Sprot

. . . or “sport” as it’s more commonly known.

Photo by Lukas on Pexels.com

Pexels has just presented me with a number of thought-provoking images regarding this subject, one of which is used above. It also included a rather appealing 2-D aerial view of a soccer pitch, someone doing an asana and a woman in a hijab holding a football. This is probably some kind of salutary lesson to me.

Although it probably isn’t entirely necessary, you might need to be born into a family who is interested in sport to grow up interested in it yourself. I never really have been, if sport means an active outdoor competitive team game involving scoring. I’m certainly interested in activity and keeping fit, although more in the breach than in the observance sadly. I also get little flickers of interest which are not maintained for long if I feel a personal connection. Maybe it’s that personal connection which does it for people, so it could be the people you hang out with that achieve this.

As I say, it isn’t entirely absent. I’m not as interested as Sarada is in Wimbledon, and she by extension is also apparently somewhat interested in other tennis, but the experience of coming back home after my O-level and A-level exams and sitting in front of the TV wanting something to take my mind off the worry of how I’d done in them, and therefore watching Wimbledon, did leave a lasting impression on me. To the extent that I have some interest, it probably provides a welcome distraction from the troubles of my life and I’m not entirely detached from it.

As a child, I felt like an outsider not being interested in it and being from Kent, that was mainly manifested in cricket. It was just about possible to kindle a tiny, fitful, smouldering flame of interest in cricket for a couple of years back in the ’70s. This was when Kerry Packer was starting to organise World Series Cricket, which was a really crap idea and I did feel quite passionately opposed to that as a nine year old. From this distance and decades of neglect in focussing on the subject, my recollection of what that was about is quite faint, but it seems to have been about the over-commercialisation of the game. I do vividly remember Ian Botham becoming the first person to score a century and take eight wickets in one innings today in 1978, and Geoff Boycott scoring the hundredth century of his career at Headingley on 11th August 1977. In fact it sometimes seems like there’s another version of me who could have existed and didn’t decide this was not part of my identity, which is one reason why the dog has the name he has in this video:

The names Geoff Boycott, Mike Brearley and Ian Botham do in fact mean something to me, but I can’t push it that far. Were I to pretend to be into cricket, it would be an affectation, and it wouldn’t really be me. I wonder if that would be so if my enthusiasm for it had continued past 1978. Maybe it would’ve become part of a completely false persona.

The really big sport is of course soccer, and like many others I felt pressurised into the idea of supporting a particular team back in the day. In fact there were two, at different times. The first was Arsenal because my friend supported them, but everyone saw through my completely abstract and half-hearted affectation so I abandoned it. The other, though, was Celtic, and I was rather more serious about that, although the scope for being a lot more serious and still not being serious at all is considerable. I suspect that my family was on the Other Side as far as the Celtic/Rangers rivalry was concerned, so in a way it was quite subversive for me to be interested in Celtic although our general lack of interest in any kind of sport made that quite arcane.

So far I’ve only talked about being a spectator, and of course I’ve participated unwillingly in a lot of sport at school. My attitude to sport is similar to other people’s attitude to maths: it was something I did at school which I would never be able to apply in adult life, so what was the point? And I have to be honest: I find the idea of supporting a particular team as a spectator alone without also participating in that sport oneself, assuming one is able to, quite odd. I don’t know how big the overlap between playing a sport and watching it is. I presume the pleasures are very different. Anyway, I have played, and with one exception I never really enjoyed any of it.

Like most other Brits, I call soccer “football” in conversation but think this may confuse people not from round these parts, which is why I use the more specific term here. In England, calling it “soccer” is a kind of class thing and when I call it that it also feels like an affectation, like calling a lounge a “living room”, though I do in fact call that. It was notable that when one of my teachers went into hospital to have an operation on his knee, every other pupil who wrote to him said they missed him supervising their football on the playing field except me. It just wasn’t on my radar.

