Hear that? That's the sound of half the people that came, saw that title, and clicked on the back button. As my global audience consists of one man and a diseased dog, it's just you and me then, and you're probably already a convert to sport so the one thing important to you in this world is guaranteed not to be what comes next.
This is the impossible dilemma. Sport takes you early. If it doesn't get you then the bug will probably never bite you. Maybe in those fleeting moments when it seems like significant quantities of LSD have been dumped into the nation's water supply you get caught up in the moment. You may even pick up that remote and flick the television over while no one else is watching. But that's as much as it comes to, usually.
I understand that. Sport is, in the main, exceptionally boring. Nothing much happens for long periods and its protagonists are usually, well, dicks. Of course the most common argument about most sports is to reduce it to its most basic, seemingly absurd level. For football, the sport I love most, the classic is always 'It's just loads of men trying to put a ball through two posts, what's so amazing about that?'
Well, I've tried it, and it's hard.
It's especially bloody hard when everyone else is trying to do it better. Give a baby a round ball and watch their face. As soon as they see it roll after giving it the slightest touch, and it keeps on rolling, they are instantly enthralled. Watching a baby see a ball in action for the first time is what it was must have been like watching the neighbourhood faces when an entrepreneurial caveman first rolled up with a stone wheel.
When you have every baby in the world practising however, you know a professional career is probably a bit beyond you (although you never really hang up your metaphorical boots), and the long years playing football quickly pass by in a haze of drawn out summer evenings in the park and cold winter mornings on a bus travelling to games you don't want to play in.
But sport is really not about winning, or taking part, it's about watching.
Now sport is not art, let's get out of the way. Watching sport is not like absorbing a great piece of art, it's much more emotional than that. Art can stun you, it can creep up on you and it can leave you indifferent. Sport does the same. But let it into your life, even a little, and it will do something art can never do. *
It will make you as nervous as if it’s your first date with the prom queen and as excited as when you think you might score on the first date with the prom queen. Sport is capable of stringing you along past the hundredth date without sex, never mind the third. It will break your heart on a regular basis and you'll still love it.
Now, rarely do I digest the latest paper from the Nobel Prize laureate in particle physics. It would be nice if I could, but let's face it, Dan Brown is more my level. Great books, paintings, photography, movies etc. are pinnacles of the human mind, a snapshot of what our imaginations are capable of, sometimes even becoming a point of light towards something better.
But sport is something more ethereal and abstract than even art, although it seems the most real because of its physical nature. Unlike art it doesn’t try to change our world and, though its participants happily do it, it doesn’t preach at us to change our ways. It doesn’t have an opinion, it just is. It's perfection within its own rules, only disturbed by the chaotic element of human participation.
The clichéd arguments that sport can stop wars between nations, foster community spirit and generally heal all wounds is as false as the argument that sport is a place where our children should get their role models from. It's as alien to sport as the super injunctions, the prostitutes, drug doping, the bitching, the 24-hour rolling coverage and every Sky Sports News presenter is. These are all human additions, desperately trying to confine sport to a certain set of rules.
It can’t be though, sport is elemental. It can never be beaten, never perfected and never tamed. Watching these sportsmen and women endlessly striving for this impossible perfection is a show I want to see. For those that don't, I hope you enjoy the other things in life that give you pleasure. For me, I'm sticking on the match.
* Music is the only rival to sport in this regard (just to end that particular line of thought, yes, music is better).
