With any luck, readers of Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper will be savvy enough not to have swallowed the line fed to them Sunday by President Bush.
"As a boy, I never even saw a soccer ball," Bush told the newspaper. "Where I'm from, soccer wasn't played. The sport just didn't exist. So there is a generation of Americans who really aren't soccer fans."
OK, let's examine that a little closer.
Bush was born in New Haven, Conn., where soccer has been played at one level or another for more than a century. Just around the corner, in East Hartford, Conn., is where the U.S. team will play its send-off match May 28 before leaving for Germany and this summer's World Cup.
"As a boy," Bush would have turned 4 just one week after the U.S. defeated England, 1-0, in the 1950 World Cup to record one of the sport's greatest upsets.
He was raised in Texas, true, but he was attending Yale University in 1966 when the World Cup was played in England, and he was at Harvard Business School in 1974 when the World Cup last was held in Germany. He was also at Harvard in 1975 when Pele came to play in the North American Soccer League.
Both tournaments and Pele's arrival would surely have penetrated even the thickest of Ivy League walls, if not the future president's consciousness.
As for his Texas upbringing, Bush most surely during his climb up the political ladder must have run into Lamar Hunt, whose Dallas Tornado played in the NASL from 1967 to 1981 and whose FC Dallas (nee Dallas Burn) has played in Major League Soccer since the league was founded in 1996.
And Bush did live in Houston, where the NASL's Houston Hurricane played from 1978 to 1980 and where MLS' Houston Dynamo now plays.
Then there is the Dallas Cup, one of the world's top youth tournaments. It has been in existence since 1980 and has drawn teams to Texas each year from almost 100 countries.
It was in 1994 that Bush was elected governor of Texas. It was also in 1994 that the most successful World Cup in history was staged -- in the United States, including Texas.
So, no, it is not, as Bush told Bild am Sonntag, that "the sport just didn't exist." It is simply that, like so many other Americans brought up on a diet of football, baseball and basketball, he has opted to ignore it.
That was his choice, and no blame attaches.
