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On being unsportsmanlike — 7 Comments

  1. I tickles my irony humour sense buds that the most fanatical sports fans (tautolgy?) look as if the only exercise they take is pint hefting followed by pizza hurling.
    The spectator sport I am really puzzled by is golf.
    On a par (see what I did there?) with hysterical audience applause for a wee lottery ball dropping down a transparent tube into a little rack.

    • I have played quite a few rounds of golf myself in the past [even once getting a hole-in-one]. It has a couple of redeeming features – it tends to take place in quiet scenic locations and the players don’t get hysterical after a good shot. Compare football players and their sliding on their knees and their group hugs to a golfer who will raise an arm no higher than shoulder height! I still won’t watch it though.

  2. I have a couple of gripes with it all – firstly, this over-blown inter-school sports-day is compromised by the ‘fluid nationality’ of the players, as it seems that they can freely adopt the nationality of whichever country will pay them best. Nationality should be the country which gave you your first passport or the country in which you have been continuously tax-resident for the last 5 years. That would sort them out.

    My second gripe is with ‘circus acts’ purporting to be sports. A sport should be objectively measured, whether by points scored, times taken or distances etc. Any ‘sport’ which relies on judges to apply subjective scoring, like gymnastics, ice-dancing, skateboarding etc., has no place in the sporting compendium – they may be spectacular theatrical or circus-style achievements and worthy of applause for that, but they are not sport by any realistic standard.

    Ernest Hemingway once wrote that there are only three sports in the world, motor-racing, mountaineering and bull-fighting, because in those events you are ‘sporting’ with your life, anything else is just a game, a pastime, an amusement. I am not amused.

  3. “When the starting gun goes to start a race they could let loose a pack of bad tempered Dobermans?”

    Or they could have a finishing gun and shoot the runner who’s last over the line.
    Or (and I’m just riffing now) they could choose a random number and shoot that one as they finish.

    Admit it, you’d pay to watch that. 😀

  4. “Even now I occasionally get asked if I “watched the match last night”. Naturally this leads to a blank look as I haven’t a clue what they are talking about.”

    Pipe smoking of course. I have watched thousands of matches over the past 40 odd years. (I watched one just this morning after filling a pipe with a great burley flake tobacco.)

    Maybe the Olympic Games should add a slow smoking event. Not only would it require a degree of talent, but it would fit into both summer and winter games.

  5. I’m the same when it comes to sports. I simply don’t care. Not saying I didn’t participate in a couple of them in my younger days–bowling and golf mainly. I think I took up golf and bowling just out of pure malice. I knew that I would be terrible at both what with my bad back so my golf swing was something to see as was my bowling “delivery”.

    I have to say though that the day I killed a squirrel that was sitting halfway down the fairway by badly topping the golf ball I was swinging at into a flaming “worm burner” that slammed right into the squirrel’s head, still lives in my memory to this day. But it was when golfing partner launched the demised squirrel over the trees and onto the neighbouring “green” while another group was “putting out” that really burned that day into my brain. Landed right in the middle of them.

    I think he used a 7 iron.

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