PRINGOALS

Pringoals at a shop in Madrid

SOCCER SPOTTING

The NBA 's annual world tour to further familiarize foreign fans, attract overseas business partners and sell merchandise abroad stopped in Madrid in June. The event featured Dwight Howard and his human-head-sized shoulders, 76ers point guard Jrue Holiday and the Milwaukee Bucks Dance Team. A huge crowd streamed through the parking lot in front of Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, stopping to play NBA Live at the EA Sports tent, wait in line for the three-point shooting contest and participate in the giant 5-on-5 tournament. The Spanish basketball fans piled on all the NBA clothes they owned for the event and, with no real regional alliances except to los hermanos Gasol, created a comprehensive collage of NBA popularity and unabashed frontrunner love. The Lakers, Celtics and Heat in general as well as Durant, Kobe, Lebron, Wade, Howard, Rose and Jordan in particular were well represented. The relatively new basketball enthusiasm also led to some crazy hodgepodge outfits, as evidenced by this guy below.

Kevin Garnett Celtics jersey and Lakers shorts. Plus bonus DayGlo green laces.

This same phenomenon exists at MLS soccer games at which you will see, and likely wear, an assortment of European football attire unrelated to the Dallas Burn/New York Red Bulls game on the field before you. Somewhere, someone defiantly dons a Barcelona top and Real Madrid shorts much like our bipolar NBA fan above.

The last time my brother and I went to a Red Bulls game, we each chose a team (I, Barcelona and he, Manchester United) an counted how many jerseys we saw. I forget who won the contest, but the combined number in support of those teams rivaled and possibly exceeded the amount of Red Bull merchandise in the crowd. I acknowledge that Thierry Henry and Rafa Marquez both arrived from Barcelona earlier that season, but that does not explain the huge number of Holland, ManU, Real Madrid and AC Milan jerseys dotting the stadium.

Lately, the soccer shirt as fashion statement has spread to other, non-soccer events. At this past weekend's Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago I noticed scores of jerseys before I finally snapped thirty-five photos of different kit-wearers on the final festival day.

Although there definitely was an elitist, I-know-more-than-you-do vibe similar to that exuded by the wan hipsters who wear mid-90s Champion brand NBA jerseys (the"Hoopster" cliche documented on Deadspin.com the past two years), a lot of the guys were just bros repping their teams. Albeit teams more or less cherry-picked from the top of the EPL, La Liga and World Cup standings or arbitrarily selected for franchise mode in whatever version of FIFA they first played.

Check out the website http://soccerspotting.tumblr.com/ for a daily dose of globalization evidencing, europhiliac and patriotic portraits of Americans wearing soccer jerseys like these:

Top to bottom: AS Roma, the ubiquitous Barcelona and the US National Team's Clint Dempsey

Yeah, soccer jerseys are becoming a hipster fad.

Wilkommen, Jurgen

After five years of courtship behind manager Bob Bradley's back, the US Men's National Team finally sealed the deal with Jurgen Klinsmann. Klinsmann, a former striker, was one of the best players of the 1980s and 90s and helped West Germany win the 1990 World Cup and a unified Germany, the 1996 Euro Cup. He scored 11 World Cup goals (6th most all time) and was the first player to score at least three goals in three different tournaments. On the club level, he excelled for Chelsea, VfB Stuttgart, Inter, Bayern Munich, Monaco and Tottenham before settling in Southern California. In 2006, he coached Germany to a 3rd place Cup finish.

Artwork: Stickers and markers on paper. Green t-shirt. German footballer figurine purchased at a dollar store in 1995 and found in drawer beneath hairbrush, bag of Pogs and old cell phones.

Uruguaysho

Atletico de Madrid's Diego Forlán never sat on a flight for longer than an hour without standing to do some quick calf raises, back stretches and a lap through the aisles to hydrate, reignite his metabolism and circulate blood more efficiently. "El Uruguayo" (pronounced "Uruguaysho" with the Southern Cone Spanish accent) subsists on a diet of lentils, spinach and grilled salmon. He doesn't know what beer tastes like.

