CARTAGENA – When I was kid, soccer was pegged by many people as America’s fastest growing sport. In terms of creating a favorable impression among the girls at school though, I couldn’t help but notice soccer players ranked somewhere in between the junior-varsity football team’s placekicker and the chess team’s fuzzy, castle-shaped mascot.

This wasn’t the only reason I quit playing soccer, of course; there was also the matter of getting caught making out with the coach’s daughter under the bleachers – which probably wouldn’t have been so bad, were it not for the rather large baggie of weed I had in my pocket when the Student Resource Officer stumbled across our tryst in progress. (That SRO motherfucker never did pay me for all that weed, by the way.)

In any event, instead of quitting the game outright, I might have tried moving to another country and continuing with my pro soccer aspirations, had I known players in countries where the game is truly appreciated make some serious money and enjoy all the trappings of mega-fame – including the occasional overture from porn stars offering to make movies with them.

“How would a porn video with Tino Asprila do?” asked Colombian porn performer Amaranta Hank in a recent Instagram post.

In case you’re wondering, Tino Asprilla isn’t even an active soccer player; he’s a retired one who now works as an announcer, in addition to marketing his own line of condoms on the side.

I’m not saying if I had kept playing the game, I’d have reached the level of Tino, who played for top-flight teams like Newcastle United and once scored a legendary hat-trick against Barcelona.

For that matter, I’m not even saying I’d have made a professional squad in any league, or drawn pornographic invitations from a woman as attractive as Amaranta Hank if I had.

All I’m saying is I coulda been a contender – if not a contender for Premier League contracts and sexual overtures from gorgeous South American porn stars, at least a contender for the role of backup linesman in the NASL and maybe a discounted roll in the hay with a porn performer-turned-escort, or an amorous evening with one a gullible would-be porn star featured in a documentary produced by Rashida Jones.

But noooo, shortsighted idiot that I am, I decided to skip any steps requiring things like talent, athleticism and a lack of criminal record, instead trying to cozy up to porn performers more directly, by writing about the industry which employs them and the movies in which they perform.

For some strange reason though, sitting in at my Cheeto dust-covered desk (well OK, my Cheeto dust-covered coffee table) frantically typing away in the corner of a dark, musty room just isn’t causing the romantic social media missives from porn performers to roll in as I’d expected.

I tell you, sometimes it’s all enough to make me wonder why I even bothered moving out of my mother’s basement all those years months days hours ago. Shit, at least when I lived at home, I got the occasional phone call from a flesh and blood woman. True, those women all happened to be my sisters (and the occasional solicitation of donations from some nice lady at the Beacon Foundation) but it was better than nothing.

Maybe it’s not too late, though. After all, if someone comes along and creates the soccer-equivalent of the BIG3, only with much lower acceptance standards, maybe I can still live my dream. After all, it seems like professional athletes are managing to stay in the game longer and longer these days (if I’m not mistaken, Tom Brady is 117 years old now, for example) and all sorts of has-beens are coming out of retirement (or trying to, at least) to reclaim their piece of the pro sports pie.

Oh, who am I kidding? My days on the soccer pitch are long over – and not just because I now have glorified string cheese where there used to be meniscus in my knees. Among other things, it turns out they have drug tests in pro soccer these days.

You might be wondering how hard it could be to pass a stupid drug test, but I know better than to underestimate such things. After all, I studied as hard as I could for my last drug test, smoking everything I could find for days on end, and I still failed!