I’ve been hearing a lot about football butts lately. No, NFL training camps haven’t started yet. Please. Sell that so-called sport to the Japanese, let them call it what it is – Team Sumo – and get it out of my face already.

The World Cup is on. The football World Cup. I refuse to call it “soccer". This is the original football. You know? As in “you play the ball with your foot?" Played by dudes you can actually see what they look like. None of this “two tons of body armor" stuff. Mind you, a 350-lb. (25 stone, 160 kilos) NFL offensive lineman with terminal Dunlap’s Disease is probably grateful for the concealment. Not so your true football stud. Give him a good set of cleats. A decent jersey – which he’ll rip off at any excuse. And, um, shorts.

Hey. You get in training so you can run around a grass pitch for 90 minutes straight, without commercial breaks (and you were wondering why football doesn’t sell in America), and see what it does to your abs and buns. Your girlfriend’s figured it out. If you still have one.

And she’s not the only one. The pink press is all over these guys too, or at least so San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Gwen Knapp tells me. Not just because of the six-pack abs that have nothing to do with swill … er, “The King of Beers". But, I read, because of the passion. The Oscar-worthy screams of agony that seem to be necessary to earn free kicks. The prancing and dancing, kissing and hugging that happens every time a goal is scored, once every second moonrise. The jerseys that get ripped off at every excuse. Not the shorts yet, speaking of moonrise. But it’s only a matter of time.

A bunch of people, Ms. Knapp among them, are all caught up in the passion. No passion, no buzz, no points, they argue. The USA got bundled out of the tournament early, so they say, because they “lacked passion". Never mind that what they really lacked was a proper striker, a proven goal-scorer, and consequently played a formation that makes the neutral-zone trap in ice hockey look like the return of the kamikazes. Never mind that they spent their entire time in Germany being carted around in Brinks trucks. Geez. It’s as if we’d invaded Iraq or something. Never mind that the Germans will likely win the World Cup by methodically beating the snot out of their opponents and then walking away passively, Mr. Cosby. Ah no. We’ve gotta have passion.

At least we’re consistent. Pete Sampras has to have been one of the best tennis players ever to play the game. But he didn’t date movie stars like Andre Agassiz or toss rackets and f-bomb referees like The Holy John McEnroe. Pete who? We seem to like our athletes, especially our male ones, hot. Flamboyant. Erotic, even homoerotic. At the boundaries of control, if not maybe just a little over.

And it all reminds me of miniskirts.

Yes, I’m sure the html script has represented that word on your screen accurately. But to be on the safe side, I’ll repeat it.

Miniskirts.

They were all the rage during the 60s. High schools across the USA had their dress codes in a twist worrying about butt cheeks. While the girls were standing. The Laugh-In girls all had ‘em. Goldie Hawn … ah … Diana Rigg wore ‘em as Emma Peel in The Avengers. Though she (or at least her producers and directors) also went in for pantsuits. Tight ones. Diana Rigg was just simply an unfair thing to do to a boy who hadn’t quite figured out this dating business yet in 1966.

Miniskirts were passionate. Hot. Flamboyant. Erotic (duh). At the boundaries of control, if not maybe just a little bit over.

And then, suddenly, there was a Voice. “Wait a minute. This is supposed to be the Liberation. Why are we allowing ourselves to be treated like little girls??"

Abruptly, the miniskirts disappeared …

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.