When Spanish Men's Health featured Forlán on its cover, the airbrush whizzes curiously softened his polygonal torso musculature, marking the first time a magazine blunted their cover subject's finest attributes.

Michelangelo's Diego Forlán reveals the ideal form to which all health-conscious joggers should aspire and which American professional sports scouts, using descriptions typically reserved for livestock, would label "a specimen."

At least, these are the things I think in the moments after Forlán scores a screamer from distance and, with an expression as bright as his old Villarreal uniform, peels off his red and white stripes.

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When I arrived in Madrid, I couldn't wait to go to my first La Liga match and watch Forlán fly through midfield, receive a throughball at the top of the 18, take one touch into space behind a defender with the outside of his foot, and on the the next step, fire a high, bending scorcher past an alarmed goalie's flailing fist.

Forlán has been one of the decade's premier goal-scorers, twice winning La Liga's Pichichi Trophy for top goal scorer in the country and the European Golden Shoe for top scorer on the continent or Isle, even scoring twice to beat Fulham in the 2010 UEFA Cup final. He was never better than at the 2010 World Cup where his five goals and overall outstanding play (watch the shocked reactions of the Dutch defenders after his 30-yard strike) earned him the tournament's Golden Ball as best player. He and Luis Suarez's palm (2 feet 1 hand) carried an unlikely Uruguay to the semifinals where they lost to Holland and then Germany in the consolation match. Still, Forlán scored two of the tournament's most beautiful goals (the aforementioned rocket among dismayed Dutch and this impossible to replicate scissor strike against Germany) in those defeats.

Strangely, Forlán failed to maintain that form in the club campaign. I went to five games and never saw him score. In fact, the last game I attended, Atletí, with Kun Aguero and Diego Costa starting up front, overwhelmed Real Sociedad and Forlán jogged on as a mid-second half sub with his team already leading 2-0. The team was in the middle of una buena racha, piling up wins and charging toward a fifth-place point total (tied with Sevilla and Atheltic Bilbao, they finished seventh with tiebreaker rules) and a spot in Europe with their star little more than a late-in-game, change-of-pace substitute. As Marca.com wrote in May, "A year ago, he was a superhero, now he is almost an outlaw" after a disappointing season of injuries, struggles with fitness and, most damning, a feud with manager Quique Sánchez Flores.

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Although he hadn't scored a goal in twelve previous international matches, Forlán was back in form for the Copa América. Last Sunday, Madrid's bars filled with rowdy Latinos, Atletí fans and the regular crowd craving some meaningful soccer for the first time since May (the USA/Mexico Gold Cup final didn't exactly pry Madrileños' attention from the sports dailies' constant Cesc, Kun, Neymar transfer rumors).

I waited to meet friends outside a bar in the La Latina neighborhood, the city's Sunday hotspot, and ducked in every few minutes to watch the action. When I heard the noise inside swell and burst through the windows, I squeezed between the bouncing Uruguayans and got hugged by two guys in beer-splattered light blue jerseys while replays of Luis Suarez's goal played on the big screen in front of us. Just as my friends arrived at our meeting spot, the frenzy again erupted from the overheated, sticky barroom. I slipped in among the ecstatic Uruguayan expats, as if intruding on some decadent religious rite, and watched the goal replay. Forlán had nabbed a loose ball and netted immediately. In the second half, he scored another that sealed the 3-0 victory and provoked a concert of staccato U-RU-GUAY-O chants and devotional songs, which punctured the heavy evening heat for the first time in a year.

Uruguay Campeones

Felicidades Diego Forlán and Uruguay -- 2011 Copa América Champions.

