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"  David Beckham won&amp;#039;t break soccer in America. No matter how massive his paycheck or skinny his wife or luscious his cheekbones, he&amp;#039;ll never do it because he&amp;#039;s not an asshole. Fans may throw garbage at loud, obnoxious athletes like Terrell Owens, but what they do to quiet professionals is even more brutal: They ignore them. American indifference to soccer will only be overcome when we have a true villain, someone who is such an unqualified douchebag that he&amp;#039;ll make Americans everywhere pay too much money to watch a too-boring sport, just for the chance to chuck an overpriced tray of nachos at his head. In short: American soccer needs Jose Mourinho. Mourinho is the manager of the London-based Chelsea Blues, a deep-pocketed team -- the team&amp;#039;s Russian owner possesses four luxury yachts and counting -- hell-bent on buying a championship. (And indeed, they accomplished just that over the weekend, beating Manchester United for the FA Cup.) With the possible exception of Bobby Knight, there&amp;#039;s nothing quite like Mourinho in American sports. He&amp;#039;s Joe Torre meets Ric Flair -- a devout prick who wears expensive Armani suits and refers to himself in the third-person as &amp;quot;The Special One.&amp;quot; What else do you need to know about him? He&amp;#039;s the kind of guy who once announced &amp;quot;we were the best team today&amp;quot; after losing a soccer match. He likes to &amp;quot;compliment&amp;quot; rivals, citing one opponent as the finest manager never to have won anything of importance. And he regularly begins sentences with the phrase &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to sound arrogant&amp;quot; before making a statement that makes Barry Bonds seem like a Quaker. Unlike the blandly likable Beckham, Mourinho is a shit-stirrer of the grand order, a proudly elitist bastard to whom nothing and no one is sacred. After winning his second-straight Premier League championship, Mourinho threw the medal and blazer they awarded him into the crowd. When they handed him a second medal and blazer, he threw those into the crowd as well, explaining the medal was the same as the one they gave him the previous year. Doesn&amp;#039;t sound that bad? Imagine Tiger Woods flinging his Masters&amp;#039; jacket off the 18th green and into the lake, since he already had one and all. That&amp;#039;s Jose. These aren&amp;#039;t the only reasons to despise him, of course. When someone rubs him the wrong way, he fights dirty. Really dirty. Consider his feud with his Portugal countryman Cristiano Ronaldo, English soccer&amp;#039;s player of the year. The battle began innocently enough, with Mourinho bitching that league officials were biased against Chelsea. When Man U&amp;#039;s star had the nerve to disagree, Mourinho went thermonuclear, employing the class card and insinuating Ronaldo was stupid because he grew up in a poor, blue-collar neighborhood in Portugal. Picture Phil Jackson saying LeBron James doesn&amp;#039;t know what a foul is because he never went to college (and is a commoner to boot). Mourinho may never have physically assaulted anyone like Coach Knight, but that&amp;#039;s only because he does enough damage just by opening his mouth. Impressive as these accomplishments are, however, Mourinho won&amp;#039;t achieve truly legendary status as an asshole until he comes to the United States. Americans have long suspected all Europeans secretly look down on us as ill-mannered and ill-educated. Jose won&amp;#039;t even try to hide it. After all, if he views one of his fellow Portuguese as a peasant, how will he react to Oklahomans? And the U.S.A. will respond in kind, as fans across the country will snatch up season tickets, eagerly anticipating those few times a year Jose comes to town and they get to zing D-cell batteries at him. He&amp;#039;ll achieve a celebrity greater than Pele ever knew, while soccer will finally hold our nation&amp;#039;s attention for more than a month. Get your ass over here already, Jose. You have a sport to save. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a3027/savesoccer052307/>