Before I left for France and upon my return, almost anyone I told about my World Cup trip responded with a crack about soccer hooliganism. The customs officer at SFO asked me, “What’s wrong with them soccer fans?” When I watched a quarterfinal at my uncle-in-law’s house, he joked, “You aren’t going to trash the living room after the game, are you?” I’ve tried to abbreviate the long speech I use in response to those who immediately link soccer with violence. It includes statistics on shootings at U.S. high school football games and points out that thousands of soccer games are played worldwide each week without incidents. After the U.S.-Iran game, I was in Lyons hoping that Americans saw how fans from both nations partied together, waved each others’ flags, and danced the Macarena side-by-side. Then I heard German thugs had beaten a French policeman into a coma in Lens. It was an orchestrated attack, a virtual assassination attempt by sober men on a gendarme charged simply with guarding a bus. It’s true, soccer games are sometimes chosen as venues for violence, especially by traveling fans who generally face only a short detainment before extradition. But I had gone to nine games at France ’98, none involved England, and I saw only friendly behavior between opposing fans. When I returned to San Francisco, I learned 16 people were injured when gunshots rang out at the Alameda County Fourth of July Fair. The next day’s paper reported that 10 people were shot at a Tacoma karaoke club and five died. Independence Day gatherings and karaoke won’t be linked to violence. But the odd story about soccer-fan barbarity in a foreign land helps take Americans’ minds off their own violent society.