Madrid, Port of Entry to el Paraíso de Fútbol

I moved to Madrid at the end of September 2010 -- about ten months ago and about six years since I last studied Spanish -- with little functional speaking ability and even less cultural or geographic knowledge besides a) at some point, some tourists run away from bulls in some city, b) something called 'tapas' is tasty, c) people eat a lot of eggs but not for breakfast, d) women are pretty e) a place called the Alhambra is stunning and f) everyone likes fútbol.

I soon realized that trying to fit into a new culture with a different language is an often confidence-shattering endeavor in which subtle gestures, expressions or smirks can kill a good vibe.

Although it may seem trivial, one such expression, I call it The Quizzical Look, was the worst moment of my day. The Quizzical Look is an absent-minded but obvious display of incomprehension and pity. You may have received it from a professor during a class in which you stammered comments in a desperate attempt to raise your participation grade. You may have received it from a pretentious music fan as you amateurishly reviewed your favorite album or from a know-it-all sports nut when you tried to break down an NFL offense. Whatever the antecedent, TQL is universal: The listener cocks their head slightly, leans closer, purses their lips, squints and furrows their brow as if trying sooo hard to understand the nonsense fleeing your head. Normally, the person who delivers the exaggerated “You’re babbling and sound like an idiot” expression does not mean any harm — they do not consider the implications or affect of their facial contortion — but the look is truly disheartening and makes me want to stop trying.

Yet, overcoming a series of embarrassing experiences forces one to find perspective and adopt aplomb-repair strategies. So, whenever I feel discouraged after receiving TQL as I butcher the pronunciation of the letters R and RR, I remind myself I have learned un montón de cosas since I first emerged from the Metro soaked with sweat, dragging 90 lbs. of luggage and wandering aimlessly because I couldn't understand the responses from the passersby whom I asked for directions.

Back to the aforementioned things I actually knew before I was so frequently and thoroughly humbled. I was pumped about b, c and d, curious about e, indifferent to a and most excited for f -- fútbol. Of course I would miss Eli Manning and the Giants, miss the NHL Playoffs and even miss the ever-failing Mets, but like Joseph Gordon Levitt getting over Zooey Deschanel by running into Minka Kelly at the end of 500 Days of Summer, Jason Segel upgrading from Sarah Marshall to Mila Kunis and the plot of every other romance film ever, something better was on its way.

I was about to immerse myself in Iniesta-Cup-clinching, Diego-Forlán-Golden-Ball-winning, Gerard-Pique-hammered-on-a-parade-float soccer paradise.

My love for soccer became my best tool for adapting to Spanish culture. Each day, I learned more sentence structures and slang by reading the commuter tabloid sports sections in the morning and Marca.com (The ESPN of Spain) articles and user comments in the evening. I learned how to swear by listening to the jaded "sufridores" (sufferers) cursing Atlético de Madrid's shaky defense. I learned about the weird web of political ideology and sports fandom, which helped me begin to understand some Spanish social issues, politics and the transition from Fascism to modernity.

Most importantly, I always had some way to talk to and connect with people, whether they were the third graders wearing full Spain national team kits, including socks and cleats, in my English classes or the drunk guys at the bar calling me Guti because I have long blonde hair and posing around me for photos.

This year I have watched games at Atleti's Vicente Calderon stadium, Real Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu, FC Porto's Estadio de Dragao and Barcelona's Camp Nou as well as a ton of bares, tabernas, cervecerías and other spots that cram the calles of Madrid and offer cheap beer, a basket of sunflower seeds and a TV screen on which Cristiano Ronaldo overpowers otherwise unflappable defenders for an hour and a half.

In two days I return to New Jersey (true home of Villarreal's star striker/Italian turncoat Guiseppe Rossi -- another important conversation starter) and I'm excited to watch Thierry Henry at Red Bull Arena to juggle with my brother in the frontyard while trying to impress joggers and to write and create art for this website.

Outside Camp Nou in Barcelona with my tall friend Aaron.