Archive for the ‘Sport’ Category

You can’t really tell I’m crippled

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

Firstly, mind the look of the place. This blog is like most people’s spare room at the moment. Nobody comes in here much, it’s a bit of a mess but there’s definitely a plan to fix the place up a bit. That said, Christmas is coming and with all the weekends pretty much booked out between now and then, I’m not sure when I’ll find the time. But I digress.

Here is something what happened to me the other day.

I was picking Little Miss L up from after-school care. I was walking towards the building when I heard her yell to me from across the yard and come running towards me. She gave me an update as to what she’d been up to and one of her friends showed me a butterfly she’d caught. It was very exciting. The carer looking after them was a young man, I think he was one of the year 12s.

I noticed there was some sporting equipment strewn about the place and as my daughter and friends were talking to me, I picked up a stray volleyball a few feet away.  I told Miss L to go inside and get her gear and as she took off, I threw the ball above my head and set it in the direction of the big green wheely bin the balls go in. I think it hit the edge and bounced away but it was close.

The carer said “So, you used to play a bit of volleyball…?”

!?

“Used to…?”

I’m not in a fucking walking frame just yet, thankyouverymuch.

I’m still in my 30s and when I did play volleyball I played with and against people in their late 40s, possibly 50s. And while I may be retired hurt, you can’t tell just from looking at me: I walk upright and I’m still rather thin.

So while he was technically correct on the fact that I used to play (technically incorrect on the “a bit” part; I used to play a shitload of volleyball), I just didn’t like his assumption.

I guess though, that if I have a shoulder chip, then it’s my inability to play any kind of meaningful sport. My ankle is never going to recover, so that pretty much rules out any sport that involves standing up.

Which is most of them.

So I hate it when I hear people saying “oh, I can’t be arsed going for a jog”, when I’d gladly do it for them.

Posted in Ma vie, Sport | 2 Comments »

It ain’t broke (but it ain’t fixed either)

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

This week marked my auspicious return to the volleyball court. I had forgotten which year it was that I last slipped on the knee pads but due to the magic of putting a lot of work into writing a blog since 2003, I can simply go back in time and see that my operation was in December 2005.

Footballers have whole knee reconstructions and are on the field again after six weeks. You’d think that after nearly four years, I might be able to have a bit of a runaround, whack a few balls about the place and generally enjoy myself doing what I love.

And, as things went, I did have a pretty good time. I was very rusty and very out of shape but the rest of the team I was on was just as rusty or maybe less experienced, so I found myself compensating for some of them; encroaching on their space a bit when the other team’s best server came on (well, someone had to get a dig up).

I was really unfit though, and my legs’ transformation to jelly began somewhere around the end of the first set.

But wow. It was really good. The game wasn’t of the best standard but I got a few good hits in, set up a few good points, saved a few points and even blocked on or two.

After the game though, I knew I wasn’t going to be jumping about the place the next day. I even stopped at the supermarket on the way home for a bag of frozen peas: they make great ice packs.

I had taped the ankle, wrapped it in a bandage and put the whole lot in a lace-up brace. I didn’t land on it funny, twist it, roll it or even give it a dirty look all game.

It wasn’t swollen or damaged. But it was angry.

Next day, I couldn’t walk on it. I worked from home but had to go into town for a meeting and had to grab my trusty old walking stick.

There I was with my stubble, untucked shirt and pack of painkillers. If I’d suddenly amassed an incredible knowledge of diagnostic medicine I could have passed for Doctor House. I had the odd urge to send random strangers for a liver biopsy. I even thought of taking all my painkillers out of the blister pack and putting them in one of those little yellowy-orange plastic bottles.

Anyway, long story short, it’s Saturday morning and I still can’t walk properly. The ankle is just too weak. I’ve told the guy who got me on the team that it’s not looking too good. He’s hoping it’ll come good; so am I, of course.

But the writing’s on the wall and the writing says ‘Whatever you do, don’t even think about setting foot on a volleyball court ever again unless you want a life of pain and resemblance to a certain fictional crippled TV doctor’.

