story.

Where's My Google PC?: It's coming. It'll be great. You'll hate it.



SOCCER

The True Story of American Soccer: From The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.
By Dave Eggers
June 2006

When children in the United States are very young, they believe that soccer is the most popular sport in the world. They believe this because every single child in America plays soccer. It is a rule that they play, a rule set forth in the same hoary document, displayed in every state capital, that insists that 6-year-olds also pledge allegiance to the flag—a practice which is terrifying to watch, by the way, good lord—and that once a year, they dress as tiny pilgrims with beards fashioned from cotton.

On Saturdays, every flat green space in the continental United States is covered with tiny people in shiny uniforms, chasing the patchwork ball up and down the field, to the delight and consternation of their parents, most of whom have no idea what is happening. The primary force behind all of this is the American Youth Soccer Organization, or AYSO. In the 1970s, AYSO was formed to popularize soccer among the youth of America, and they did this with startling efficiency. Within a few years, soccer was the sport of choice for parents everywhere, particularly those who harbored suspicions that their children had no athletic ability whatsoever.

The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four coordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple of times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.

Because they all play, most of America's children assume that soccer will always be a part of their lives. When I was 8, playing center midfielder for the undefeated Strikers (coached by the unparalleled Mr. Cooper), I harbored no life expectations other than that I would continue playing center midfielder until such time as I died. It never occurred to me that any of this would change.

But at about age 10, something happens to the children of the United States. Soccer is dropped, quickly and unceremoniously, by approximately 88 percent of all young people. The same kids who played at 5, 6, 7, move on to baseball, football, basketball, hockey, field hockey, and, sadly, golf. Shortly thereafter, they stop playing these sports, too, and begin watching these sports on television, including, sadly, golf.

The abandonment of soccer is attributable, in part, to the fact that people of influence in America long believed that soccer was the chosen sport of Communists. When I was 13—this was 1983, long before glasnost, let alone the fall of the wall—I had a gym teacher, who for now we'll call Moron McCheeby, who made a very compelling link between soccer and the architects of the Iron Curtain. I remember once asking him why there were no days of soccer in his gym units. His face darkened. He took me aside. He explained with quivering, barely mastered rage, that he preferred decent, honest American sports where you used your hands. Sports where one's hands were not used, he said, were commie sports played by Russians, Poles, Germans, and other commies. To use one's hands in sports was American, to use one's feet was the purview of the followers of Marx and Lenin. I believe McCheeby went on to lecture widely on the subject.

It was, by most accounts, 1986 when the residents of the United States became aware of the thing called the World Cup. Isolated reports came from foreign correspondents, and we were frightened by these reports, worried about domino effects, and wondered aloud if the trend was something we could stop by placing a certain number of military advisers in Cologne or Marseilles. Then, in 1990, we realized that the World Cup might happen every four years, with or without us.

At the same time, high-school soccer was booming in the suburbs of Chicago, due in large part to an influx of foreign exchange students.

My own high-school team was ridiculously good by the standards of the day, stacked as it was with extraordinary players from other places. I can still remember the name of the forward who came from, I think, Rome: Alessandro Dazza. He was the best on the team, just ahead of Carlos Gutierrez (not his real name), who hailed from Spain and played midfield. Our best defender was a Vietnamese-American student named Tuan, and there was also Paul Beaupre, who was actually from our own WASP-filled town, but whose name sounded French. We were expected to win State, but we did not come very close. Homewood-Flossmoor, we heard, had a pair of twins from Brazil.

A short time later, after the growth of professional indoor soccer and then some vague stabs at outdoor leagues, we proved to the world that the United States was serious, or relatively serious, about soccer, and the World Cup came to America in 1994. At least 4 to 5 percent of the country heard about this, and some commensurate percentage of them went to the games. This was enough to fill stadiums, and the experiment was considered a success. In the wake of the Cup in America, other outdoor leagues have struggled to gain footing, and the current league seems more or less viable, though newspaper coverage of the games usually is found in the nether regions of the sports section, near the car ads and the biathlon roundups.

