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How About That Local Sports Team?
Sep. 30th, 2016 10:48 pmVictoria can be a strange state to live in at times. Today is a public holiday dedicated to a football grand final, with a massive parade through the city. The state also has a holiday dedicated in about a month dedicated to a horse race. I find both events incomprehensible. Melbourne Cup day seems to be an opportunity for people to dress up, ignore any sense of the style for the rest of the year, and get stupidly drunk. I can vaguely understand the appeal to the "aspirational" lower middle class who want to LARP as upper class for a day and fail miserably. Why would you want to do that? For the AFL ritual of the boot, I even understand watching the game. It a highly dynamic game that requires a high level of both natural talent and skill. The phenomenology of the viewing contrasts significantly with cricket. Viewing Australian Rules Football has a high level of intensity; cricket is like background music - occasionally something interesting happens, and it has a narrative, but its mostly low-intensity viewing.
It's not as if I don't grok sport, even competitive sport. In my grade school teen-aged years I was quite the player; in summer an opening bowler for a local u/18s cricket team, in winter an interschool football player (half-back flank with occasional ruck rover), ruby player (oddly, wing), and when I could, Gaelic football, lacrosse, and European handball. I was one of the school's best medium distance runners - anywhere from 400m to 3000km I excelled at. There was other outdoor pursuits as well; especially rowing, cross-country running, archery and the like. There were a few things that put me off such activities however shortly after starting university. Firstly, there was university where my interests rapidly moved to political activism, intellectual investigations, the trinity of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Secondly, the sporting institutions themselves struck me as being more than a bit yobbish and had commanded far too large a portion of income and expenditure for what they did. Thirdly, was sports fans as a group, with the partisanship and anti-intellectualism, and often loutish behaviour. But buggered if I can work out why people want to go to the AFL parade, let alone why the day has a public holiday, as if any of it has existential importance.
It's not as if I don't grok sport, even competitive sport. In my grade school teen-aged years I was quite the player; in summer an opening bowler for a local u/18s cricket team, in winter an interschool football player (half-back flank with occasional ruck rover), ruby player (oddly, wing), and when I could, Gaelic football, lacrosse, and European handball. I was one of the school's best medium distance runners - anywhere from 400m to 3000km I excelled at. There was other outdoor pursuits as well; especially rowing, cross-country running, archery and the like. There were a few things that put me off such activities however shortly after starting university. Firstly, there was university where my interests rapidly moved to political activism, intellectual investigations, the trinity of sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll. Secondly, the sporting institutions themselves struck me as being more than a bit yobbish and had commanded far too large a portion of income and expenditure for what they did. Thirdly, was sports fans as a group, with the partisanship and anti-intellectualism, and often loutish behaviour. But buggered if I can work out why people want to go to the AFL parade, let alone why the day has a public holiday, as if any of it has existential importance.
