I’ll try and be brief. I certainly won’t go for ninety minutes, plus extra time, injury time, penalties. Plus a half-hour of charmless punditry on either end, and one in the middle when you break for jaffa cakes.
Sport.
I feel like I’m missing out.
I feel like I’m missing one obvious clue, one synapse firing puzzle-piece. The same way I can look at trees, hills, the platypus and the baby sloth and not see the guiding hand of some big man in a chair in the sky, I can look at Sky Sports and not see whatever it is that makes my brother get so cross when someone loses to somewhere. I can’t see whatever it is that makes my mum cheer and clap when the chap in the white with the headband misses the thing and it hits the bit.
I can see the joy in participating. I used to love the odd game of seven-a-side I’d play on a Sunday with those lads from HMV. I wasn’t much good, but there was exercise, endorphins, a sense of achievement and the satisfaction of being much bigger and much more solid than a few Filipino kids. The satisfaction of feeling like something out of a Robert E. Howard story as I smashed them against the boards and trod their calves under the plastic blades of my Umbros. The struggle and the triumph was something I actively took part in. I didn’t just pick a point on a map and call it ‘us’ and ‘we’ and watch from the corner of the pub. I strapped on my shin pads and went out and did all I could for myself and the five other lads chosen by a guy who lost a coin toss.
What I can’t understand, AT ALL, is how this sort of thing makes anyone feel anything:
Somewhere You’ve Never Lived: 2 – Bunch of People From All Over The Place: 5
Unless you:
1. Own the bunch of people.
2. One, or all of them are your offspring
3. You put money on one of these squads to win.
4. Shrapnel is lodged in your brain.
I get caught up on the paradox. What are you supporting, when it’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles? I can just about see how watching it play out might be entertaining. What I absolutely can’t fathom is how a text message that says “Gunners 2-0 down’ could stir any kind of reaction out from even the most manic of minds. How does reading a paper, or a scoreboard, without any experience of the battle that delivered those numbers do anything to you? I know it does. I’ve seen it countless times: the dismay or delight as digits display. I don’t get it.
I get the Panini Sticker Album bit. That was ace. Totally understand that bit.
When I went to Primary School in Tooting we played football in the playground, but no one ever mentioned Football Clubs. I don’t think I knew anyone who supported anyone. It was just a game we played, and to me the idea that anyone watched grown-ups play the same game on the telly or in stadiums never entered my head. It would be like SKY having a channel that was just people playing Hide n’ Seek, or Forty-Forty. When I turned up in Orpington, I felt uprooted, and wanted to fit in. Richard McKnight asked me which team I supported, and when I told him I didn’t know, he told me I supported Liverpool. So I did. He also told me to show Alison Shepherd my willy. So I did. Football was a much bigger deal out in BR6 – the school played it on mud, in proper sessions, with adult supervision and rules and whistles and special outfits and stuff. The Cubs did too. I’d play in parks. There were leagues. The results of the games were recorded and people remembered how well they did.
I wasn’t really much good. Chicken or the egg on whether that’s because I preferred indoorsy, escapist things like drawing or writing or watching movies or playing video games or reading comics, or I drifted to all those things because I wasn’t good at sport. Then I ended up in a Secondary School where they didn’t even play Football. They played Rugby, which was even worse because you can’t even enjoy playing it, let alone watching it. Great, savage inhumans with heads like car batteries wrapped in plasticine ramming into each other for a strange pellet that can’t travel forwards. It’s a nightmarish contest of mutants and mud. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a scrum with their trunk-like faces pressed into me, nor would I want to endorse the exploitation of such disfigured blobs from a stadium seat. Their desperate, accusing eyes squinting out from crevasses in their bulbous, bony blocks: ‘Why am you make me play?’
I’m being a snob, of course. Which is an important part of why sport doesn’t sit well with me. A lot of it is championed by people I did not, or would not have liked at school. Brash, cocksure, moronic jocks, or braying, privileged, moronic poshos. The personalities in professional sport seem (at a glance, I’ll admit) to be a mix of dull or bastard, much like 90% of people I didn’t want to know when I wore a blazer with a badge on it.
