The Alewife

Alewife Sports by Erich C. Mueller

The United States will win the World Cup

As the time draws nearer and nearer for the first whistle to start the 2006 World Cup, the detractors of team USA get louder and louder. I won’t pull any punches, I want the United States to win the World Cup. Going beyond wanting, I firmly believe they can.

The detractors I spoke of are the same as your ‘buddy’ that tells you the cute guy or girl is out of your league and you shouldn’t bother. They are one in the same as the teacher that wouldn’t call on you when you knew the answer, even though you got it wrong (albeit close, let’s not forget how well team USA did in the 2002 cup in Korea) most of the time.

These hateful SOB’s will stop at almost nothing to say how the US won’t do squat, or how we don’t deserve to win, and a whole host of other ignorant BS.

Alewife Sports

Barnstorming out of the Fens

by Erich C. Mueller

Not having much money and being a baseball fan, I’m disheartened at the state of admission at Fenway. Factor in a hot dog, beer, and the scalped ticket, you are sadly getting close to the century mark.

That scalped ticket that goes for around twenty dollars face value may cost you seventy-five, even if, sigh, the Royals are in town. With ballparks getting smaller and ticket prices getting larger, there seems to be no end in sight for all my fellow frugal fans.

This is merely a sign of the times. The gap between rich and poor is widening at a  faster rate than Vince Wilfork’s waistline. Regular people are getting squeezed out of the picture, but I’m not going cry over this.

I’m here with a solution:  I want the Red Sox to hit the road for six games. A lot of the inflated cost of seeing the Sox arises from the small venue they play in. I love Fenway Park. It is the quintessential ballpark and a national treasure that should be preserved with the same earnestness that the Constitution is.

By taking their show on the road, the Red Sox would be undertaking an unprecedented public relations effort. Instead of the fans coming to the Sox, the Sox would go to the fans. I propose that the Red Sox play a home series in Gillette Stadium and another in Olympic Stadium in Montreal.

I know there are doubters out there who bring up the valid point that no one watched baseball in Montreal even when they had their own team. Lest we forget, that team was the Expos.

Alewife Sports

by Erich C. Mueller,  Sports Editor

For those of us not from East Africa, marathons are not the penultimate in sporting events. At this time of year everyone’s attention is focused on how much money has been made or lost on college basketball.

If you’re the sports editor of this paper, you scratch your head wondering why you would put three Big Ten teams in the final four just because you went to Wisconsin.

I decided to write about the Boston Marathon with a bit of trepidation. I find running painful and about as fun as taking in a Celtics-Spurs game. I make myself do it on the treadmill at the gym the same way you would take vitamins. I do it only because it is good for you.

The basis of any sport is struggle. The struggle to stop the drive on third down and to go up strong for the bucket is what drives an athlete. I use struggle in a positive sense, a challenge instead of a setback.

When I was a kid, I loved to play with Legos. I loved the fact that so many different, cool things could be built out of them. When I played with Legos, I had to struggle with my ideas of what I wanted to build and then what was actually built. While not as flashy as the Micro Machine city, my Lego creations were raw and more real than all that Tyco junk.

In a similar light, marathons are like Legos while other more popular sports are like the flashy toys in bigger boxes with better TV commercials.

Alewife Sports

by Erich C. Mueller

The Winter Olympics were a truly remarkable spectacle occured in Torino, Italy. An unheralded ice hockey club from Switzerland knocked off, gasp, Canada in the preliminary rounds of Olympic competition.

Canada, the nation that gave ice hockey to the world, a nation that has won seven Olympic gold medals and an astounding nineteen world championships, was bested by a nation that is more known for wrist watches and chocolate than slap shots and checking. This has a familiar resonance for Canada’s neighbors to the south, the US of A.

Flashback to Indianapolis 2002, the FIBA (basketball’s international body) World Championships.
The United States, a team composed of NBA all-stars, figured that the competition would merely be a jam-fest in which they would only half-heartedly engage in.

Losses to New Zealand, Argentina, and Yugoslavia later, the message had been served:  the world is just as good, even better than the life-givers of hoops.

In that same fashion, the Canadians were upended by the Swiss 2-0. The Swiss team had three players in the employ of the NHL.