During the summer of 2007, in the early twilight of my affiliation with a certain sports media giant, I went to a minor league ballgame in New Britain, Conn. with several of its employees. Sometime around the fifth inning, the conversation turned to the company's disastrous recent attempt to sell an emerging sport, one it had invested considerably in. ESPN had failed to convince the sporting public to embrace arena football.

The flop was truly spectacular. I was told that the company had tried to ignite the fever in-house that spring, instituting Arena Football Apparel Days. On certain days, it was mandatory to show up for work in Russell Athletic Philadelphia Soul or Colorado Crush or Tampa Bay Storm merchandise. But despite HD coverage across multiple platforms and constant advertising, even with prime space on SportsCenter and the BottomLine, America never fell in love with the "50-Yard Indoor War." This is how bad it was: scheduled online chats with star players were so poorly attended that employees had to enter the chat rooms, submit fake questions. For all the money it spent on arena football, ESPN hadn't bought any actual fans.

I've been thinking about this a lot this past week, what with a similar campaign underway, conducted by the same entity. This time, there's a lot more money on the line, and the product is world-style football. It occurs to me that this offensive has hurdles in common with the arena football thing, namely that opening hearts and minds is different than opening space on the American sports buffet table. The key difference between us and the rest of the world is that we have a crowded sports menu and too many games. We have MLB, NFL, NBA, college football, college basketball, golf, tennis, NASCAR; beyond those there are minor sports like the NHL, outdoor lacrosse, poker, indoor lacrosse, X Games, open-wheel racing, Olympic sports, college hockey and lingerie football. And lately, above all, sports celebrity culture too. But there are only so many hours in the day, a ceiling on the benefits of ADD, no room at the inn.

Thanks to internet information overload, I'd estimate that I consume at least 500 mini-factoids, polls and survey results per day. Or maybe it's 500 million per day, because that's what it feels like. But one single statistic has stuck with me ever since I first came across it back in January, the one that claims that one out of every five men in the United States is unemployed.

The Great Recession has been especially tough on dudes. This trend has been pored over for a while now from a number of angles, and the socioeconomic impact is so powerful that it's caught the attention of America's thinking class. Just today, I got my copy of The Atlantic with a flaccid male symbol on the cover, and a feature article called "The End of Men." It's your basic new-journalism piece, full of shock illustrations and pullquotes designed to scare half the audience and validate the beliefs of the other.

Beyond the window dressing, it's a good article! ("Good," of course, meaning "I agree with it.") That the salary scoreboard is changing is indisputable fact, based on raw numbers and observed evidence. And I'm not here to defend my gender. I'm more interested in American male population's internal dynamics, or rather, where my brothers are at right now.

This week, the 2010 World Cup in South Africa gets underway. Since the 1920's, when the cold war between the International Olympic Committee and the International Football Association began (primarily over amateurism issues), the World Cup slowly and surely supplanted the Olympics as the earth's largest sporting spectacle.

While the IOC worked long and hard to convince the sporting world that a modernized ancient Greek concept was a good idea, the rise (and genius) of FIFA can be credited to its basic success in tapping into a deep-rooted cultural instinct most of the world already had: the urge to kick a ball around with other people in an organized fashion. True love is always more powerful than shrewd marketing -- when taken from that perspective, it's no wonder that this single sport left all the other Games in its wake.

But ever since soccer was dropped from Los Angeles 1932, mostly for financial reasons and a lack of local interest, the sport grew up weird in the United States. For starters, it took on a different name in the 1940's, resulting in a sort of Babel-tower disconnect with the rest of the world. Other sports, like baseball and basketball and American-Style Football, became the national pastimes, and the "global game" spent most of the 20th Century struggling to stay in our top ten. The U.S. relationship with soccerfootyfootball has been bizarre all along, and it's not really getting any more stabilized or normal. In most countries, the sport Just Is, like the sky and water and particle physics. Here, the bond is loose, complex and highly theoretical.

So here's something. A couple of weeks ago, I received an e-mail intended to gauge my interest in being part of a panel discussion about raising money on the internet at a conference. In Florida! No, really, I am not kidding.

I wasn't simply plucked out of the crowd for this honor, that's just not the way these things work. Somebody knew someone else, and the first one in that short chain was someone who's been a longtime supporter of my basketball web initiatives. The conference representative's e-mail name-checked this person as a way of introduction, and it mentioned that I'd raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for travel and that I'd managed to turn a profit with a paywall website, and who's my agent? There was something about a round-trip plane ticket and three nights' lodging, and you just don't throw that stuff around unless there's a timeshare exchange involved.

It was all quite flattering, but I'm not going to do it. I could have flatly turned them down because I'd never heard of the organization, but I didn't, or I could have told them that I don't do things like that because I'm afraid of crowds (that's not true, just ask anybody I went to college with). As it turned out, I just didn't get back to them.

Since then, though, I've thought about what words of wisdom and authority I'd offer about raising money on the internet -- and what I'd have to offer to a group of (presumably) paying listeners who would likely be subsidizing the panelists' travel expenses. After practicing my speech in my head a few times, I'm convinced they wouldn't like my advice. "First rule," I might have said. "Scare off or ignore most of the available market."

Over the past year or so, it seems that the only times I ever use this journal is when somebody dies. This was brought home to me when a friend mentioned in an recent e-mail: "Are you ever going to blog on your site again? You know, about people who are alive?" My first reaction was defense -- well, isn't death the only thing worth writing a longform journal entry about? And then, the quick fishhook-in-the-mouth before the whole sentence came out... wait, that sounds exactly like something an old person would say. And I am old, internet-old. I've been on the World Wide Web for 17 years, longer than some very savvy young internet users have been real-life alive. And the rewards for that kind of longevity are similar to those given the real-life elderly: blank stares, indifference, on to the next one.

For the past day or two, I've had this feeling that the recent resurrection of Leslie Harpold's proto-webzine smug (1997-2000), by means of mirrored archive, should be a bigger deal somehow. Jason Kottke, a web aggregator who's been at it for 12 years and who makes money off his blog, pulled out the "get off my lawn" line, and well, there you go. I don't know if this is really like finding DaVinci sketches in your basement; to me it's more like rediscovering a stash of high school newspapers in the attic, and realizing that they're a lot more awesome than nearly everything since. We just didn't realize the full genius of it at the time. How could we have? We were all so young then.

Leslie Harpold died in December 2006 mysteriously, alone. They didn't find her for a few days, and it might have been longer if her readers hadn't noticed that she'd stopped updating her site. This would have been like any number of similar American deaths, but she'd written hundreds of thousands of words online and made friends all across the (far less crowded) World Wide Web. There were many remembrances on blogs and message boards in the days following. It seemed like everyone knew her.