I’m being a bit unfair and narrow-minded. And rightly so, as this is my soapbox. I’m only really thinking of Football when I write this. The Premier League, to be precise. A stereotype of a lad with a pink tie and large knot in it being caught out with a really rather rank prostitute. I turn my nose up at that sort of thing. Especially when their Abbey Clancy or equivalent stands by them as if it was part-and-parcel of their love-life. In Italy, things might be different – a more exciting class of game, with players that dress well and have style and other things that I tend to value over tactical thinking and athleticism. Although I imagine they still have the affairs.
So what of the other options? Golf has Ian Fleming and Sean Connery in its corner, and has a certain throwback, side-parting and slacks quality. Nevertheless, it’s an absolute bore to watch. I once worked for a sports broadcaster. Of a lunchtime, Golf commentators would use the VT machines in the office to practice their narration, before heading into the suites to commit to recording. I’d sit through blobby soundbites like:
“In the approaching gloom, Nick Faldo’s accuracy...”
Cue pause as man in Rupert Bear trousers knocks a Slazenger away from a wall of fog.
“...shone like a beacon.”
And while I can see myself enjoying the outdoors in preppy menswear (though perhaps not in the pringle and patterned garb ) I don’t imagine I can actually play it. It does rather seem like there’s a lot to judge and process before each swing. A shame all the precision in the world can’t make it the least bit spectacular.
I think Cricket follows on from this. I like the idea of something so old fashioned - images of picnics and gentlemen and Kent - but television translates it to a quiet, uneventful game that seems to happen miles and miles into the centre of an ocean of short grass. Tiny white figures bowling and batting in gargantuan amphitheatres, occasionally giving up a cheer as something is caught and, over in an adjacent time zone, a polite applause goes out from the stadium seats. I think I also dislike the way ‘hero’ was bandied about after England won the Ashes, as though bringing a tiny trophy to our shores was akin to storming the beach at Normandy. Honours all round for a bunch of people who managed to do their jobs without fucking up. Oh, Bravo. And I’m not going to play it either, as for the most part that means launching a leather missile at dogwalkers, pushchairs and joggers, until someone is killed.
Athletics. Well, there’s a certain purity to the accomplishments involved in athletics. Individual skill, strength, agility, ability. A person is the fastest, throws the furthest, leaps the highest, and there’s very little disputing the prowess involved. That said the curmudgeon in me can’t stomach all that feel-good, unifying, common-man claptrap that has proceeded the Olympics for the last million months. London will not be transformed into some utopia of inspired, kindly, community-minded Joe Publics. Instead the London Underground will become a network of concrete arteries, boiling with fat and grim, oily waste. Bodies will wash up on the South Bank, wrapped in bootleg T-shirts. They’ll take the torch and burn down more furniture stores in Croydon.
Motor-racing. International Playboys in glamorous cities, dealing with life or death instincts at 200 miles an hour? Or a sooty, repetitive, indistinct contest where ugly, identical can-opener cars orbit a twisty bit of road for what seems like all of every Sunday ever? I really, really want to like motor-racing...but no.
Tennis. Ah, well, Tennis. It’s preppy. Although I’m picturing more scenes from The Royal Tennenbaums then I am real-life figures from Tennis lore. And it’s gladiatorial. I like that. Except it’s just as difficult to root for a man you don’t know as it is a town you don’t live in. I’m not going to blindly follow a player because he’s English, because he may well be an idiot, or a prick and I’m not in the habit of cheering either on. Surely personality matters more than passports? For once I recognise what’s so thrilling about the sport, but without anyone to champion, it just doesn’t hold my attention. I’d still much rather use that time to draw, or watch Hayley Atwell from the tree outside her house.
