The Game

This is surely to be a very risky piece of writing. I say this because I know how far gone the rest of you are. I am no stranger to alienation, so what’s one more dark mark next to my name? I hate soccer. This loathing began with mild indifference when the sport occupied the same void in my brain as the 16 times table and other such inaccessible data. I think I may actually have relished the ‘extra time’ my abnormality afforded me, tallying up the ‘bonus’ TV shows and gratis hours I could play with my cat.

When one is as ‘different’ as I am, one can’t help but look back for answers. I remember running with my brother’s asthma pump in the Cross Country athletics in Grade 4. No, I didn’t have asthma but I did have the tendency to develop spells of what was later diagnosed as ‘apathy’. It was convenient for me that the two disorders were indistinguishable to the watchful eyes of the sports master.

Its not that I hate all sport. I played some junior tennis matches for the D team and even helped out the chess team sporadically in primary school. I just wasn’t much of a team player.

I wonder now if I’ll ever be part of that ‘team’. Just days ago I sat in the ‘Rat and Parrot’ pub in Grahamstown during the England/Portugal match. The place was overcrowded but I happily took a seat with my back to the projector facing the mob of angst-filled supporters. I was amazed by the camaraderie. I watched grown men with faces contorted, screaming “Come on boy!” - their fists thrashing the air. The worship of the players annoys me. I grow irritable. I hate David Beckham’s versatile hair mousse. I loathe the red/green blur of the Portugal supporters. I look at the fathers and brothers created in front of me and ask them if I may join in.