Keeping an Eye on the Gulf

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Doug Pike** (0:52)
All right, welcome yet again to Fifty Plus, the only weekday show of which I'm aware around here that shares as much as can possibly be crammed into an hour each day. And right in the middle too in your lunch hour. About things of interest to folks who've already lived five or six, maybe even seven or eight decades, or more, I guess. I bet you I've got some people in their 90s out here. I know when I prep for this show that I don't have to explain things like I'm talking to children, like lots of national television newscasters do. Of course, they don't get to write their own stories, though, like I do. When I bring up a subject, I try to share enough of it to cover it. That's enough for you, whoever you are, and however much you want. But I also try to leave you maybe a little hungry to learn more and then form your own opinion about what's going on, whether it's in Iran, in our own Congress, or in places around the city, in the state, in the country, in the world that warrant the attention of wise people who've got book learning, street smarts, or some combination of both. So anyway, here we go. Weather system in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico looks intent on paying us a visit, but according to two solid sources I trust on these matters, this one might be sort of, it's probably gonna run out of gas before it has a chance to be much of a threat or a bother around here. I'm presuming we'll get some rain out of it. I'm presuming we'll get a little bit of breeze out of it, neither of which will be unwelcome at this point.
I've got no problem in getting a little more rain around here. Maybe some slightly cooler days and nights, maybe a little more than a breeze for a day or two. But that's about all I think that we're gonna have to worry about so far as tropical weather systems go for the next week or two. This one, by the way, acquired the name Bertha, and honestly, I would guess that Bertha is a name probably nobody younger than 40 has ever heard before. The last time I saw that name was in print decades ago, stamped on the head of a driver in a friend of mine's golf bag. And I know it would have been more appropriate yesterday, but this is the first chance I get with this audience to recap the World Cup, talk about it in past tense.
Admittedly, I'm not a huge soccer fan, not because I don't understand the game or that I dislike it for any particular reason, but simply because I didn't grow up with it. My generation, our generation here on Fifty Plus, had baseball, we had football, basketball, hockey up in the northern half of the country. Those were our primary professional sports. Over time, though, soccer was introduced, and more and increasingly more youth sports associations adopted it. Then high school teams came along and then college teams, and now a fairly successful professional presence of soccer in our country for both men and women.
And wishes we all might that our World Cup team might someday be more competitive in competition.
That day, I'm afraid, is years away, maybe an entire generation away, because the greatest American athletes are still gravitating toward the sports I mentioned a little earlier. Now, it is true, according to one survey I saw just recently, that soccer has eclipsed baseball as the number three sport in the country. I can see how that's happened, but honestly, I'm not a big fan, because I grew up around baseball. That was my sport growing up, and it still is today. Maybe we'll do better at World Cup competition someday, maybe become more competitive, but again, that's a long ways away. And one of the reasons, I think, is because soccer in this country still doesn't pay like the other sports. That's why the best athletes in America are still gravitating toward baseball, football, and basketball. Soccer players, the elite ones anyway, make a ton of money around the world, but it doesn't pay that well here. And that's why all of our best athletes keep going to baseball, football, and basketball, because that's where they can make generational money, enough money in six or eight, maybe ten years in the leagues, to take care of heirs for several generations who couldn't spend it all if they tried. I'm entirely convinced, and I think it would be hard to make an argument otherwise, that if almost any American athlete who is in any professional hall of fame now had chosen soccer when he or she was maybe six years old and devoted as much time to it as they did to the sport they chose, they could have been soccer stars. No doubt about it. And now the quality of the athletes turn into soccer here at the high school and college levels is growing exponentially. There's a guy here at work who has a son who's an outstanding soccer player and likely to late, he may choose to play it professionally when he finishes college. And by then, since he's played since he was a toddler, and because he has a tremendous work ethic, it wouldn't surprise me at all to see him on a future World Cup team. I kind of wish that for that kid. I really do. I've seen in social media posts that his dad puts up how hard that kid works and how good he is. And at his age, I think he's got as good a shot as anybody. Still on World Cup for just a little bit longer, by the way. I saw some guy interviewing on social media fans on their way into one of the matches, I don't know where, and asking what they paid for their tickets. And the numbers were just staggering, 20 grand, 50,000.