I’m inclined to agree with her.

I just made a comment on Lehmo’s blog and it ended up being so long that I should just pass it off as a blog post in its own right.

Lehmo made an excellent point when he said:

“He’s not a hero, he’s a sportsperson”, they say. I’m happy to accept that in a broader sense athletes are not heroes. However, within the context of their sports they can put in heroic performances.

I think this really nails where the disconnect is happening in this whole debate.

Poor Mia Freedman copped a caning for what she said when she was asked her opinion, and gave it. I don’t think she was being disrespectful to Cadel; she just doesn’t get excited about sport. And a disinterested minority of us feel the same way.

Now, I’m not averse to sport. I’ve led a pretty active life and knocked various balls of different shapes and sizes around various playing surfaces with varying degrees of success. Participation in sport is, in my view, one of the defining qualities in Australian culture.

I can also enjoy watching sport at an elite level because those doing it know how to do it really well, and I can appreciate the skill it takes to be the best at something. Sure, watching golf leaves me pretty cold and seeing people swim from one end of a pool to another is as boring as, well, watching people swim laps of a pool (how CAN that be interesting?). But come the World Cup, I’ll get up at 4 to watch a good game, and if it’s a good game, I’ll enjoy it.

Where sport does confuse me is the level of emotional investment people have in supporting one team or one player over another. These days, team support is fairly arbitrary. It’s not like the starting 18 for Carlton all live in Carlton; they’re just a bunch of guys who are good at football that were offered a contract with Carlton. The days when you gave “the local team” a cheer at the weekend match are, at the elite level, well and truly over. Teams aren’t location based, players are contracted employees and where they live is irrelevant.

Now, I don’t know Cadel Evans. Never met him. I’m sure he’s a top guy and if he’s just won a big race, then good on him. That must be hard to do. I couldn’t do it; I wouldn’t want to. But I’m not going to jump up and down for him any more than I’m going to jump up and down for Sven Svensson from Svenssonland if he’d won it.

Cadel’s Australian. Great, so are 20 million other people. A common nationality is just no longer a big enough factor to make this person “familiar” to me.

I think that’s where we sport agnostics sit. There’s just not enough of a connection between us and any sporting great to make that kind of significant emotional investment into the result of something trivial.

And sport is trivial. Occasionally it may spill into the political arena (and sometimes spills into rioting and violence at the extreme level and anger and frustration at a personal level).

But most sport is played as it’s own reward and does very little outside the context of sport. Being the fastest person in the world only gets you a big coin on a ribbon; winning the grand final gets you another trophy for the pool room. And a year later, they give away another one.

It’s a lot like music. All Mia did the other day was the equivalent of telling an audience of pre-pubescent girls that she wasn’t a Bieber fan.

Pure heresy in context. To the rest of the world, meh, neither here nor there, really.

I shall be watching the wedding on my television receiver.

Not that I feel any need to explain my reasons for doing so, I will say that it’s one of those once-in-a-generation events that become part of our collective consciousness. Whether you’re pro- or anti-monarchy, it’s a cultural reference point.

Personally, I am largely ambivalent towards the royal family. I have pro-republican leanings these days but being of English descent, I have a certain nostalgia about all things British. For me, this event is more about the British character, community and history than it is about the monarchy. So, less about the event, more about how people come together to celebrate.

So I don’t buy every New Idea with a picture of Kate & Will on the cover, but my Nanna lived through the blitz and loved the royals so I may get out my Union Jack tshirt for the occasion because it would have made her happy. Yes, I know she’s dead, but there you go. We are what our histories have made us.

There’s also the reasons I mentioned here.

So tonight, we shall be drinking endless cups of tea, I may even have a pint of bitter. Our daughters will be encouraged to watch because if Englishness is part of my identity, it’s part of theirs too. I will enjoy the spectacle, though knowing myself, I will no doubt view it with a certain air of ironic detachment, as I would a Eurovision telecast.

Imagine if there were not one but ten royal weddings every weekend for six months of the year, with journalists and experts talking shit about them every day of the week, taking up half the news bulletins and entire sections of newspapers.

Imagine radio broadcasts commentating every exchange of vows, every ring-on-finger placement, every kissing of the bride, and your favorite Friday-night TV shows being pulled because of them.

Imagine people talking about them around the water cooler, taking bets en masse in organised pools on who’ll get the most presents.

Imagine people, on any given day, wearing loud scarves and jerseys in the colours of their favorite royal house.

Would it annoy you, that something so pointless and irrelevant to you was given blanket coverage and that everyone you knew was really, really into it?

Well, that’s how I feel about football.

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.

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.

Here, and here.

Only the city has changed, really.

And last night I watched handball.

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?

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.

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.

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.

How fantastic is it to see sports you wouldn’t normally get to see on Australian television. Hockey, softball, and my personal favorite: volleyball.

It’s great to see volleyball on TV almost every night. And it’s about time. I don’t recall seeing it shown from the Sydney Olympics. In fact I’d go so far as to say I don’t really recall seeing an entire match of volleyball on TV ever.

Last night’s game between Cuba and China (women) was a thriller right down to the last few points of the 5th set. And I love women’s volleyball. Not because the shorts they wear nearly cover their bums (if I wanted a perve I’d watch beach volleyball) but because I think the gameplay is more competitive. In men’s volleyball, they’re all about the same height as the net, which kind of defeats the purpose of having it there; in women’s volleyball, they really have to jump and as a volleyball player, I really appreciate how amazing it feels to be 2 feet off the ground and hitting a ball as hard as you can into the blocker’s face. Enough blathering.

Interesting to see how the Olympics is almost identically branded on both networks, with the upright LG plasma screen and, of course, all the same icons for the various sports. It would be interesting to see the coverage offered on TV stations worldwide to see how successful the IOC’s marketing department has been.