The Morning Rekrap: June 28, 2017

Atlanta United got roasted by a puppet on YouTube yesterday.

Yep, a puppet. Like what the Billy Haisley of comedy Jeff Dunham uses.

Atlanta has diss tracks and before that had duels. Miami has ... a puppet.

Anyway, here’s what the puppet had to say:

(if you are at work consider using the nice headphones that you got the technology office to get you for ‘conference calls’ to soak all this in, it’s NSFW)

I speak an interesting dialect of Spanish, meaning I’m a Gringo who learned he could get by with about ¹⁄₃ the vocabulary and grammar necessary to be fluent and relies on the graciousness of the people in Spanish speaking countries I’ve lived in to be patient with me so I can do mundane tasks, but I did understand many of the swear words in this and it is not kind to Atlanta.

There’s a lot to unpack here, let’s get started.

I’ll give credit where it’s due, his media criticism is spot on. Living in a country where Hulk Hogan could take down a trashy tabloid website in a lawsuit financed by a thin skinned Silicon Valley billionaire that fundamentally reshapes a right outlined in a document that legitimized slavery, traded an authoritarian king for an oligarchy thereby not actually achieving any revolutionary change, and is still venerated despite its obvious inability to be a reference point to solve problems that developed in the post-Industrial Revolution and post-Civil Rights eras makes me want to vomit and never stop. The obvious evidence for this, as Pepe points out, is that the media is ignoring a soccer game being hosted by a minor league footy team.

As for the rest of it, I could take the high road and say that Miami is a tough opponent and have figured out that the key to success in NASL is signing MLS castoffs and overpaying for a what passes for the best midfielder in the league - or I could say some outlandish nonsense about the city and it’s minor league soccer team. Plus, if the last 12 months taught us anything it’s that fake news always wins so Pepe can have his facts.

1. Don’t be fooled by Miami FC’s MLS washouts and NASL All-Stars, Miami is a fail town when it comes to sports. Once a fearsome football school that sent highly ranked criminals to the NFL, the University of Miami has fallen out of the national sports consciousness and most recently served as a money laundering front for Ponzi schemer Nevin Shapiro. The city has such legendary fans that LeBron James decided that he would rather live in Cleveland, Ohio, a city you cannot step foot in without getting tetanus, than stay in Miami one more minute than his contract required.

Miami’s most exhilarating sports memory was immortalized in the documentary Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, a movie that also passes for the city’s greatest cultural contribution featuring a man who talks with his butt. Who could forget when Ace saved Dan Marino so that the Dolphins could imagine having a winning season between 1972 and whenever global warming deposits the city in the bottom of the ocean? Miami is such a bad sports town that despite, according to Pepe at least, having the best soccer team in the United States of America, the Miami FC draw about 5,000 fans a game. They play in a city that yearns for soccer so desperately, thirsts for it like a dehydrated tourist desiccating themselves on one of Miami’s sand pits, that they waited nearly 1,200 days before finding a place for David Beckham to put his team.

2. Atlanta United are so good that they have an MLS team, won’t play most of the starters, and are still the favorites. If you want to know why, it’s because the Five Stripes will field what will basically be a NASL team tonight with maybe a designated player on it but probably two to three teenagers that will end up making Miami FC look like Scunthorpe United.

3. Miami is the flooded basement of America’s retirement home, it is less a city and more an Axe Body Spray commercial with a Pit Bull soundtrack that you can visit in real life. It is a city that makes the news whenever the following happens: 1) a hurricane is poised to remind everyone how unbelievably stupid it is to put a major population center in the path of costing $5 billion to rebuild every 25 years. 2) when peak Florida Man is achieved with an attack by an actual zombie. 3) the city is invaded by pythons. The three biggest economic sectors in the city are anti-communism, Scarface posters, and DUI lawyers for celebrities.

While Atlanta is building into a world class city, Miami is just hoping that the oceans swell high enough to put it under water before the earthquake that cleaves Los Angeles into the sea happens so it can be better at something than LA for once. Or to put it another way, I want our talented wonder children to score a bunch of goals on Miami FC’s MLS rejects and hope the starters rest up for the game on Saturday.