Horses don’t give two round shits about soccer, but the Gilded Gelding and I still thought it would be fun to try and watch the two halves of the USA v. Italy game in separate, team-appropriate venues.
Thusly, we started at the ESPN Zone in downtown Chicago. This place reps American-style excess so hard that we expected to find swirls of red white and blue liquid in the urinals.

A hellhole of televisions, testosterone and flab, but, hellhole or no, a whole ton of our red-blooded countrymen packed the place, and all eyes were on the football match. The spectators’ reactions suggested that they didn’t always know what was going on, but whenever team USA did something other than fuck up, the place went nuts. After spending most of the first half marveling at a mysterious control center and looking for couple of chairs, GG and I sat drinking beer and watching a whole shipload of sailors play all of the kiddie games in the arcade that takes up half of the second floor of the place.

A whirlwind of weirdness that was over almost before it started. Our plan was to then skateboard over to Little Italy to watch the second half.

We weren’t sure how long halftime was, but we reasoned that we could skate the five miles in 20 minutes. Not so much. The 90-degree heat made it hard to keep moving. We had to take lots of breaks and at different points in our journey we both took off our shirts.

It took us about 45 minutes to get to Little Italy, and when we arrived we couldn’t find a single bar that looked even remotely the part. We imagined a dimly lit room filled with empty tables covered by yellowing, red-checked tablecloths and a bunch of old men guzzling Peroni at the bar. All we found were stupid hot dog vendors. We watched the last few seconds of the game on a small television on the counter of a convenience store. After that we decided to skate home.

The heat had made us crazy, and the more we skated the hotter we got. All sorts of horseplay ensued.

Mostly just trying to get a decent picture of us holding hands while skating and doing lots of little ollies.

Incidentally, the canvas Sperry Slip Ons held up marvelously. The sparse damage you see here was inflicted by at least 100 jump scrapes.

In our delirium, we concluded that soccer is indeed the manliest sport in the world. Most American football players couldn’t even keep up with the referees in a real football match. We also revisited a conclusion that we’d made separately as youths: we aren’t good at sports. We’d rather fuck around than help people who don’t like us score goals. But about halfway home we found a beach ball in an alley and had a little World Cup action of our own. Let me tell you, the Gilded Gelding is one hell of a goalie.