liberation

Not too long ago in a post I write about my pay-TV subscription and the obscene amount of sport—that is, AFL, EPL, A-league, and associated commentary programs—I could watch if I had a mind to. The thing is, I don’t seem to have a mind to watch much any longer.

The EPL and A-league are in recess, but Euro 2012 is on. I’ve not watched a minute of it.

I’ve despaired about elite Australian Rules football in other posts. The game once rewarded the player making the best effort to get the ball; now it penalises him. Players are more skilful than ever but the game is become a rugby and soccer hybrid that has lost its integrity.

For years I ask myself why I hunch on the couch season after season subjecting myself to the wee-small-hours frustration of Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal? Why I endure fraught afternoons of Carlton butchering opportunities to kill off hapless opponents?

Perhaps the stress of being a supporter has got to me. I don’t want my spiritual well-being determined by my team’s position on the ladder. I just can’t see it as important any more. Maybe the business of sport being a business has soured it, tainted it beyond redemption.

I reach tipping point. I feel things dying inside me—the need to know the scores, who’s in and who’s out of the team. I sit on the couch less, don’t turn the radio on. Instead I think about my job, give it time and thought above and beyond what I’m paid to give it. I pick up a book.

I’ll stay up late and watch the 99th edition of Le Tour, but “this could be the last time, this could be the last time, maybe the last time, I don’t know, oh no, oh no.”

Yesterday I meet Nicky at North Ringwood Reserve. We ride for an hour in pale cold sunlight around Wonga Park, an enclave of country nestled close to suburbia. She racks her bike on the roof of her 4WD and heads home.

I wheel the Cervélo up onto the viewing platform on the roof of the change-rooms and watch an under-age game between North Ringwood and Croydon. The lads slog through the slush, their endeavour palpable, the one-on-one contest to the fore. I smell the liniment, the meat pies; my nostrils salivate.

Sport is a pastime. Before sixty there seems endless time to pass, rolling in the mud, pursuing a slippery pill.

Now, somehow, it seems a waste to pass what time is left to me watching sport. I clip in and pedal home.

Rock on.