In other news

We’re going away today, back Tuesday. Off to the Yorke Peninsula. We usually get out for a drive or other such fun but the weather’s looking like crap for at least the rest of the weekend. I’ll be voting for sticking the kids in front of a DVD, sitting on the verandah with a glass of wine and a good book.

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Posted in Ma vie, Sport, Travels | 1 Comment »

Four years on…

Friday, August 15th, 2008

I was thinking about writing a post on the Olympics until I realised I did that four years ago.

Here, and here.

Only the city has changed, really.

And last night I watched handball.

Posted in Events, It's a blog, Media, Sport, TV | 3 Comments »

Vague

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

So where was I? Yeah, that’s right, I went to Melbourne then came home and sort of just fell asleep.

Melbourne was great. Good to be back in my home state. I don’t know what to make of myself sometimes because I don’t often feel very Australian and despite, or probably because of, my football-filled youth, I can no longer stand the sport, or the constant news coverage it gets, or the nugget fans (nugget fans being a majority sub-species of fans in general; I know there are some quite normal, respectable, educated people who are not nuggets but are, paradoxically, football fans) who can talk about nothing else. Yet I still feel some kind of connection with Victoria. I’m not sure if it’s the landscape, the people, the weather, or the fact that, unlike South Australia, it doesn’t have it’s head stuck up its own arse (just my crude way of saying that South Australia is way too parochial, introspective, isolated (not only geographically) hostile to external influence (especially from Victoria) and has an inflated, ‘we’re as good as the other states’ complex that the other states don’t have because they’re not secretly worried that they aren’t).

So yeah, there’s that.

And I seem to have realised just how deeply entrenched I am in my current rut. Not enjoying the job and have had a sick kiddie, which means waking up at all hours of the night and being generally very tired, which kind of sucks. I’ve never had the SADs (the lack of light thing) but am wondering if there might not be something to it this winter.

And I’ve been shocked to notice how vague I have been of late. Only last night, after a day of staring blankly at a screen, I put in my headphones, stepped outside, and while crossing the road, forgot to look and stepped out in front of a motorbike. Then, as I was getting on the train, I put my ticket in the validator… and forgot to take it out again.

Where the fuck was my brain?

Posted in Adelaide, Australia, Ma vie, Sport | No Comments »

Unsporting

Friday, April 11th, 2008

There’s a growing number of people joining in protest over the Olympic games, soon to be held in China.

I, for one, would like to add my voice to the chorus. I think the upcoming Olympic games should not only be boycotted by athletes everywhere, but be cancelled outright.

Not so much for any political reason, you understand. Merely because they’re so fucking boring.

Posted in Events, Sport | No Comments »

A goal… wow… how exciting

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Growing up, I played a lot of competitive sport. When I got a bit of coordination about me, sometime in early high school, I took up Australian Rules football, then moved on to volleyball quite early and gave footy the flick before I turned 16. For a while I was a bad sportsman (which I alluded to here) and, at times, an even worse spectator, before really taking stock in my mid-20s and getting my act together and losing the barracking baggage that I’d picked up over the years.

The thing that made me change my behaviour was the way I acted on-court in some volleyball games. A lot of the time I was fine but I played in a particular league where it seemed to be part of the culture to sledge a bit. And I gave my fair share. I would make snide comments at other players and be mildly abusive towards umpires (granted, it was only when they made genuinely shit calls but I guess that’s not the point). At times, even when we won a game I’d come away feeling pent-up and aggressive and drive home still making up abuse to throw at the opposing players.

So I tried to stop. And I did. By the time my career ended (just before the ankle surgery) I’d reached a kind of zen state when I played. I’d come away from the game remembering only how it felt to play the good shots I’d played. Sure, it was nice to win but I was happier losing in a skillful close game than winning in a whitewash. It felt good to participate. It felt good to play well. The result was a secondary concern.

It seems though, that my efforts to remove my personal emotions from the playing arena may have been a bit too effective.

