Major Sports and Minor Ones

The New York Times World Cup blog today includes an article on the huge growth of the television audience watching the cup in the U.S. Univision, offering the games in Spanish, is actually doing better than ESPN/2, but (quoting the Milwaukee Sentinel), the article says,

If you take the rating for the U.S.-Italy match on ABC (4.4) and combine it with the Univision rating for the match (1.7), you get a 6.1, which makes it the weekend’s most-watched daytime event, beating the U.S. Open golf tournament and the NASCAR auto race in Michigan.

That's a lot of people. Who says that soccer's a second-tier sport, again?