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
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
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.
