This Sporting Life

            CG 2010

Watching a road cycling race

on TV with the sound on mute

and Weather Report being funky on the box,

I wondered what goes on

in the minds of the cyclists

at the back of the peloton,

without a hope of moving up.

It was beyond me.

                        Basketball Coaches

Basketball coaches

have dreams about exes and ohs

running offensive moves and defensive traps.

Basketball coaches

are like choreographers,

in a competitive contact ballet.

Basketball coaches

have to take heaps of shit when their teams are losing.

Basketball coaches

know that the fundamentals have to be right

for the rest to fall into place –

attack the break; don’t sag off it,

play defence with your feet, not your hands,

block out, give and go, pick and roll,

feet at 60 degrees for foul shots,

defend the passing lanes off the ball,

follow your shots, cover the point,

and so on.

Basketball coaches

know that speed is important, but there’s no substitute for size.

Basketball coaches

know the difference between getting beaten and just losing –

a team gets beaten when the other team

has to do all it can to defeat it;

when a team loses it beats itself.

The most profound thing

that basketball coaches learn

after doing it for enough years

is that it’s better to be lucky than to be good.

             The Excitement of Sport

Watching the Asia Cup cricket final on TV,

I enormously enjoyed

the shots of the spectators,

especially the young Pakistani women,

with and without hijab scarves,

and the young Sri Lankan women –

all belonging to healthy elites who can afford travel

and who wear expensive clothing –

all of them excitedly shouting

and flashing straight, white, smiling teeth

and jumping up and down

in response to the exploits

of the healthy young male athletes

disporting themselves down on the greensward.

I could almost smell

the oestrogen and vaginal fluids

through the television.

Turned me on, it did.

                     Lucky Blokes

Watching amateur club rugby league on Maori TV,

it became evident that much of it is ritual,

as the players on every team

from every one of Auckland’s

ethnocultural backgrounds represented

behave with almost identical

celebrations or commiserations

whenever one of their teammates

either scores a try

or stuffs up.

I envy them

their standard-issue,

done-by-rote,

reflexively automatic

blokey mateship.

      The Gold-Medal Women’s Curling Match

Most of the winter Olympics

is tedious on TV,

but I found myself

with nothing else to do after work

than watch the gold-medal

women’s curling match.

In general I’d be inclined

to back Sweden over Canada,

other things being equal,

but that Canadian woman

who shoved the stone instead of sweeping in front of it

had stupefyingly magnetic, riveting eyes,

chestnut hair, and a charismatic smile

that really did it for me.

The teams’ tactics were beyond me,

but that didn’t matter.

Sweden won.

Oh, well …

that’s sport.

Stupefyingly magnetic, riveting eyes

don’t matter.

                      Aggro Ridiculoso

One crashed into the other awkwardly –

who knows why?

Clumsiness? Bad judgement? Recklessness?

Callous disregard? Malice? Fatigue?

Just one of those things that happen?

– anyway, the testosterone and adrenaline and

who-knows-what-other hormone levels

zoomed up to levels requiring action,

but they couldn’t afford to take action

with real consequences,

as they both wanted to stay in the game,

so they went into a peacock display of chest bumping

and aggressive, glaring-eyed forehead leaning,

the garishly bright and unnatural colours

and the silly patterns

of their football shorts and jerseys

making them look hilariously ridiculous.

A case could, of course, be made that, deep down,

we’re all ridiculous –

the suffering involved in most people’s lives, however,

puts something of a damper on real-life hilarity

in regard to those who don’t deserve ridicule,

although human pain

does make certain psychopaths giggle and snigger.

                      Netball

When we were reading stuff about New Zealand

in 1988 whilst preparing to shift here from Guam,

I read that the country’s major sports

are rugby, cricket, and netball.

Now I’d seen people playing rugby in the park,

and cricket scenes in movies,

but I’d never even heard of netball,

and wondered whether

it was what Kiwis called volleyball,

volleyball being a major sport on the island.

The first time I saw it on TV I couldn’t believe it.

It resembled a sport that girls played when I was a kid

called girls’ basketball – since discarded for being sexist,

but I couldn’t figure out why the defenders had to stand back

and let the attackers shoot unbothered.

Nearly a quarter of a century later,

after shepherding two daughters

through the Saturday netball circus –

it seems as if it was usually in the rain but it probably wasn’t –

I still think it’s weird as shit.

I’m not keen on watching sports

in which the officials blow their whistles

every few seconds

for infractions that I don’t see.

                    Ryne Duren

When I was a kid in the fifties

I became fascinated by

a baseball pitcher named Ryne Duren.

His genius at gamesmanship and showmanship

eclipsed his skill at pitching,

but that’s what makes memories.

Sure, he could throw a baseball faster

than just about anybody ever could,

at somewhere about 175 kph.

Think of that.

He was also almost legally blind

and wore glasses that were, as everyone said,

as thick as Coke bottles.

His problem, of course, was control.

A relief pitcher, he would come on in the middle of an inning

and while warming up was always sure

to fire some of his high-velocity offerings

several rows up into the grandstand

and some others somewhere near

where the next batter’s head would be likely to be.

At least once that I recall, perhaps imprecisely,

he took off his glasses to polish them,

dropped them on the ground,

and then got down on his hands and knees

to feel around blindly for them

until he found them, put them back on,

and blazed one more warm-up cannonball, high,

before nodding that he was ready.

Batter up!

                Russian Tennis Fans

Watching the St Petersburg Open tennis tournament,

with the sound off, of course,

it seemed as if the clearly affluent spectators

were almost entirely either

women who looked like trophies,

or maybe porn actresses,

or men who looked like thugs –

or like cruel, expensively dressed gangsters

who employed thugs.

              Pace and Reproduction

One thing that struck me

when I watched the Beijing Olympics

was how Usain Bolt stood out from the field

with his sense of humour and personality

as well as the pace at which he motored down the track.

I also noticed the looks on the faces

of the young Chinese women in the crowd

and on the stadium staff

whenever he appeared.

I wonder how many half-Jamaican babies

who may end up being able to run fast

were born in Beijing in 2009?

                  Wimbledon Celebrities

One of the best parts of watching tennis on TV,

of course,

especially a grand-slam tournament such as Wimbledon,

was the editor’s selection of shots

from cameras focusing on celebrities in the crowd.

It amused me that I was unable to recognise most of them.

I assumed that those who were of A Certain Age

but wearing well

were either former tennis greats or minor royalty.

The glittery young women with perfect teeth

who’d look comfortably at home

on the covers of fashion magazines

were likely the players’ wives and girlfriends,

and the fashionably clothed and barbered young men,

also with excellent teeth,

their husbands and boyfriends.

Particularly fascinating were the apparently professional celebrities

taking time out from shoots for the covers

of supermarket check-out aisle magazines

to glom some world-class, global exposure

before sinking into the ranks of the uncelebrated

by the time next year’s Wimbledon rolled around.

I had no idea who any of them were.