My contribution to sport

Sport was compulsory at Auckland Grammar. You had to play one winter sport and one summer sport. I lined up for hockey with all the bad grace at my command – I was a 3^rd former, 12 years old, and it was 1947. As I recall, they had me standing out on the field clutching a hockey stick, not having the remotest idea what I was supposed to do, or which indeed was “our” goal. Indeed, I didn’t even know whom I was playing for or against. I didn’t care. People were shouting at me. Evidently there was some autonomic sense of what to do in sport which I did not possess. I was apparently a bloody waste of space.

But I knew clearly that this was not how I wished to live my life; it all seemed even then juvenile and pointless. So I walked off the paddock and never went back. Over four years at Auckland Grammar I became invisible and watched the sporting heroes paraded at school assembly to shine the light of their magnificence upon us.

Sport was not an agenda in our home. My father, when he condescended to live with us, did have some prior and mysterious knowledge of wrestling, and that was of some interest to us in the time of Lofty Blomfield and Earl McCready. So we sometimes attended the wrestling in the Auckland Town Hall with morbid fascination, and considerable schadenfreude when the evil guys got dumped from a great height. “They know how to fall” said my father. Well, one would hope so.

Life proceeded without sport, as I still think it should. I could never understand why so many of my contemporaries were so eager to spend weekends on cold windswept paddocks to no good purpose. I recall being slightly amused when my father, by this time with a son at St Kentigern College, evinced a hitherto unveiled expertise in Rugby football, in the sense that he now knew all about it, and followed the fortunes of the St Kentigern First XV so assiduously each week that they made him an Honorary Member, and gave him a certificate which he framed and hung on the wall. My amusement was enhanced when he informed me one day that I did not and could not understand Rugby. He was right, I thought, the physical and mystical features of Rugby Football entirely elude me.

The fact is, I have always been unmoved and underwhelmed by the pervading cult of team sport and team spirit, speed, strength, physical prowess. These days it seems to produce, as collateral damage I suppose, sustained inebriation and gross sexual misbehaviour and crime. This is constantly excused by aficionados as the kind of latitude we have to allow to adrenalin-ridden sports icons, popping hormones all over the show -- and our role is to “understand”. That’s crap. These guys need to grow up. They haven’t yet come to terms with their gonads.

Professional football in all codes seems to me increasingly revolting. The juvenile and aggressive gestures on the field whenever someone achieves something, the often thinly-concealed racism, the tacit approval of violence and cheating against the rules... but then, as my father pointed out, I don’t understand any of this; it is somehow veiled from me. The exception, it seems to me, is netball, which appears to retain principles and is entertaining to watch.

Motor sport, on the other hand, is beyond belief. Noisy, polluting, wasteful of resources, hugely expensive, dangerous, pandering to everything less than admirable in human nature... Stock cars, drag racing, V8 stuff... It was a happy day for me when Auckland proved unable or unwilling to accommodate the international motor sport event which would have shut down part of the central city for about 3 weeks, and it went to Hamilton, which deserves it.

So I am counter-cultural. Isn’t that good! I have had a sports-free lifetime since I walked off the hockey field, and thus have achieved so much more in wideness and depth.