But it does rather leave me without some things that I really do love. First of all; event television. I like the talking point, ‘Did you see?’ as a concept, but in practice I’m almost always out of luck. For some months now I’ve been without broadband and rarely got home in time to watch anything. I have missed out on both ‘The Hour’ and ‘Torchwood’ where I know I would have had at least one person to go ‘Did you see...?’ with, and had that sense of the shared enjoyment I miss. Furthermore, I’m as likely to enjoy The Apprentice as I am a genuine Job Interview with an angry grey bollock, so no office banter for me there, either.
The other thing is - being in a gang. I think that’s the best way I can explain it. I’ve always wanted to be part of a defined gang. In the last few years, like a child, I have given name (and membership cards) to two groups of friends of mine, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Instead of going to the cinema with X and Y, ‘The Dead Fish’ assembled. Where one might see a bunch of old school friends and their girlfriends out to dinner, I saw ‘The Feast of Empires Club’ convening. It’s probably all rather needy and smothering, but I relish the thought of belonging to something more than a ragtag handful of people who have one another’s phone numbers. I’ve never been on holiday with a group of friends – no cottage, or villa or chalet shared, and now I’m of an age where my peers are all settling down, I can’t see it ever happening. Of course, sport doesn’t really give you this, or when it does, it’s a pack of inbreds throwing garden furniture about in Bareclona. Nevertheless, sport provides a badge, a shared experience, drama – between friends. I think that’s the bit I covet. I think it would be good to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’ every once in a while.
Though there’s the Soap Awards, I guess.
Sport.
I feel like I’m missing out.
I feel like I’m missing one obvious clue, one synapse firing puzzle-piece. The same way I can look at trees, hills, the platypus and the baby sloth and not see the guiding hand of some big man in a chair in the sky, I can look at Sky Sports and not see whatever it is that makes my brother get so cross when someone loses to somewhere. I can’t see whatever it is that makes my mum cheer and clap when the chap in the white with the headband misses the thing and it hits the bit.
I can see the joy in participating. I used to love the odd game of seven-a-side I’d play on a Sunday with those lads from HMV. I wasn’t much good, but there was exercise, endorphins, a sense of achievement and the satisfaction of being much bigger and much more solid than a few Filipino kids. The satisfaction of feeling like something out of a Robert E. Howard story as I smashed them against the boards and trod their calves under the plastic blades of my Umbros. The struggle and the triumph was something I actively took part in. I didn’t just pick a point on a map and call it ‘us’ and ‘we’ and watch from the corner of the pub. I strapped on my shin pads and went out and did all I could for myself and the five other lads chosen by a guy who lost a coin toss.
What I can’t understand, AT ALL, is how this sort of thing makes anyone feel anything:
Somewhere You’ve Never Lived: 2 – Bunch of People From All Over The Place: 5
Unless you:
1. Own the bunch of people.
2. One, or all of them are your offspring
3. You put money on one of these squads to win.
4. Shrapnel is lodged in your brain.
I get caught up on the paradox. What are you supporting, when it’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles? I can just about see how watching it play out might be entertaining. What I absolutely can’t fathom is how a text message that says “Gunners 2-0 down’ could stir any kind of reaction out from even the most manic of minds. How does reading a paper, or a scoreboard, without any experience of the battle that delivered those numbers do anything to you? I know it does. I’ve seen it countless times: the dismay or delight as digits display. I don’t get it.
I get the Panini Sticker Album bit. That was ace. Totally understand that bit.
When I went to Primary School in Tooting we played football in the playground, but no one ever mentioned Football Clubs. I don’t think I knew anyone who supported anyone. It was just a game we played, and to me the idea that anyone watched grown-ups play the same game on the telly or in stadiums never entered my head. It would be like SKY having a channel that was just people playing Hide n’ Seek, or Forty-Forty. When I turned up in Orpington, I felt uprooted, and wanted to fit in. Richard McKnight asked me which team I supported, and when I told him I didn’t know, he told me I supported Liverpool. So I did. He also told me to show Alison Shepherd my willy. So I did. Football was a much bigger deal out in BR6 – the school played it on mud, in proper sessions, with adult supervision and rules and whistles and special outfits and stuff. The Cubs did too. I’d play in parks. There were leagues. The results of the games were recorded and people remembered how well they did.
