More of This Sporting Life

                      Partisan Supporters

English and German football spectators

seem, on TV at least, to be crowded together

there in the stadium grandstands,

at least in the top-level leagues.

They often sing non-stop

in unison,

unless their team’s being hammered.

The German crowds

sometimes jump up and down

in unison

for the full ninety minutes –

plus injury time added on.

It certainly adds enormous atmospherics

and a sense of occasion

to every match.

They seem to be there

more for the social bonding

than to watch the game,

and I’m sure it provides them

with psychological benefits galore.

I’d hate to be amongst them, though,

myself.

                   Awarding Points

Whenever I took a squizz at the sport channel

and there before me was the image of yet another

snowboarder, skateboarder, BMX cyclist,

or some other repetitive-stunt sportoid performer

having fun once more sliding

down a banister or some other railing

and pretending that it’s serious sporting competition,

I surprise myself that I manage to refrain

from throwing something at the screen.

Judges should award points for this.

                        My Role Models

I’ve never had a real role model,

so I’ve constantly had to invent myself.

Okay, for a while there in the mid-seventies

when I was doing some voice-talent work in radio commercials,

I sought to emulate Mel Blanc,

the Man of 1,000 Voices from the Warner Brothers cartoons,

but it was too big an ask

with no real encouragement to keep me at it,

so ‘That’s all, folks!’

Now that I spend my time composing and performing

bagatelles made of words

in an effort to connect with audiences of any size,

I’ve adopted as my role model

a heavyweight boxer from the fifties, sixties, and seventies

named George ‘Scrap Iron’ Johnson.

Scrap Iron had 22 wins, 27 losses, and five draws.

He got beaten by every big name of the period, except Ali,

lasting seven rounds against George Foreman,

the full ten against Sonny Liston and Joe Frazier and Jerry Quarry.

He was durable and known for being able to take punishment

and always coming forward,

head down,

slugging away.

Nothing fancy.

That’s the way I aspire to write.

Taking Pride In One’s Appearance

I saw a UK rugby league player on TV

with a sculpted hairdo

greased so stiff

that it kept its shape

no matter how much

violent contact

the bloke got into,

and rugby league is a hard-ass sport.

I wondered if he used it

as a weapon

and if it would shatter

if somebody were

to hit it with a hammer.

          Droll Sport

Watching a Fox

Memorial Shield

amateur league match

on the Maori Channel,

it seemed odd to me

that all the big blonde blokes

were playing for the Barracudas

and that all of the Vikings

were Polynesians.

              Sports Announcer Intelligence

Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?

Back when I lived in the old country

I used to joke that to get a job as a sports announcer

applicants had to take an intelligence test

and fail it.

This seemed especially accurate with retired athletes.

Here in Aotearoa, however,

I’ve admired two notable exceptions –

Peter Williams, who as far as I know

had just been an amateur golfer,

but then they moved him to doing straight news,

and Wairangi Koopu on Maori TV,

a former rugby league standout,

whose mind works rapidly, with a great sense of humour,

and comes up with surprisingly deep insights.

I only wish I could understand his commentary

when he’s speaking Te Reo Maori.

                  This Is Not A Quiz

Tuning on the TV on a Sunday afternoon

to women’s club softball,

with the sound off, of course,

I watched a replay of a game I’d seen the previous season.

One team’s pitcher was a huge, glowering bear of a woman,

who could’ve easily intimidated me physically

if I were to meet her face to face.

The other team’s pitcher was cute

and had remarkably pretty legs.

No prize for guessing whose team won.

            Goal Celebrations

Watching highlight videos

of some spectacular and skilful football goals

over the decades

I wondered,

never having scored any kind of goal myself,

if the choice of celebration techniques

is really so limited

that the players have no choice but to go through

the same small number

of repetitive, ritualistic, bullshit motions

year after fucking year.

Maybe it’s because they idolised

the star players of their childhoods

so much that they feel obliged

to copy their behaviour?

                    Vroom! Vroom!

Watching the TV promos

for motor so-called sport shows,

it strikes me vividly that no matter what the medium,

whether motorcycles or modified stock cars or Formula 1

or whatever,

those promos always include ample servings

of the objectification of young female bodies

on the barely-covered-asses-and-tits level,

with plenty of exposed belly buttons, of course.

            Basketball Is His Life

He dreams of diamonds and grateful charities,

of fashions and fast cars and eating caviar

– whatever that is –

although he now has just one pair of shoes

and eats white bread on lunchmeat every night;

his teachers write him off as dull and a dreamer;

the bullies make fun of his glasses.

He doesn’t care.

‘Basketball is my life,’ he says.

He can hear the crowds erupt with love

and sign endorsements that gobble up his time.

His parents are both working day and night,

jobs that feel and pay like death,

as he works on his spin moves and his bombs

till the playground lights switch off.