I went to see Adelaide United play the Newcastle Somethingorothers at Hindmarsh Stadium on Friday night. I scored some free tickets, asked a friend along and was kind of looking forward to the spectacle of a big-league soccer match.

But I couldn’t get into it. I didn’t get in the least bit excited. I was in the western stand with hundreds of Adelaide fans… and I think it kind of worked against me. It all just seemed so biased and partisan.

It was the mob mentality aspect of the whole thing. There are some unpleasant cultural behaviours that are associated with team sports. I know this from experience as well as from observation. There were guys there, shouting (fairly mild and frankly pretty unimaginative) abuse at the visiting team. I kind of expected that but listening to their ten-year-old sons mimic that, and have it cemented in their minds that “hey, it’s fun and OK to yell angry crap at people because of the shirt they’re wearing” bothered me a little.

And I even found that the guy a few rows back yelling “Come on, Adelaide” was annoying me. Did he think they could hear him? Was every member of the team going to hear him and think “gosh, yes… we’re not quite performing to our full potential in this contest. We should really play harder, smarter”…?

I wanted to go there wanting the home team to win: to participate in the whole thing. But I didn’t want to be like the other spectators because so much of it just seems ugly to me.

So now I think I am perhaps the most dispassionate sports spectator I’ve ever seen. The score was 4-1 and I think I clapped once. Someone would score a goal and the crowd would rise, throw a collective triumphant fist to the air and yell “Yeah!!” while I just sat there watching them do it, thinking how strange it all seemed.

I was thinking at the time ‘what difference does it make whether I clap or cheer when a goal is scored?’ and replying to myself that when you’re a player, having a cheering crowd can really spur you on, so being an active spectator is almost an integral part of the live sport experience.

But because of the conscious decision I had made to remove my emotional connection from sport, I can now have no emotional investment in the result of a game, especially when it’s between two teams, one that comes from somewhere I’ve only been once in my life, and the other from the city I now live in but has a lot of people yelling ugly things behind me.

Thing is… I just don’t care.

I think if it had been a close game, I would have been a lot more excited. I think that’s what I was hoping to see. But 4-1 is a bit too lopsided an affair for my liking.

And the refereeing was fucking shit.

Posted in Adelaide, Featured, Idea v. Reality, Sport | 1 Comment »

Penalty

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

I don’t know what to say. But not in the way you think I don’t know what to say.

There are so many things that the Aus v Ita result brings to mind. That everything from here on in is a cliché, that sport really brings out the ugliest in people, whether it’s in victory or defeat, and that now we have to endure the overblown aftermath of the bandwagon crashing at full speed.

I really don’t like sport. I used to play Australian rules football and didn’t like the kind of person it was turning me into, so I stopped. I remember watching games as a teenager, being on the edge of my seat, yelling at the TV and lashing out in frustration when things didn’t go my team’s way. Then I woke up to how pointless it was. When there’s 12 or 16 teams in a competition, come the end of the season it’s a pretty large proportion of people who are going to be disappointed.

I do like playing sport though, and apart from the physical benefits of it, for me sport became a mostly mental exercise, an exercise in getting over myself. I used to taunt the opposition, give lip and make snide comments. Then I realised I didn’t like being that kind of person. It became a pursuit of being able to disconnect myself from the situation, an exercise in self-control and being in my own head and rather than concentrating on ‘the game’, concentrating purely on the execution of the manoeuvres I was performing. Sport should be about skill; not about rivalry.

Have you ever seen the T-shirts they sell on The Onion? They have this great knack of distilling a message to its basic rhetorical structure, a method of comedy (or parody, I think) that I find rather clever and amusing. Anyway, there was one that said “The sporting team from my area is superior to the sporting team from your area.” It kind of sums up the pointlessness of anyone supporting a team. I mean, so what if it’s the Australian team? I don’t know Mark Viduka any better than I know David Beckham or that Brazilian player that looks like Coco from Fame. So for me to support Australia is rather silly. I know someone who once knew someone who played for Italy, so really, I should have been supporting them when you think about the connections we have to the teams we follow. That said, I’m not going to stop watching world cup matches now. Coming up over the next week and a bit is going to be some of the best football anyone is going to see for the next four years, and even if Australia had lost against Uruguay, I’d still be looking forward to a lot less sleep over the same period because this is one of the few sports I enjoy watching.

