Drink It, You Gits
Few things seem more boring
or less newsworthy
than those identical eight-second bytes
on the sport so-called news
of the winners
of motor so-called sport events
shaking those jumbo bottles
of expensive champagne
and spraying it
all over the place
onto no-sane-person-cares-what.
What would be newsworthy
is if they didn’t.
Not
Entirely An Old Pig
I don’t generally watch golf on
the telly
– even with the sound off –
but there was something about
that Norwegian golfer
at the top of the LPGA event’s
leader board
that caught my attention.
I began having fantasies
about her colourlessly pale
Norwegian pubic hairs.
After she’d won, though,
the boringly cliché
champagne-squirting ritual
turned me off completely.
Basketball
As Dance
Although I’m non-competitive,
I was a basketball coach for
twelve years.
I saw it on the individual
level
as a process of teaching skills
and nurturing attitudes,
and at the team level
as orchestrating challenged
choreography.
When it all came together well
it enabled me to experience
creative aesthetic pleasure
that all this playing with
words
has never matched.
Mo Cheeks
After the 2011 Rugby World Cup ended,
Maori TV started showing
what it calls classic 1980s NBA games
on Saturday afternoons.
Watching with the sound off and some music on
in order to mute the voices
of the American basketball commentators,
who as I recall have to fail an intelligence test
and be able to shout a minimum
of five mindless clichés a minute –
with emphasis,
I was delighted to notice one of my old favourites
out there on the floor several weeks in a row:
Maurice Cheeks.
That’s Moe-reece, in the
unanglicised American pronunciation,
and not Morris, in the anglicised UK-NZ-Caribbean way,
but he went by the nickname Mo, anyhow.
Every time I beheld his homely countenance
there on the musically silent screen
I couldn’t help but recall
what a female basketball-fan friend of mine
once told me about him.
She said that he was why
she and her girlfriends watched basketball –
and referring to the callipygian splendour
of so many African-American stars,
and the tight shorts that they wore back then,
she exclaimed, “We just wanna see mo’ cheeks!”
Women’s Muscles
When I mentioned that she had a
great body
they were all over me like a
sudden squall,
soaking me with demands that I
explain what I meant.
Instead of coming back with a
facile and superficial – if true – reply
about her tits and ass,
I thought for about a second
and answered, ‘Toned.
She swims and runs and does
yoga and has well-toned muscles.
I liked that.’
The conversation moved on.
I was thinking about that as I watched the Commonwealth Games
on and off sometime later.
The women athletes almost all seemed terribly attractive to me:
The shot-putters and the distance runners,
the badminton players and the weight lifters,
the boxers and the hockey players,
the high-jumpers and the judokas –
looking at almost all of them,
whether square and bulky or long and lean,
or pretty much every body type in between
turned me on –
except for the gymnasts.
I’m not into paedophilia, man.
Olympic Volleyball
There was a time
when I used to fantasise
about being gang-raped
by the Cuban women’s Olympic volleyball team.
¡Aii! ¡Mamacita!
But now I’m too old,
and can’t stand being that pathetic –
I couldn’t last all six of ’em out
anymore
even if they wanted to,
which, of course,
they never did
and never would have.
My queer neighbour
has it for the weightlifters,
come the Olympics,
not the swimmers.
He told me he likes his men with hair on ’em.
Midriff
Impressiveness
Watching amateur Auckland
on Maori TV with the sound off,
I found myself more than impressed –
Some significantly, gloriously
magnificent beer puku were on display
at the plate.
Wow! Serious effort went into those.
Dangerous Fat People and Angelo
Dundee
I guess it’s because both my mother and my
elder sibling
bullied me relentlessly and also tended to
be overweight
that throughout my life I’ve had a physical fear of fat people.
This fear has not been entirely
groundless.
Perhaps the most obese person I’ve ever
known,
the owner of a delicatessen who briefly
employed me,
once threatened me with the handgun
with which he shot target practice
in the garage of the office building where
the deli was located.
I didn’t go back to work the next day.
Once, when Muhammad Ali was keeping in
shape
in the absence of any serious contenders
by regularly taking on all comers in what
the press called
a ‘bum of the month’ policy,
a reporter asked Angelo Dundee,
Ali’s trainer and cornerman,
whether Ali was taking his next opponent
seriously,
because the bum couldn’t hit.
“Anybody who weighs 230 pounds can hit,”
“I don’t care if he’s a broad.”
Inclusiveness
One of the things I admire most about rugby
is the effort that it makes
to include even those with severe disabilities.
I mean, even at its highest level,
every rugby team seems to be careful to include
at least two or three players
who were apparently born without necks.
Emotion Worth Reliving
The other team were the clear favourites;
they obviously expected to clobber us,
fancying themselves as unquestionably superior,
and the game was at their gym.
My girls played to the game plan from the start, though,
which was to be relentlessly aggressive
with our trap-zone defence,
and when we couldn’t get a breakaway layup,
and had to set up on offence,
to get the ball to the shooters.
We quickly raced away to a big lead,
stunning the opposition show ponies,
but the aggressive defence had its price,
and in the second half foul trouble made itself felt
and the other team slowly made it back into the game.
With eight seconds left
they took the lead from us for the first time –
by one point.
Two quick passes and the ball was in the hands
of our fat girl,
our starting centre having fouled out,
but the fat girl sank a two-pointer right on the buzzer.
Her face shined as if that was the finest moment of her life.
Maybe it was indeed the high point of her life,
other than having children, of course.
My eyes were moist as I keyed this onto the screen.
