I Heard You Say You Hate Sport
You said you hate sport?
You don’t hate sport.
You might be mildly annoyed by sport. But you don’t hate it.
At worst you’re bored by sport. At best you really enjoy sport because it gives you a sense of intellectual superiority over sports fans.
But you don’t hate it.
When you’ve spent a whole weekend with your stomach tied in knots, fists clenched, grinding your teeth and trying to stave off hyperventilation for fear that your team will lose…then tell me you hate it.
When you still can’t shake the memory of the most devastating day of your childhood: the day your team lost the grand final in extra time and at ten years old you put your head in your hands and howled like a baby and your sisters started taking down the balloons and streamers on the front of the house and you SCREAMED at them to leave them up because goddammit the body wasn’t even COLD yet…then tell me you hate it.
When you spend your life replaying in your head a single kick, a single pass, a single ball snicked to the keeper, and each replay makes you sadder and sadder, and you think about how much worse it must be for the person who has to replay those moments with the knowledge that they could’ve actually done something to change it, and then you think no, actually nothing could possibly be worse than this feeling…
When you sit staring numbly at the TV screen, scarcely able to believe that worst-case scenario has actually come true, feeling that surely death would be preferable to this sensation, feeling like you’re about to cry and vomit at the same time…
When sitting down to watch sport feels like watching your child embark on its first whitewater rafting trip, and seeing the team lose feels like watching the vet administer the final injection to your puppy…tell me then.
When watching a group of men you’ve never met, in whose careers you play no part, to whose success you have not contributed and for whose failures you bear no culpability, with whom you share nothing in common apart from the fact that when they play their chosen game they wear a uniform to which at a young age you formed an emotional attachment for no logical reason, gives you a tightness in the chest and an overwhelming sense of panic more usually associated with hearing your pilot tell you the plane just ran out of fuel…
When you wish that group of men were a useless bunch of bumbling idiots, rather than a highly skilled and professional unit, because getting nowhere near the prize is so much less painful than almost reaching it…
When you realise that even sweet, sweet victory isn’t really worth it, because the feeling of relief when they win is less powerful than the misery when they lose…
And when you know, you absolutely KNOW, that it’s just a stupid game and it doesn’t matter at all and to care about the result is irrational and ridiculous and there are much much more important things in life, all of which you are neglecting in favour of this meaningless recreation, but despite this full and fact-based knowledge that your depression has no reasonable basis and that nothing all that bad has actually happened…you cannot prevent yourself sliding into the depths of despair, EVERY. SINGLE. TIME…
When you know what that’s like, THEN tell me you hate sport.
Face the facts: you can’t hate sport, until you love it.
