If you stopped by the soccer page at Yahoo! yesterday, you saw this video link: “Landon Donovan gets mad at a reporter.”

Naturally, I clicked — Donovan isn’t the type to blow up at anyone. He’s heard it all before. At worst, you’ll get a mildly sarcastic answer, not hostility.

The video paints a different picture:

If it seems unbelievable, well, it is. Donovan has plenty of experience answering inane questions. And it’s hard to imagine a reporter asking about Gatorade unless it was a precondition of the interview. (Many reporters decline those preconditions.) In any case, there’s no way a question on Gatorade would send someone over the edge.

So it’s clever, though not as clever as this ad for a Mexican lottery:

Hard to imagine, say, Cuauhtemoc Blanco landing a similar ad deal in the USA.

If you’re looking for the more thoughtful side of Donovan, try this LATimes interview in which he talks a bit about attitudes toward the game in different cultures.

In the meantime, we’ll wonder what it’ll take to get soccer players back in shampoo commercials (skip to the 6:48 mark):