Our continued indifference to the sport worshiped around the world can be easily explained in two parts. First, as a nation of loony but determined inventors, we prefer things we thought of ourselves. The most popular sports in America are those we conceived and developed on our own: football, baseball, basketball. If we can claim at least part of the credit for something, as with tennis or the radio, we are willing to be passively interested. But we did not invent soccer, and so we are suspicious of it.

The second and greatest, by far, obstacle to the popularity of the World Cup, and of professional soccer in general, is the element of flopping. Americans may generally be arrogant, but there is one stance I … stand behind, and that is the intense loathing of penalty-fakers. There are few examples of American sports where flopping is part of the game, much less accepted as such. Things are too complicated and dangerous in football to do much faking. Baseball? It's not possible, really—you can't fake getting hit by a baseball, and it's impossible to fake catching one. The only one of the big three sports that has a flop factor is basketball, where players can and do occasionally exaggerate a foul against them, but get this: The biggest flopper in the NBA is not an American at all. He's Argentinian! (Manu Ginobili, a phony to end all phonies, but otherwise a very good player.)

But flopping in soccer is a problem. Flopping is essentially a combination of acting, lying, begging, and cheating, and these four behaviors make for an unappealing mix. The sheer theatricality of flopping is distasteful, as is the slow-motion way the chicanery unfolds. First there will be some incidental contact, and then there will be a long moment—enough to allow you to go and wash the car and return—after the contact and before the flopper decides to flop. When you've returned from washing the car and around the time you're making yourself a mini-bagel grilled cheese, the flopper will be leaping forward, his mouth Munch-wide and oval, bracing himself for contact with the earth beneath him. But this is just the beginning. Go and do the grocery shopping and perhaps open a new money-market account at the bank, and when you return, our flopper will still be on the ground, holding his shin, his head thrown back in mock-agony. It's disgusting, all of it, particularly because, just as all of this fakery takes a good deal of time and melodrama to put over, the next step is so fast that special cameras are needed to capture it. Once the referees have decided either to issue a penalty or not to our Fakey McChumpland, he will jump up, suddenly and spectacularly uninjured—excelsior!—and will kick the ball over to his teammate and move on.

American sports are, for better or worse, built upon transparency, or the appearance of transparency, and on the grind-it-out work ethic. This is why the most popular soccer player in American history is Sylvester Stallone. In fact, the two greatest moments in American soccer both involved Sylvester Stallone. The first came with Victory, the classic film about Allied soccer-playing POWs, and the all-star game they play against the Nazis. In that film, Stallone plays an American soldier who must, for some reason—no one can be expected to remember these things—replace the goalie on the POW team. Of course, Stallone knows nothing about soccer, so he must learn to play goalie (somewhere, Moron McCheeby grins triumphantly). Stallone does this admirably, the Allies win (I think), and as the crowd surrounds them, they are hidden under coats and fans and sneak away to freedom.

The second most significant moment came when the World Cup came to the United States, in 1994. It is reported that Stallone attended one of the games and seemed to enjoy it.

It's inevitable, given the way the U.S. teams are improving every year, that eventually we will make it to the semifinals of the World Cup, and it's likely, one would think, that the United States will win it all in the near future. This is a country of limitless wealth and 300 million people, after all, and when we dedicate the proper resources to a project, we get the job done (see Vietnam, Lebanon, Iraq). But until we do win the Cup—and we have no chance this particular time around, being tossed into the Group of Death, which will consume us quickly and utterly—soccer will receive only the grudging acknowledgement of the general populace. Then again, do we really want—or can we even conceive of—an America where soccer enjoys wide popularity or even respect? If you were soccer, the sport of kings, would you want the adulation of a people who elected Bush and Cheney, not once but twice? You would not. You would rather return to your roots, Communist or otherwise, and fight fascism with your feet.

This is an excerpt from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, an anthology edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey and published this month.