But I don’t enjoy the news coverage; I don’t enjoy the interviews with countless experts saying the same inane things over and over; I don’t enjoy the attitude of fans, gloating in victory and becoming bitter (or blaming the ref) in defeat. I don’t want to face work tomorrow knowing that some people are going to do one and some people are going to be doing the other. Sure, I’m having my own little rant about it here but I’m not accosting people in the office kitchen making them listen to me.

And though I say I don’t care, what I think I hate the most was that my heart was racing when that penalty hit the back of the net.

So to qualify my earlier comment, I don’t hate sport. I just don’t like the fans. Or some of the players (yeah, the kind of players I used to be like). I’m going to keep watching world cup games but just not tell anyone about it because I think fans are what really ruin sport for me, so I just don’t want to be one.

I miss running (damn ankle). Non-comptetive running, when it’s just you, the road, and whatever’s banging around in your head at the time. Now that is sport.

Posted in Australia, Events, Featured, Sport | 1 Comment »

An innings

Wednesday, January 28th, 2004

Now, I have nothing against David Hookes and I think it abhorrent that he died the way he did.

However, the media circus that has surrounded not his death, but his post-death period, has been nothing short of cringeworthy. Yesterday was his funeral, and while I respect that he was a good cricketer and deserved an appropriate send off, I just find the emotive rhetoric rather empty. Sure, he will be missed and mourned by many people, including family, friends, teammates and players he has coached. I would expect them to be seriously mourning, to feel gutted, cheated, angry and above all, sad. But with lines like

It was the place where, through his brash and larrikin style, David Hookes first captured the imagination of those who now mourn his death. Yesterday, thousands of those who looked up to him—and loved him—returned to Adelaide Oval to say goodbye,

…you can just feel the sensationalism dripping from every loaded word.

On today’s front page is a picture (taken at, or after, the funeral at a guess) of a set of stumps with a bat leaning on off-stump and a cap hanging off leg-stump. In front of them lie a few yellow roses and… get this… the bails from the stumps, one on top of the other. Get it? The bails are off… cos, y’know… he’s out.

A personal pet hate is the word ‘larrikin’. I’ve always said that this is a word they bring out whenever someone dies who was

  • a sportsman (not being sexist… it’s only applied to blokes); or
  • an arsehole (when they need a word which says ‘pain in the arse’ in a nice way)*

I don’t think David Hookes was an arsehole. I think he was a good sportsman. I remember watching him make 100 off 67 balls. I don’t want to remember the way the media has used his funeral as currency.

What was in really bad taste was Ray Martin hosting his gutter-journalism ACA from the Adelaide Oval with, get this, a picture of Hookesy under his arm.

What it does is exploit not only Mr Hookes but the grief felt by those closest to him. This is how the media works. They hand out grief as if it were sporting merchandise. People buy the replica shirts the players wear and when a player dies, they can get some of the replica grief in the tribute edition of the tabloids. It’s not real grief, it just pushes the grief buttons of readers to sell more copies. But that cheap merchandise never lasts.

Or does it? This kind of media saturation attempts to superimpose an outpouring of emotion onto the public’s consciousness. All the media go on about it, then Johnny will want to say what a national treasure and a legend he was before he goes to the bathroom to wank over his Steve Waugh pin-up. The goal of the media is to turn this (or any such) event into something by which we mark time, as if in ten years we’ll all be asking ‘What were you doing when you heard David Hookes died?’ Again, no disrespect but this is not one of those events. Sep 11, 2001 was. A State cricketer/coach isn’t.

Sorry, it’s just not.

*If little Lleyton died tomorrow, they would definately use the word ‘larrikin’

Posted in Australia, Featured, Media, Sport | No Comments »