It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of lairiness is priced in. But God, this lot seem loud. Football? Rugby? I’m sure I read somewhere that an Olympics is due. One thing is clear, though: the sports people are doing sports stuff again and no power on earth will stop them. All you can do about it – all you’ve been able to do about it for your entire adult life – is tug the duvet about your head and wait for it to go away.
At least ancient Greek athletes took their clothes off
I don’t dislike sport: it’s just entirely meaningless to me. It doesn’t register, it passes me by – and as a middle-aged, heterosexual white British male, that makes me a freak. ‘Could you do something on sport?’ asked the editor, adding, ‘Obviously we’ve got the Euros and the Andy Murray/Wimbledon saga’. Really? We have? The ‘Euros’, I realise, are football, but when is there not football? Wimbledon is the tennis competition that seemed to keep half our office glued to their screens throughout sunny summer lunch-hours. Plopping noises and occasional shouts. True, it feels like it might be that time of year again.
But ‘obviously?’ Not from where I’m sitting. Our TV subscription came pre-loaded with a cluster of sports channels. Last month they simply vanished. ‘We notice you haven’t viewed these channels in the last six months, and therefore we’re removing automatic access’, said the email and I did wonder what had taken them so long. Six months? Try three decades. That’s a long time to be entirely unengaged by a pastime that has such an overbearing cultural presence. All that TV coverage, all those column inches, ‘every kick of, it massively mattering to someone, presumably’, in the words of David Mitchell’s ‘watch the football’ sketch – one of the nearest things that we sports atheists have to a sacred text.
The other is Andy Miller’s 2003 book Tilting at Windmills, a cri de coeur written in the backwash of 1990s lad culture – probably the period in recent British history when a lack of interest in sport was most likely to be a social handicap. My twenties coincided with that whole Blair-era hellscape of Fantasy Football and ladettes and Three Lions and… I’m guessing, Gazza? Was Gazza a thing then? Anyway, back then I despised sport, though as Miller points out, it wasn’t really sport itself that we loathed but football, and the screaming, loutish circus around it. Take cricket: the knitwear, the gentle applause, dear old Blowers on Test Match Special. You couldn’t hate cricket. You could even grow to like it, if only you didn’t have to sit through the indescribable tedium of the actual game.
Miller writes about trying to cure himself of his sport-phobia by taking up miniature golf. To me, at the time, even that felt like a betrayal. He recounts the experience – familiar to every sports-shunning British male – of being stuck with a chatty taxi driver, and waiting for the inevitable, ‘see the match last night?’ Why, wonders Miller, do they never ask if you’ve seen the latest Fassbinder retrospective? I tried that at the pub once, with limited success, ‘so, catch the Leeds Piano Competition on Saturday? What about that Federico Colli, eh? My money’s on Schwizgebel in the Rachmaninoff’.
In truth, it’s a war that you can’t win: better, instead, to aim for peaceful co-existence. Some of my dearest friends sincerely love sport. They’ve taken me to football matches and have been as disappointed when I fail to share their elation as I am when they, in turn, are bored rigid by Peter Grimes. (Though in a culture that routinely accuses opera of being elitist, overpriced and governed by exclusive and intimidating social codes, it feels a bit rich to see Premiership football held up as some kind of great leveller).
I can appreciate the sincerity of their passion, even if the object of their enthusiasm baffles me. It’s just so relentlessly dull: hour upon hour of purposeless physical activity with zero visual appeal. (At least ancient Greek athletes took their clothes off). Possibly, like bebop jazz, it’s comprehensible and even enjoyable once you’ve mastered the abstract principles upon which it’s all based. But that would take time and mental energy that could be spent reading Buddenbrooks or rewatching The Sopranos. Life is fleeting, and I’ve long since signed a non-aggression pact with sport. I won’t bother it as long as it doesn’t bother me – or at the very least, keeps the noise down.
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