Go With What You Got
I was watching a tier-4 English
football match
on the free-to-air sports
channel
before it went belly up.
The mostly adolescent
footballers’
swagger and silly hair-dos
impressed me far more
than their playing skills did.
Extreme
I suppose it’s because I’m old
or something,
but watching stunt-based sports
in which judges judge
how well the competitors
perform what seem to me to be
pretty much the same stunts
over and over again
on their BMX bikes,
skateboards, snowboards, waterboards,
or whatever,
on half-pipes, over ramps, down
railings, and so on
makes me change the channel,
even with the sound off.
They may be having fun and
thrills and stuff,
but that’s their business;
watching them’s no fun for me
at all.
It’s Not My Call
When I watch European football
on TV,
the officials continually
astound me.
It makes no sense to me
that they let the players get
away
with so much shoving-over and
shirt-pulling
and what amount to assaults,
and that they blow their
whistles
for fouls and show yellow or
even red cards
when clearly no contact has
occurred.
I just don’t get it.
This isn’t sour grapes
because I almost never give a shit who
wins.
But then, I don’t play the
game,
and I suppose they used to,
and are around it all the time,
so they must know something I
don’t.
Rational Resource Allocation
I wonder what it’d be like
to have as much money in the
bank
as European professional
footballers
spend with their hairdressers
in an average week?
Best
Wishes
When I was watching a replay
of the women’s weightlifting
competition
from the 2011 Pacific Games
I felt stunned into a sense of
awe
by how beautiful all the
competitors were,
and I hoped that their lives
will come out better than mine.
Sporting
Codes
Unlike their counterparts
in the English and German
football leagues
that I watched on TV,
the players from all over the
world
whom I watched on a televised
rugby sevens tournament
a few years ago
did not sport a single
extreme, extravagant, or
silly-looking
hairdo.
Maybe a shaved head or two,
that’s all.
Heartland
I watched Heartland Rugby on TV –
with the sound off, of course –
and the de rigueur shots
of the interiors of
rural New Zealand
where everybody knows everybody
else,
and has done so for their
entire lives,
creating close, unspoken social
ties,
filled me with envy and awe,
being totally foreign to my
experience.
A
Trade-Off
Watching netball on TV with the
sound off,
I considered that although it’s
a bullshit sport,
the athletic female legs on
display
were certainly eye-catching.
For
Love & Money
Watching an English
professional football match
in which two teams from the
second or third tier
spend what seems like the whole
ninety minutes
passing the ball around and
testing each other’s defences
and almost never taking a shot
at the goal
is like watching a boxing match
in which the fighters bob and
weave and feint and spar
without ever throwing a punch.
Of course, when that happens in
boxing
the crowd boos and whistles and
shouts derogatory expletives
and the referee eventually
stops the fight.
The football spectators,
however,
sing lustily and have a jolly
old time
throughout the whole dull
nil-nil draw.
His
Not Mine
During an Auckland
on Maori TV,
the camera zoomed in
on a Maori spectator
with a salt-and-pepper goatee.
Clearly a solid citizen,
and definitely a solid unit,
and clearly comfortable in his land,
his whenua, his kāinga,
which, although I have no other,
can never be mine.
Sitting there
with my bottle of cheap plonk,
I wondered
what it would be like
to be him.
What Makes Bolt Great
It’s such a simple thing,
conceptually, that is.
It doesn’t require judges
to award points;
It doesn’t require panels or
juries
to decide competitive aesthetic
value;
success or failure cannot be
determined by a referee’s
whistled judgements.
In sprinting the one who runs
the fastest
is the first one over the line,
and that’s it.
A sense of humour helps,
and showmanship and innate
nobility
don’t hurt.
No comments:
Post a Comment