What a difference one lousy unjustified war can make: the United States soccer team is getting heckled by World Cup crowds like Carrot Top at a Mensa picnic. The anti-American sentiment is so bad the team has to ride around Germany in an unmarked bus for fear of violent encounters - the same strategy the Dixie Chicks used through Alabama and Georgia two years ago. All this despite the fact the U.S. team is made up mostly of dudes with foreign roots and names like Claudio Reyna and Pablo Mastroeni and Oguchi Onyewu. George Bush is actually safer travelling secretly to the heart of Iraq than he would be riding to Nuremberg for the Ghana match on the team bus. A quick look at this year's World Cup roster may help explain the mood a bit: In our corner, England, Australia, perhaps Sweden. Leading the list of countries whose fans may have a bit of a beef with us, unjust or not - Iran (something about atomic stuff), Saudi Arabia (something about oil), Korea, Japan (something about trade tariffs), Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro (helped tear up their country pretty bad), Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Netherlands, Ukraine (something about being sucked into a bad war), The Czech Republic, Poland (generally irritable), Tunisia, Ghana, Togo, Angola, Ivory Coast (Bush not even sure where these are on a map), Argentina, Paraguay, Ecuador (something about helping assassinate their leaders), Brazil (beef legislation), Trinidad & Tobago (beat them consistently at track meets), Costa Rica and Mexico (something about building a wall across the entire southern United States to keep them out.) Switzerland as always remains neutral but quite frankly is acting a bit snooty lately.

Aussie Geoff Ogilvy won the U.S. Open Golf Championship Sunday the hard way - by withstanding a parade of challenges from skilled but pretty dumpy-looking shmoe pros. This marks the first time since Johnny Miller won the 1976 Bob Hope Desert Classic that any male viewer's wife or girlfriend looked at the screen during the trophy ceremony and said, "That guy's kinda cute," before diving back into her newest issue of Marie Claire. Phil Mickelson's pudgy cuteness could only take him so far before he caught a glimpse of himself in a shiny ballwash on the 18th tee and proceeded to double-bogey. Britain's Colin Montgomerie suffered a similar fate at 18, walking past the reflective surface of a small water hazard and realizing he looked like more than a bit like the evil foster mom in the "Harry Potter" movies before also double-bogeying the hole. Earlier, Jim Furyk saw what he thought was Howard Stern's nose in his sunglasses, then realized it was his own, and he too crashed and burned on 18. Vijay Singh fell back quickly after feeling his own throat at the 13th and then obsessively asking people in the gallery the rest of the way, "Does this look like a double chin to you?!" Ogilvy then became the first golfer since the LPGA's Jan Stephenson to actually use a tourney win to get laid that very evening.