The other sports were rugby, tennis, rounders, hockey and basketball. I don’t recall playing any other kind of competitive team sport at school. Rugby suffered from an immediate problem caused by the teacher asking the wrong question in my first lesson, when he asked the whole class “hands up who knows how to play rugby”, and I, being in the centre of the group, was invisible when I was the only person not to raise my hand. Consequently I didn’t learn then, still haven’t learnt and spent the whole time walking and running around completely bewildered, but since I lacked any interest in it anyway I didn’t bother to do anything about his misconception. I don’t understand what scrums are about, for example, except that they’re unpleasant and sometimes painful.

Playing soccer generally involved getting freezing cold on the pitch because of there being no apparent way to get at the ball. Again, there was a lack of motivation to do so anyway. I did score one goal though. Actually I scored two but the other one was set up for me by friendly people on the other team. Rounders made zero sense to me. Its chief interest is its similarity to baseball, because of how seriously that game is taken in the US and Japan, but not at all here, and rounders itself is just a kid’s game which doesn’t go anywhere much in adult life so far as I can tell. As to why that might be, I do not know. Nor do I know what the difference between rounders and baseball is.

Basketball I disliked because it involved getting your hands dirty. Also, slightly like the rugby situation, in my first basketball lesson the teacher told us to do “lay-up shots” and none of us had any idea what he meant, and I still don’t know. I did have a slight interest in its predecessor Pok Ta Pok, and remember attempting to play that with some friends, but since I’m still alive I obviously didn’t follow all the rules and the appeal there is exoticism. It’s possible that if the sports hall had been cleaner I wouldn’t’ve hated touching the ball so much, and I presume that others weren’t as bothered by getting dirty. In one rugby session, the teacher had us all roll in the mud to ensure that we weren’t put off by the prospect of getting dirty, which seemed very unfair on the people who were going to end up washing our sports kit. It was also disgusting. Tennis was marginally better than the sports I’ve mentioned so far but I didn’t really understand the rules at the time and when we played doubles I seemed to end up being completely uninvolved. As soon as something starts to become a team, it stops being playable. Other people have got the ball and I can’t get a foothold.

Cricket was mainly just boring. Fielding was less unpleasant because there was little involvement in the game for most people most of the time anyway. Batting and bowling were practically impossible. In spite of knowing how to bowl, every ball I’ve bowled has been wide. However, I did exercise some sporting behaviour when playing cricket, because I was once asked to lose deliberately by accidentally on purpose knocking the bails off the stumps and refused to do so. This was because the next person to bat wanted to show off, and it didn’t seem like teamwork to me to do that. I personally couldn’t care less if my team won or lost but other people did. It was literally not cricket. And it seems strange to me now that my attitude to cricket had changed so much from what seemed like honest involvement in the game as a spectator to not giving a fig in so few years.

The one exception to all this was hockey, or “field hockey” as it would be known to many people outside Britain. I was actually, bafflingly, both really good at and enthusiastic about this sport. This came as a great surprise to everyone, not least myself. However, I was unable to indulge this enjoyment because hockey was deemed a “girl’s game” and it was only played by boys at my school for literally a few weeks out of the entire time I was at that school and there was no boys’ hockey team and so forth, so it went nowhere. I mean, I couldn’t care less now but it still seems that this was an example of the problems caused by gender or sex segregation in competitive sport, and this is where I’m going to have to break with the usual demarcation I exercise between blogs and talk about trans issues in sport.

Trigger warning: gender identity issues – skip to below if this isn’t your cup of tea.

Okay. Throughout my time at school, I was one of those weedy people who was the last to be picked on any team. Rather than seeing this as unfair, I embraced my role as a nebbish. In short distance races I literally always came last except for one occasion when I came second to last. In athletics, I couldn’t compete with anyone: long jump, high jump (and I’m quite tall by the way), shot put, discus, javelin, you name it, I was invariably the last in my group. And I wasn’t physically inactive. I walked many times the distance most of my peers did on a regular basis and the one thing I was good at which I was actually allowed to do was long distance running. It just seemed to be impossible to gain the strength or muscle bulk any of my male contemporaries managed.

