Soccer is a sport of the suburbs, thus this comment poses no threat to America

From a profile of Michael Bradley, son of U.S. soccer coach Bob Bradley and key member of the U.S. national team for the upcoming World Cup:

Soccer is Michael's business, but it is also his life. He has two overarching goals: win matches for the national team and land a job with a club like AC Milan or Manchester United. "It's been my dream for as long as I can remember to play for the biggest clubs in the world," he says. Anything that gets in the way of either is a waste of his time. Like, for instance, homesickness. Or college. Although he has mostly lived on his own since he was 13, when he joined the U.S. residency program in Bradenton, Fla., he says he's never thought about what he might have missed. When he had the chance to jump to the pros, the son of the Ivy League and Charlottesville didn't look back. "I was never going to college," he admits. And when he got the opportunity at Heerenveen, a club with a history of developing, then selling budding stars such as Klaas-Jan Huntelaar and Ruud van Nistelrooy, he wasn't about to stay in MLS. "If you want to get to the level I want to," he says, "you have to play in Europe." Even now, as he has begun to make a name for himself in the Bundesliga, he lives a Spartan existence in an uncluttered, bare-walled apartment in tidy working-class Mönchengladbach.

Somehow I feel that if a young black male from a poor, crime ridden area had made this statement or led this kind of life paternalistic sportswriters would be wringing their hands in agony bemoaning the decline of STUDENT ATHLETE IN AMERICA.

And yet, because this kid's white and he plays a sport where the business model doesn't allow for any of this college-athlete-as-unpaid-apprentice crap it's all just fiiiiiiiine.