I wasn’t really much good. Chicken or the egg on whether that’s because I preferred indoorsy, escapist things like drawing or writing or watching movies or playing video games or reading comics, or I drifted to all those things because I wasn’t good at sport. Then I ended up in a Secondary School where they didn’t even play Football. They played Rugby, which was even worse because you can’t even enjoy playing it, let alone watching it. Great, savage inhumans with heads like car batteries wrapped in plasticine ramming into each other for a strange pellet that can’t travel forwards. It’s a nightmarish contest of mutants and mud. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a scrum with their trunk-like faces pressed into me, nor would I want to endorse the exploitation of such disfigured blobs from a stadium seat. Their desperate, accusing eyes squinting out from crevasses in their bulbous, bony blocks: ‘Why am you make me play?’
I’m being a snob, of course. Which is an important part of why sport doesn’t sit well with me. A lot of it is championed by people I did not, or would not have liked at school. Brash, cocksure, moronic jocks, or braying, privileged, moronic poshos. The personalities in professional sport seem (at a glance, I’ll admit) to be a mix of dull or bastard, much like 90% of people I didn’t want to know when I wore a blazer with a badge on it.
I’m being a bit unfair and narrow-minded. And rightly so, as this is my soapbox. I’m only really thinking of Football when I write this. The Premier League, to be precise. A stereotype of a lad with a pink tie and large knot in it being caught out with a really rather rank prostitute. I turn my nose up at that sort of thing. Especially when their Abbey Clancy or equivalent stands by them as if it was part-and-parcel of their love-life. In Italy, things might be different – a more exciting class of game, with players that dress well and have style and other things that I tend to value over tactical thinking and athleticism. Although I imagine they still have the affairs.
So what of the other options? Golf has Ian Fleming and Sean Connery in its corner, and has a certain throwback, side-parting and slacks quality. Nevertheless, it’s an absolute bore to watch. I once worked for a sports broadcaster. Of a lunchtime, Golf commentators would use the VT machines in the office to practice their narration, before heading into the suites to commit to recording. I’d sit through blobby soundbites like:
“In the approaching gloom, Nick Faldo’s accuracy...”
Cue pause as man in Rupert Bear trousers knocks a Slazenger away from a wall of fog.
“...shone like a beacon.”
And while I can see myself enjoying the outdoors in preppy menswear (though perhaps not in the pringle and patterned garb ) I don’t imagine I can actually play it. It does rather seem like there’s a lot to judge and process before each swing. A shame all the precision in the world can’t make it the least bit spectacular.
I think Cricket follows on from this. I like the idea of something so old fashioned - images of picnics and gentlemen and Kent - but television translates it to a quiet, uneventful game that seems to happen miles and miles into the centre of an ocean of short grass. Tiny white figures bowling and batting in gargantuan amphitheatres, occasionally giving up a cheer as something is caught and, over in an adjacent time zone, a polite applause goes out from the stadium seats. I think I also dislike the way ‘hero’ was bandied about after England won the Ashes, as though bringing a tiny trophy to our shores was akin to storming the beach at Normandy. Honours all round for a bunch of people who managed to do their jobs without fucking up. Oh, Bravo. And I’m not going to play it either, as for the most part that means launching a leather missile at dogwalkers, pushchairs and joggers, until someone is killed.
Athletics. Well, there’s a certain purity to the accomplishments involved in athletics. Individual skill, strength, agility, ability. A person is the fastest, throws the furthest, leaps the highest, and there’s very little disputing the prowess involved. That said the curmudgeon in me can’t stomach all that feel-good, unifying, common-man claptrap that has proceeded the Olympics for the last million months. London will not be transformed into some utopia of inspired, kindly, community-minded Joe Publics. Instead the London Underground will become a network of concrete arteries, boiling with fat and grim, oily waste. Bodies will wash up on the South Bank, wrapped in bootleg T-shirts. They’ll take the torch and burn down more furniture stores in Croydon.
