Tennis on TV
I like to watch sports on the TV. My favorite is tennis, a great spectator sport. I used to play so I understand exactly what’s happening, not that tennis is so complicated. Now that summer is on the way to the Northern Hemisphere there is a quite a lot of tennis going on and it’s interesting to see what the top players look like since we saw them slamming the ball back and forth at the end of last year. The other fascinating thing about tennis, and all professional sports for that matter, are the vast sums of money that are won.
Where’s a tennis match?
So I flip through the channels in search of tennis. I have access to many sports channels including ESPN and Eurosports – there is no tennis anywhere. On every channel, including the French, Italian, Spanish and Russian channels there is only one sport being aired – soccer. The Mondial, better known as the World Cup, is due to take place in South Africa in June 2010 and preliminary qualifying matches are already being played in different countries around the world.
The fever
Soccer is the world’s most played game, whether it is by a bunch of small boys kicking a bundle of rags around on a dusty patch of ground with tin cans acting as goal posts, or a professional team where the players have been bought for millions of dollars, playing on a manicured lawn. Every boy and girl plays soccer at some time in their life and some keep playing it as long as they can run after a ball.
Successful players make careers out of playing soccer. The current best-known player on both sides of the Atlantic is David Beckham, a man who not only has a gifted sense of ball play, but the charisma and business ability to promote himself as well.
The tickets
The Personal Money Store does not suggest Payday Loans for purchasing tickets to the games, but one can try. Tickets are already available and below are the prices in U.S. dollars. Of course, if you intend going, don’t forget to throw in the airfare, hotel, car rental and other such incidentals before you make final application to the Personal Money Store.
Matches Cat. 1
Opening Match (No 1) $450
Group Matches (No 2 to 48) $160
Round of 16 (No 49 to 56) $200
Quarter-finals (No 57 to 60) $300
Semi-finals (No 61 & 62) $600
3rd/4th Place Match (No 63) $300
The Final (No 64) $900
A brief history
One of the earliest forms of soccer in which players kicked a ball around on a small field has been traced as far back as 1004 B.C. in Japan. The Romans played a game that somewhat resembled modern soccer. The early Olympic Games in Rome featured twenty-seven men on a side who completed so vigorously that two-thirds of them had to be hospitalized after a fifty-minute game.
Future World Cups
The U.S. is dead set on hosting the World Cup and to help things along, Dr. Henry Kissinger has joined the U.S. bid committee to help drive the U.S. bid.
Soccer World Cup – that’s going to be quite the event. It is, after all, the world’s most popular sport. Interesting that they would choose South Africa – South Africa is notorious for sporting events because of the High Veldt. It’s like when teams play the Denver Broncos, very high altitude. Blame falls on the elevation quite often when visitors are defeated in South Africa.