 ‘Basketball is my life,’ he says.

In his sleep he thrills to dreams

of muscling dominant in-your-face

slam-dunks and rejections against superstars,

yet he has no idea how big he’ll grow,

if he’ll wind up NBA-sized at all,

or only grow to be too short to get a contract

in the Paraguayan or Kazakhstan leagues.

He doesn’t care.

‘Basketball is my life,’ he says.

He can almost feel the caresses and the lips

of the angel-faced, toned-bodied bikini babes

at holiday spots for the global elite.

He doesn’t care that more than a half a million boys in the US

make their high school basketball teams,

while only a handful break through each year in the NBA,

about a quarter of them from other countries.

He doesn’t care at all.

‘Basketball is my life,’ he says.

Drifting Through

                 Fifteen Years Of Tobacco

I never liked tobacco,

but when I was fifteen, in 1961,

everyone else in my family smoked,

as did most of the people I knew my age and older,

and cigarette ads were all over the TV,

so the question wasn’t if I was going to smoke,

but what brand.

I never found a brand I really liked.

It got to me when I was twenty-nine.

I’d been smoking so much

that everything I ate tasted like tobacco,

and the only aroma I could smell was tobacco –

I even smelt it in my sleep –

and I liked neither the taste nor the smell.

I was determined not to quit, though,

because the people I knew who’d quit

were self-righteous and smug about it,

and I didn’t want to be like that.

So I kept lighting ’em up and then,

my senses filled with loathing, stubbing ’em out.

Fortunately, I have a genetic predisposition

against being desperately addicted –

to anything, really –

and some time just shy of my thirtieth birthday,

I didn’t realise exactly when,

I just stopped,

without actually trying or even noticing.

I never really liked tobacco, after all.

                 Cars of the Sixties

I bought a 1966 VW minibus new in 1967.

It had a single bench seat across the front

and lap seatbelts.

When the vehicle was in motion

this configuration enabled my little dog Naomi

to alternate resting her head on my lap

with sticking her snoot out

the passenger-side window.

It also enabled two different young women,

about four years apart,

to fellate me as I drove along country roads.

These things will never happen again,

and not only because they stopped making motor vehicles

with single-bench-style front seats

decades ago.

                                       The Clap

She picked me up when I was working a Fraternity of Man show.

She was from somewhere in the Midwest – Wisconsin, I think –

and had the most amazingly magnificent high-hard tits

that I’d ever seen up-close and personal at the time.

She told me about her fucking

most of the Mothers of Invention the night before.

It clearly seemed to upset her.

The next weekend I was road-managing the Fraternity of Man

at a big rock festival at a racetrack

somewhere outside of Oakland.

The situation was that I –

along with Iron Butterfly and Procol Harum

and some other Big Names that I forget now –

was on the inside of an eight-foot Cyclone fence

with a pass and passes to spare,

and large numbers of groupies were on the outside of it.

I was close to salivating.

I went to the Men’s room to relieve myself

and noticed a burning sensation as I pissed.

I looked down and saw some discharge

discolouring my grots –

I had the Mothers’ clap.

Cursing my misfortune, I knew that I had to act responsibly.

I brought three groupies into the star enclosure,

told them of my plight,

and asked them to give me neck rubs

and run errands for me and stuff.

They brought me a shitload of wine

that they’d stolen from Procol Harum.

When I told my mate Stash –

our band’s singer and the composer of ‘Don’t Bogart That Joint’ –

about it he grinned and asked me,

“Does it hurt when you spit?”

                                 Delicacies

There they are; they are there,

hundreds of thousands of them – maybe millions –

as common as dirt.

Extraordinarily ordinary people who smugly consider themselves

to be cool or hip or with-it or some variation on such a claim

not to be ordinary at all, but a more-worldly cut above.

Enemies of art and originality,

most of them in North America find their way to Las Vegas,

the clueless poseur suckers’ heaven.

He was huge – both tall and obese.

He and his short but well-upholstered wife and sour-faced mother

owned and operated a Jewish deli on Wilshire Boulevard,

just off the southern fringes of Hollywood.

He had a big pink Cadillac that he drove to Vegas every weekend.

He had a gun that he practiced shooting

outside the deli’s back door, in his building’s parking garage.

I’d been working for him for about a month

when his mother asked me why, despite the hot weather,

I was wearing a long-sleeve shirt rolled up above my elbows

instead of a short-sleeved one.

She dismissed my reply that it was a style preference

and told me that she’d been around Vegas enough to know

that long-sleeved shirts in hot weather meant junkie.

I pointed out that I rolled my shirts up and no tracks were visible,

but she dismissed that by telling me, Vegas-wise,

that junkies could hide their tracks by injecting shit into their legs.

I challenged her for not making sense and for making false accusations.

