Frank Deford is a versatile, award-winning sports journalist and writer. A commentator for National Public Radio, a regular correspondent for HBO’s Real Sports, he is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, and makes astute observations about a variety of sports from baseball to hockey, football to lacrosse, basketball to tennis. And occasionally, after praying hard for forgiveness and then swallowing an antacid tablet, he will write about soccer.

He doesn’t like the sport very much, apparently, and has been knocking it for years. But in my opinion, in doing so, he commits the cardinal sin of any commentator, any writer: he pontificates about something he neither understands, nor tries to grasp. It’s an old saw, Frank, but it still applies: Never write what you don’t know.

Time and again over the years, Deford, whom The Sporting News has described as “the most influential sports voice among members of the print media,” has knocked soccer. A cover story for Sports Illustrated in July of 2001 (“Not Our Cup Of Tea”) stirred up a lot of comment from the soccer-faithful, especially because of Deford’s opinion that “…any run-of-the-mill 6-4-3 double play is more graceful than the most precious soccer maneuver”. He says he enjoyed the World Cup this year, but was he watching the succession of passes involved in the goal Argentina scored against Croatia? Did he see Zidane’s deception and cheekiness in the penalty-kick in the final? And all the other marvelous acts of skill and power?

No, Deford, distinguished sports-writer though he may be, just sounds off about this sport he doesn’t like. The reason? Simply because the players can’t use their hands, there isn’t enough scoring, and there are too many ties. “It’s a very frustrating game, too defensively oriented for us,” he said recently in a debate with Lynn Berling-Manuel, publisher of Soccer America. “And it doesn’t have the efficiency that sport does that uses your hands. It is totally bizarre when you think about it, that a game would be played with feet and head rather than hands. I mean this makes no sense whatsoever. And you cannot be proficient in such a game, and Americans reject that.”

More than a billion people around the globe believe that our simple game that requires little more than a patch of open ground and a ball, does indeed make sense. That’s the beauty of it. And yes, you can get proficient at it, but only by doing what athletes in most sports have to do: practice, practice, practice, and of course, unlike baseball, run, run, run.

For a versatile writer, and a decent man who does good charitable acts, Frank Deford does himself a disservice by continuing to diss soccer. Listen to and then read the full transcript of the Deford/Berling-Manuel debate on PBS.