Game of Chess anyone?February 7, 2013
A game of chess anyone?
I just knew it. Competitive sport brings out the worst. Has anyone listened to the news? Did I not advice over and over again to award losers in sport instead of the winners? This is going to be big, I mean really big. Australia and sport are one. Forget about Craig Thompson, Slipper and Obeid. That’s just confetti for a reluctant shy bride. No one is going to catch the bridal bouquet from this lot of corrupt, drug addled doped up sport junkies.
The truth has now come out, glaringly. The minister for sport looked glum. Drugs, crime, doping, gangsters are the catch words in sport now. Woe the parent that enrolls their child in sport from now on. Soon after this evening news I went for walk. I already noticed children near our park running away from a ball that threatened to roll towards them. Within days people will be burning balls, cricket bats, sport-commentators will be strung up from goal posts. In the dark of the night people will be jettison their boxer shorts, in kerbs you will find redolent of sweaty thighs Lycra cycle gear, knee pads and other sport paraphernalia. I noticed rugby balls sticking out of the Salvos bins. The revolution against sport has begun.
The fault is not in sport but rather in insisting that the ‘winning’ is more important than just playing it. Not everyone was as lucky as I was in choosing sport as one of those activities that should only be indulged in for the fun of it, but ditched it as soon as I heard ‘winning’. I like the fun, the pure enjoyment of kicking a ball as hard as possible or to slice through a wave feeling the water rushing by. Alas, I had trouble finding sport loving friends who did not think that winning were all important. They thought of my tennis playing weird for never knowing the score. I left the tennis club.
Of course, it was always on the cards this would happen. The insane emphasis on winning trophies and medals took away what sport is about, a healthy way of burning of energy and excess calories. I played basket ball years ago for Scarborough but resigned when the coach rebuked me for throwing a ball in the basket of the opposite team, the nerve of him trying to lesson my joy of running and leaping about trying to get the ball in a basket. Who cared which basket?
There was just no enjoyment. Of course, awarding losers might sound silly but when you think that winning only awards the one entity and the rest made out losers, there is a lot that seems to stick in my craw from a social point of view. Does that not encourage the drug and doping that is now occurring worldwide? Why anyone wants to win is also a bit dodgy when you consider that it is likely most won’t. So what if you kick the ball a bit slower or in the wrong direction. Isn’t kicking the aim? If you kick slower or swim in the opposite direction, you are a loser? Come off it. Winning above everything else in sport is insane. It creates whole armies of despondent, depressed losers. No wonder sport had been drawn into drug, crime and despair.
If you are going to award medals, what about medals for empathy, tolerance, stroking a snake, kindness, knitting socks at the railway station, feeding a hungry duck or smiling at a brave lady slowly crossing an intersection, catch a shooting star? Where are the competitions in housing refugees, a race to house the homeless or feed the flotsam of society, the mentally ill and those lost souls with the dark disturbed look sitting forlornly on the park bench? Where is the race for communal inclusiveness whereby no one will ever be allowed to die unknown, unloved, uncared, a pauper’s grave? Where are the medals and expert coaches to lower our incarceration rates or lower our unwanted teen pregnancies and those lost knee deep in gloom and despair?
There is one sport I would exclude from being subject to my scorn and deeply felt aversion in having to win at all cost. It is a sport that includes a king, a queen, rooks, knights and castles, pawns and a lot more. It is a compulsory subject at school in some countries and is often played outdoors. Everyone can play it, even ex rugby players and gangsters. You don’t need to win but is fun if you do. Just enjoy it.
It is a game and sport called Chess.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Well said. Being over 6 feet and my brother a 6ft7″ we were talked into joining a basket ball club. Even on the train home, the coach would rattle on on how we should have stood here or there, taking a pad out and drawing the players on the court. I broke glasses and my nose is still out of wack.(pointing to the left of things)
I learned chess and once played a grandmaster in Holland but with a handicap. He would surrender a couple of pieces at the beginning of the game. I loved it but haven’t played for years. H can play but isn’t particularly drawn to sitting around with a well known boring old fart.
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Is it that sport is some kind of metaphor for combat where one is supposed to slake a thirst for killing and maiming people who are “other” than those with whom we share a tribal connection – replacing physical harm with psychological harm ? And then the serious types can criticise people like you, Gez, for daring to not take it seriously.
The Emmlets have always been far better sports participants than their Dad. They have both a high degree of physical skills like co-ordination and athleticism, and especially Emmlet 1 seemed to me to have something extra – the ability to read the play and be in the right spot at the right time, nearly every time. He once played as a substitute in his club’s first division team and got to play with two Australian reps. They had to slow their game down so he could take balls passed to him, but he managed to score a few times – and came off the field elated and exhausted. As a much younger player, he was praised and encouraged to make a career out of it by the pros.
I asked him what he thought of that idea and he (thankfully) said “Nah, it’s just a game, Dad”. He certainly took the game seriously when he was on the field and he was dedicated in training and thoughtful about the game, but unlike the pros, he maintained, IMHO an admirable sense of proportion – aided, I imagine, by his sport in particular being one where no player makes really decent money. It’s an amateur game, even at the national team level. And there’s the rub – when money comes into the game, that’s the end of the fun and the cheating and corruption comes to the fore. So gifted players then become just cogs in someone else’s machine.
If we put as many resources into eliminating war, famine and poverty as we do to getting a ball into a fucking net, across a line or between the posts, we’d be a lot better off.
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This is what happens with professional sport. It is shocking and totally stupid.
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I would have been a very successful tennis player if I had been encouraged to pursue my participation in competitive tennis matches as a career path, but I barely understood there was a world out there that paid people money for the achievement so hell, I got sick of it. And women got that sharp end of a pointy stick that they were neglected. Footballers paraded in front of me and parading, striking poses of strength all over the television still.
I was mocked by one delusional mental cripple of a teacher that I wasn’t the child selected for the Under-13 schoolboys! Rugby League match for Queensland against NSW! Set aside I am a girl. He mocked me having asked me what the height was etcera of a tennis net, trying to set me up, because I knew it, because I passed my umpires exam in tennis and that was my social reward. I have told this story before. It bears retelling. This is one truth about Australia’s disregard for girl children, women and the welfare of children at a local level. This is what the boys learned, watching me being forced to stand in a classroom and mocked. The teacher was so perverted it beggars belief.
Where is our society even NOW countering the influence of lunatics, but in fact ELEVATING them! I am incredulous that the Bombers footy team has hired Lance Armstrong as a High Performance Enhancing COACH! My giddy aunt. They should be laughed off the map of history. How insane and a friend of mine who is a history post grad says she supposed on reflection that the social preconditions that allowed the growth of Naziism where insanity and cultural poverty very much like that affecting a lot of us struggling for an existence prevailed in the midst of bread and circuses displays put on by similarly insane people steeped in corruption, steeped in perverted values. Lance Armstrong has been revealed to be one of the most significant liars of our century, which is the point, that will surely bite the Bombers themselves on their arses. He cannot be trusted still. He is a nasty piece of goods. Part of his brain seems to have been knocked out. Gez, your tongue in cheek exposition of moral and social revulsion is brilliant. How chronic is this that a nation regard is torn to shreds like a paper napkin and a minority of bovver boys, again, have stood up in their uniforms and told us of their utter disrespect for the law and an ethical management of social consequence in a sports arena. He got a JOB!!!! How DISGUSTING! As a male entertainer and class wit on my Facebook page said, presenting the information, “Well, bugger me!”.
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