They say I should care about football. As a man, I should have a favourite team to bury all my hidden emotions in without shame. I should feel free to get mad, excited, happy, sad, whatever, because of the fortunes of this team. And because I am a man, my fidelity to that team should depend entirely on whether it has the capacity to hold my attention for more than three minutes; if not, a small bevy of other teams should command some of my attentions and affections. That should be me, shouldn't it?
If it isn't football, it should be tennis, Formula 1, rugby (the fifteens, not that rubbish that is the sevens), NBA basketball or pro-football as epitomised by the National Football league of the United States. I should find a sport, and I should find a sportsman, who or which will command my attention when I am not busy being busy, making money, seducing girlfriends, taking a shit, sleeping, sleeping around or thinking of being busy. It is, I am told, what all men do. It is what is expected of all men, they say. It is the natural order of things.
What fatuous shit! I am not a child, held in thrall by the anodyne bloodless combat on a field filled with highly athletic, highly trained, highly remunerated men. I can allocate my attention and affection far more efficiently than the mob can, and I have. I have no need to follow the careers of men of sport, for sport holds little interest for the one who played, played well but never well enough to make it a career. I do not need to live vicariously by the victories and losses of proxies; I do that every day I go up against the world, in my world, and either conquer it or live to conquer it tomorrow. My victories and losses are mine to celebrate or mourn in private - Like A Man!
Of course I take an interest in the fortunes of the teams in the various leagues and the successes of the various sportsmen in the sports of their careers. After all, I am not an island, completely impervious to the winds of change. But my interest is arms-length, dispassionate, cold-blooded, calculating. It is an interest that is intertwined in my ambitions, my career. It is a distraction, every now and then, when distractions are needed, and it plays the same role as cigarettes once did or ice-cold Heinekens sometimes do. I wouldn't miss the games and the sports if they were suddenly to follow the dodo into the annals of history.
My grandfather did not have the spectacle of the English Premier League or the FIA Formula 1 Championship to occupy his mind; he was variously a husband, a father, a soldier, a teacher and a farmer and he came out the best man I have ever known. His lexicon was vast, unsullied by words like "hooligan" or "pit-stop." In him I had a true hero to emulate, not a jacked up man-boy with problems keeping a girlfriend and difficulty managing his affairs. If pushed to the wall and a gun held to my temple, it is to my grandfather, repository of wisdom, that I shall retreat, not the ego-driven vacuous narcissism of the elite athlete.
In time all men come to the same conclusion I have; but in that time, some men will weep tears over teams and athletes and live in the fantasy world where they are just as elite as the athletes they adore. They will have wasted the valuable time their families demand in their adoration of, usually, foreigners who would go on to live full lives without ever knowing that these men were weeping buckets over them at every loss or setback. These are the sad men whose empty lives need stimuli to remain livable. What a terrible burden these men must bear.
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