Motor-racing. International Playboys in glamorous cities, dealing with life or death instincts at 200 miles an hour? Or a sooty, repetitive, indistinct contest where ugly, identical can-opener cars orbit a twisty bit of road for what seems like all of every Sunday ever? I really, really want to like motor-racing...but no.
Tennis. Ah, well, Tennis. It’s preppy. Although I’m picturing more scenes from The Royal Tennenbaums then I am real-life figures from Tennis lore. And it’s gladiatorial. I like that. Except it’s just as difficult to root for a man you don’t know as it is a town you don’t live in. I’m not going to blindly follow a player because he’s English, because he may well be an idiot, or a prick and I’m not in the habit of cheering either on. Surely personality matters more than passports? For once I recognise what’s so thrilling about the sport, but without anyone to champion, it just doesn’t hold my attention. I’d still much rather use that time to draw, or watch Hayley Atwell from the tree outside her house.
But it does rather leave me without some things that I really do love. First of all; event television. I like the talking point, ‘Did you see?’ as a concept, but in practice I’m almost always out of luck. For some months now I’ve been without broadband and rarely got home in time to watch anything. I have missed out on both ‘The Hour’ and ‘Torchwood’ where I know I would have had at least one person to go ‘Did you see...?’ with, and had that sense of the shared enjoyment I miss. Furthermore, I’m as likely to enjoy The Apprentice as I am a genuine Job Interview with an angry grey bollock, so no office banter for me there, either.
The other thing is - being in a gang. I think that’s the best way I can explain it. I’ve always wanted to be part of a defined gang. In the last few years, like a child, I have given name (and membership cards) to two groups of friends of mine, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Instead of going to the cinema with X and Y, ‘The Dead Fish’ assembled. Where one might see a bunch of old school friends and their girlfriends out to dinner, I saw ‘The Feast of Empires Club’ convening. It’s probably all rather needy and smothering, but I relish the thought of belonging to something more than a ragtag handful of people who have one another’s phone numbers. I’ve never been on holiday with a group of friends – no cottage, or villa or chalet shared, and now I’m of an age where my peers are all settling down, I can’t see it ever happening. Of course, sport doesn’t really give you this, or when it does, it’s a pack of inbreds throwing garden furniture about in Bareclona. Nevertheless, sport provides a badge, a shared experience, drama – between friends. I think that’s the bit I covet. I think it would be good to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’ every once in a while.
Though there’s the Soap Awards, I guess.
1 comments:
I can only really talk about football, though I enjoy bits of the other sports you mention and dismiss.
I enjoy football in a few ways.
1. Aesthetically. I see the beauty in the game, in the skill and technique and athleticism of it, in the ability of a player to make a ball do what they want, in the teamwork and tactics, in the flight of the ball, in the battles between men, in the seeming telepathy to play a blind pass or the vision to see a momentary space before it even exists. The tactical battle thrills me more and more as I get older; different systems and how to counter them: warfare by other means.
2. For the drama. This is true of all sport, I suppose. It is pure drama, without too much contrivance or artificiality. Winning and losing; simple as that. Seeing competitors transcend, seeing them lose their nerve, seeing them foiled by luck or embraced by it. I think you've seen a little of that even in those 7-a-side games. A last minute winner: nothing else in real life really matches that feeling.
3. Autistically. Panini stickers. Football shirts. Player stats. Such a ridiculous level of detail to immerse yourself in, it repays and demands a sort of obsession.
4. Tribally. There's definitely an inclusive sense of belonging when you support a team, especially when you form a sort of emotional bond over the years. That's all tied in with other fans and banter, obviously, but it doesn't hurt to admire the football played by a certain team, or to respect the clubs ethos, or even to feel some attachment to a city or a country.
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