I also demanded an apology and she grudgingly apologised.

I told her that I forgave her and was letting her off.

As a result of this, the next day her son threatened me with his gun.

It was time to look for a new job.

                         Early 1972

She’d dumped me with horrid cruelty,

although I’d deserved to be dumped,

and I was working in a warehouse

down in South-Central

that belonged to some bastards

who had a distance-technical-education hustle:

electronic components, diesel-mechanic tools,

shit like that.

My boss, Javier, claimed to be Spanish, not Mexican,

as did so many like him,

but since he let me go

when he caught me sleeping after lunch

– he called it ‘meditating’ –

I conceded him his conceit graciously.

One of my co-workers, named James,

a short, wiry African American dude with an attitude,

kept approaching me with a savage smile, insisting,

“One of these days you an me are gonna have it out, Snow White!”

but my other co-worker, Lonnie,

a big, shambling, genial young African American, liked me

and made it clear that there’d be no having it out.

Lonnie and I went to the Friday night fights

at the shabby old Olympic Auditorium,

smuggling in a pint of Beam,

and by the third bout on the card it was all a blur,

but we shouted like idiots anyway,

feeling good for just a little while,

but not the next morning.

         Doña Emma’s Christmas Tamales

My young wife told me

that since all the Central Americans in New Orleans

bought their Christmas tamales from Doña Emma

we had to order ours and her mother’s

before the end of November.

The concept of Christmas tamales was new to me,

but I was keen.

Doña Emma conducted all her business from her home,

which was decorated on the principle

that every surface and wall space

that could house a cross –

or better still, a gory crucifix –

should.

Doña Emma herself was about as wide as she was tall,

which wasn’t all that much.

No prize for guessing that the only colour she wore

was black.

I was unable to prevent

her visual similarity to an eight-ball

from entering my mind.

The tamales were amazing,

not at all like those to which I was accustomed

from having bought in Los Angeles convenience stores.

They were, for one thing, a few centimetres longer

and more than three times as much in diameter.

Instead of just greasy masa and maybe some greasy mince,

their filling was a galaxy of masa encompassing

peas, black beans, corn kernels, unexpected vegetables,

chunks of meat, and even, in the case of one I ate,

an entire small chicken drumstick, bone and all.

I was given to understand

that no two of Doña Emma’s Christmas tamales were identical.

Each was a true work of art, indeed.

           Away From Ringside

Forget the long-story reason why –

it was the most substandard housing

in which I’ve ever resided.

I’d lived in a converted

one-car garage before,

but never one in which

the sewage backed up

and I had to pick my way

through turds

to navigate from front door to bed.

The woman I was seeing had found it for me;

she herself was staying in her mother’s

middle-class ranch-style home-with-

lawnmower.

My new landlord was somebody she knew

from somewhere,

a chiropractor

who moonlighted as the ring physician

at various professional wrestling

melodramas-masquerading-as-matches

in that part of the world.

After finally having my plumbing tended to

he offered me a free back-cracking,

or manipulation or whatever

chiropractors call it,

as compensation for my inconvenience.

I didn’t want to be rude,

so I agreed to the procedure.

It was scary, but I survived,

and even felt more or less kinda better, I guessed,

for an hour or two

after he’d finished with me.

          Tyre Store Humour

A long time ago

I spent far too many years

as an advertising jerk.

One of my customers

owned a couple of tyre stores.

We got along okay,

and he invited me by

a couple of times

for some beer and some weed.

I discovered that people

who are in the tyre business

know an amazing amount of jokes

and bon mots

about dog piss.

Not surprising, aye?

               Urban Geography

When I was working as

a freelance feature writer, artists’ model, and cab driver

in San Antonio in the early 1980s,

I decided to take an undergraduate course

in urban geography – for intellectual stimulation and fun.

The urban geography wasn’t because of the cab driving;

it was sort of the other way around.

Maps have fascinated me since I was a small child.

Some of my earliest memories

are of drawing maps of imaginary towns and cities,

first on the wallpaper of my home’s upstairs hall,

then on sheets of plain white typewriter paper

that my parents taped to the wall.

It’s as if I have maps in my head,

and I’ve almost never become lost  in an urban environment,

except when I lived in New Orleans.

I’ve always had unrealistically low

self-esteem, self-confidence, and sense of self-worth,

so at the time I took that course

I was relying heavily on amphetamines

to provide me with false

self-esteem, self-confidence, and sense of self-worth.

By far the worst thing about speed, in my opinion at the time,

was the people who sold it,

and just before my research project was due

my connection went out into the country to get his head together

until after my exam.

I stopped taking speed when I went back to school for real

to get my teacher’s certificate,

not wanting a repeat of the scenario with my just-for-fun course.

The ease with which I pulled down high grades without it,

including when I re-took urban geography,

flabbergasted me.