Checketts' problem? Wrong ball

Dave Checketts is upset, New York style, blaming anyone and everyone for not being able to secure a workable stadium deal for his Real Salt Lake soccer team.

All that's lacking is a New York Post headline: Dave's Meltdown!

Checketts is upset at politicians, both state and local, at Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon and at Utah Jazz owner and noted movie critic Larry H. Miller, who he says tried to sabotage a proposed stadium deal in Sandy.

New York Post: Brokeback II!

He has intimated that he has been led along, double-crossed and left to hang out to dry.

For all I know, he may be right on all counts.

Then again, maybe the problem is something else entirely.

Maybe the problem is soccer.

In all the stadium rhetoric since Checketts — after making his name, and fortune, as a sports management wunderkind in New York — brought Major League Soccer to his home state last year, there has been an underlying assumption that soccer is a prime-time sport. That a soccer-specific stadium ought to be built — somewhere. That Real Salt Lake is the summertime equivalent of the basketball Jazz.

But is that reality?

Is soccer that big of a draw in the United States of America?

Do enough people who matter really care?

Personally, I love soccer. I think it's close to a perfect game. It doesn't favor height, like basketball, or weight, like football, and it isn't capable of lapsing into long stretches of tedium, like baseball.

There's a reason it's the world's most popular sport.

But that still doesn't make it basketball or football or baseball.

I think Dave Checketts' biggest problem is that in trying to bring a world-class sporting franchise to Utah, he brought the wrong-sized ball.

Sports in America — and everywhere else — is all about irrationality. Huge stadiums get built, ridiculous ticket prices get paid, ornate corporate boxes get leased, 19-year-old athletes get the keys to a fleet of new Escalades, the modern parasite known as ticket scalper exists, all because of the ability of sports fans — and this includes politicians — to be irrational.

But it's hard to get irrational about soccer in Salt Lake City — and in America — in 2006.

On paper, it works in Utah. Thousands of kids, both boys and girls, play youth soccer. Thousands more immigrants grew up with soccer as their first language. There's your attendance base right there.