Another reader chimes in:

Jonah,
With all due respect, your recent correspondent on soccer is a know-nothing hypocrital doofus. I can’t even begin to number the numerous times baseball announcers, pundits and writers have described that ponderous sport in overglorious and epic terms. Football announcers regularly spout leaden cliches comparing the sport to warfare and marveling over the battles in the trenches or the awesome display of air power. If National Review had a nickel for everytime the word “heroic” or some variant of the word has been used about American sports, you could buy Time, Newsweek, and The Nation and make Cosmo the editor of all three, and that’s just with the salary bump you’d get.
Over the top praise for every aspect of a sport? Americans talking about American sport do that as easily as we breathe.
A practiced windbag like Bernard Henri Levi alluding to the Greek pantheon is one thing, but how is he that much worse that the excesses of, say George Will, who writes about baseball as though the Declaration of Indepence were written on the back of Topps cards. Will pontificates about the sport as though life as we know it would all be meanless twaddle if the slider had never been invented. BHL may strain in his efforts to mythologize soccer, but Will sometimes writes about baseball as though he were composing the Psalms.
So some people in the US still hate soccer bitterly and are completely ignorant of the sport (For example, it’s “Zidane”, not “Zadine”). Fine. They should just say so and get on with their lives, rather than annoying the rest of us with their inaccurate generalizations and pretensions.
Sheesh.
Otherwise, keep up the good work.