sport

Sport is unscripted theatre. I hate theatre: it’s forced and lacks real drama. Carlton versus Essendon, scores level in time-on at the MCG—that’s drama.

Sport teaches us life. It teaches us how to deal with our emotions, with hope and bitter disappointment. It teaches us to stay the course when our team is rebuilding and to take it on the chin when our club rorts the salary cap and is humiliated. And that’s just as a spectator, a supporter, a barracker.

To play is to learn how to get along with others, to abide by rules and to abide by the decisions of independent arbiters. To play a physical contact sport is to learn courage. To play for your team is to learn sacrifice and discipline. To win is to learn humility and to lose is to learn to be a sport.

I play no longer. My last game of competitive netball is four years behind me. The last 19 year-olds I ran off their feet are now 23.

As a boy I love football and can’t imagine not playing. When a game ends I’m genuinely pissed off; not because we might have lost, but because the game is over, the anticipation of beating your opponent to the next contest finished. And one day I’m too old to put on the boots and go out on the paddock any longer. It happens; it can’t be helped. I’m lucky to play in a premiership team.

At the thirty year reunion, Lace, our premiership coach, apologises to the club for not showing up at games more often. It’s too hard, he says. He can’t watch: he just wants to be out there and it burns him up inside to be on the other side of the white line. Me too.

My good woman gives me a shiny red Sherrin for the second birthday we celebrate together. Smart woman. I’m all hers now. I pump it up and carry it around the house for days, sniffing the leather, twirling it between my fingers. I put it on the sideboard and admire its gorgeous ellipse. Then I put it further and further out of sight.

Finally, one day, I take my Sherrin down the park with the JRT. My 60 year-old body still thinks it can punt a Sherrin out of sight. I line up a soccer goal, my approach dead straight, I guide the ball to the foot, the leg a perfect pendulum. The ball hits my foot and wobbles off to the right about 20 metres. My foot hurts from the impact.

Yes, sport has a lot to teach us. Humility, discretion, when enough is enough.   

      

Rock on.