Globetrotters

Last Monday, more than 85,000 (some say 90,000) people packed Bernabeu Stadium to welcome Cristiano Ronaldo to his new soccer club, Real Madrid.

As I stood three-deep on a step in the nosebleed section, I realized that this moment was unlike anything I had ever been a part of.

Here I was, waiting to watch the introduction of one player-not a match, not a scrimmage, not even a practice.

The presentation lasted all of 30 minutes. Everyone came to see him. Fewer people came to see Baby Jesus. Hundreds waited overnight and seemingly no one went home disappointed.

He said hello and that it was a dream to be a Madridista, but between his Portugese-dominated version of Spanish and my general incompetence, that's all I understood.

He juggled a ball for a minute, signed one lucky fan's jersey, walked around the pitch and, just like that it, was over.

There is nothing like this in American sports. This year's Kobe Self-aggrandizement Party (the Los Angeles Laker championship parade) drew a ton of people, but that was a team achievement. Real Madrid didn't win anything. Last year, they were the Cal football team to FC Barcelona's USC.

All this hoopla is for just one guy. Will LeBron draw this kind of mayhem if he jumps ship next summer? Not a chance. Sure, attendance will improve the following season. But the press conference will be comprised of however many papers can still afford to let writers travel (My guess: 10).

This past offseason the New York Yankees spent hundreds of millions of dollars for baseball's version of "los galacticos" and people got excited. But not like this. And Americans actually like basketball and baseball.

Before this summer's Confederations Cup fluke (many of you are now cluelessly googling the reference), 50-percent (more like 70-percent) of Americans could not have picked out Landon Donovan in a police line-up, if their lives depended on it.

Yes, Americans have kept the MLS afloat by the hair of its chinny-chin-chin, yet there is no huge draw to go see these underpaid professionals play. Who knows how much longer the league will last before it falls like its countless American predecessors.

The only semi-respectable soccer following in the U.S. belongs to Texas A&M, which loads the sidelines by the thousands on Friday nights for its women's soccer matches.

Soccer is a second rate sport in America, no secret there. After I covered it last semester, I can tell you that college soccer at Cal is treated like it doesn't exist, an average of less than 500 people made their way out to Bears' (both men and women's) home games in 2008. Whether this is just a symptom of the infamous Berkeley Athletics Apathy is unclear, but the point remains. Few care about soccer.

The people that say it's boring are the kind of people who still watch Slamball and the WWE. Soccer just doesn't work like football, where a team can just hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch and jam it up the middle.

Goals take time. Sometimes the best games end in a draw, to which Americans respond with an arena-filled, "BORING" chant.

Americans are famous for writing off things that we cannot be the best at i.e., rugby, cubism and diplomacy during the Bush Administration.

U.S. Soccer has sucked since the beginning of time and until the Confederations Cup, the public hadn't rallied around an American eleven since the women's World Cup in '99. But after the 90,000 strong in the Rose Bowl and the millions watching on television settled down from the Chastain Sports Bra Fiasco, soccer again fell by the wayside.

To have this many people in Madrid drawn to such excitement over one player is awe-inspiring. It reminded me that we need this in American sports and even more so at Cal.

Quarterback Kevin Riley is able to walk around this campus like he's just some guy. He's not. On Saturdays, his play can make or break us.

But we don't pat him on the back in the GBC after a great win. We just take turns dumping on him after a loss. And that goes for any sport at Cal.

On that day at Bernabeu, the Real Madrid fans showed me that support and faith might be the most important aspects of success. Even when the recent past hasn't been the greatest.

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