Ball Games

This girl asked me yesterday if I played sport, and I snorted. I snorted. That's a pretty big commitment to a repulsion of sport.

I mean, dancing, gymnastics, ice skating those I get. They're like arts. I can watch them and be captivated. I do not understand the beauty of ball games. I mean, I can marginally understand how playing them is fun- there's an exhiliration, a thrill, particularly with dodgeball. But football? Rugby?

I'd actually rather shave my head than sit through one of those games.

And I think that I've pinpointed my fierce resentment towards them: it's the noise. It's the green fields, and the sound that the crowd makes and the way that the commentators sound. It's the outfits, the big thick leg muscles, it's the anger that it spurs, the rage that it encourages.

You either angrily win, or angrily lose. Drawing is possibly the worst thing in the entire world because that's just a whole bag of nothing. It's an anticlimax.

My parents love sport. My dad more than my mum probably, although she still goes to games, and checks scores and wears checkered t-shirts to show her support. There was always a ball game on tv, for the entirety of my childhood and I am not exaggerating. It would always be on.

Always playing, always screaming.

It's a waste of time and it pisses me off.

I get it, okay, I have some pretty strong resentments towards my childhood, so it follows that anything that was a constant then I would also resent, but it's more than that, this anger towards sport.

I don't care if it facilitates relationships and encourages community and makes people jump up and down and stamp their feet, it's a waste of space and I can't believe that I'm a minority here.

There's this film, "Fever Pitch" that rotates around the relationship between a workholic and a baseball-loving-school-teacher. It's actually an awesome film, it's like, romantic comedy, with Drew Barrymore, but there's this one line in it that I can't get out of my head.

They're having lunch or something, and Drew Barrymore goes on about how she hates those girls who are like 'what's so great about sport' because helloooo lameness, basically. And he gets really excited that she feels that way, and they have a whole cutesy moment.

But where is the satisfaction in sport? If you bet on someone winning and they do, then whoopdey doo, you're rich. But backing a team? How do you get any semblance of thrill out of that?!

I'm entirely baffled, and that line always, always sends me reeling. Because it makes me feel ignorant, and I'm not. I'm just opinionated, does that make me a less desirable girlfriend? If I'm not jumping up and down at the prospect of sitting through a pointless baseball game? Does it???

Fuck rugby, I'm going dancing.