I've been reporting sports in the Twin Cities since the fall of 1968. There have been several revolutions in American sports, including:
Pro football overwhelming baseball to become the national game, and stock car racing becoming the king among motor sports, and boxing gorging itself on initials to the point it's less popular than the grotesque exercise called MMA.
None of these compares with what took place after Title IX was written into the education amendments of 1972 — a few words that brought equal opportunity for girls and women to participate in sports.
I've said this, and many people choose to disbelieve based on a few paragraphs critiquing the state of women's basketball in a long-ago notes column, but it is fact:
The greatest occurrence in my career was the chance for half of our population to compete fully in team sports.
And I'm now starting to feel that No. 2 on the list of sports revolutions is the arrival of soccer as a spectator sport of significance in this country.
OK, I get the old argument: "Zealots have been wrongly selling the idea of a 'soccer boom' to this country since the 1970s, when crowds of debauched youth descended on NASL stadiums and parking lots to party."
I've promoted that idea on occasion to dismiss a game that doesn't do it for me — never has, never will.