I don’t have a complete answer for the issue of trans sportspeople, but I am aware that trans women in sports considered as a group perform significantly less well than cis men. As far as my own performance is concerned, two factors were involved. One was that I really could not care less about competitive sport and it seemed an alien world to me. I still don’t understand, most of the time, why I should care except to the extent that it could create common ground with other people who are more emotionally involved. I would expect the majority of gender dysphoric people assigned male at birth to take a similar attitude. The other was that I was simply physically weaker than practically any boy, so attempting to compete would be futile, even given an attempt to build up muscle bulk and the like, which in any case felt very “wrong” for my body and interfered with suppleness, which was important to me. If it turns out I am typical in this respect, I can’t really see why trans women in sports would even be an issue. I also struggle and fail to care about the entire realm of sport, which seems like, as I said, a tiny niche interest with no consequences or point, so what’s the relevance of this whole controversy going on in a realm which really doesn’t matter anyway?

Rant over

What I’m about to say could easily be taken the wrong way. Nonetheless, there is a tendency for various policies to be grouped together and rejected out of hand as a group because of their associations. This happens with Gaddafi’s régime in Libya, which I would be the first to condemn. That said, in one particular area he did seem to get something right, and that’s sport. Gaddafi regarded sport as pointless and uninteresting, and football players would be referred to in his media by number rather than name in order that they did not achieve celebrity status (and I’m sure this failed by the way). He also disapproved of football supporters because he didn’t see them as participants in the game itself but as mere spectators. His view was that people should participate in sport directly rather than watching it, and I may have misremembered but I think he handed over many professional sports facilities to the general public to this end. I am not interested in trying to defend the man’s political record and I consider cults of personality in particular to be idolatrous and a distraction from real issues in a similar way, in fact, to Muammar al-Gaddafi’s own view of competitive sport, but he happens, I think, to have this particular point 100% right. That said, there’s no need to impose this view on anyone else or adopt it as part of a national governmental policy.

Then there’s the question of football leagues. For some unknown reason, the four league divisions have been renamed and it now sounds to an outsider that the third division is the first, as I understand it. Now here’s the thing. I do, to my surprise, care a bit about Leicester City winning the FA Cup. I am actually glad that my local team broke the trend of massive impersonal football clubs winning the Premier League in 2016 and that they won the FA Cup this year. I’m also glad Leicester Tigers, the local rugby club, is successful because my grandchild exists because of that. I can’t bring myself to care about football or other sports in general, but I recognise that it gives millions pleasure. I do have a couple of issues with the nature of the support though. I don’t understand how fans can maintain a personal connection with a local team with any non-local players in it, because I would imagine that the local connection is the most important thing about supporting a team. For similar reasons, I don’t get why people support distant teams unless they perhaps have members who have some personal or local connection to them. These are rudimentary opinions which I could possibly get worked up about if I had any interest in sport, but of course I don’t.

In conclusion then, I don’t in any way despise people for either playing or supporting competitive sport but I definitely don’t get it most of the time, and I usually have to force myself to care. That said, I did very much care when my local football team won, although I don’t quite understand what it won because there seems to be a distinction between the league championship and the FA Cup. As far as Wimbledon is concerned, I can see the appeal of escaping into a realm which is separate from one’s own and entering a place where things matter precisely because they don’t matter, and I can also see the value of international competitions of that nature as an alternative to war. Finally, I can see that there could’ve been a different path in my life where I really did care about sport, but it probably would’ve been quite inauthentic and I’m glad I didn’t take it, and finally finally, I don’t think it was remotely sensible that I was discouraged from participating in the one sport about which I was actually enthusiastic and encouraged to play those I couldn’t care less about.