Sport is an obsession which needs to be handled with care

There is a certain class of person – often male, though far from exclusively so – whose lives are haunted, dominated at times, by a malign spectre. It takes up their time and energy, better used elsewhere; it infantilises them, refusing to let emotions be developed or expressed fully. The obsessions it engenders, the way it shapes the very development of these subjects, leads to stunted individuals ghost walking through their own lives. People afflicted by this wraith are all around us, you may indeed be one of them. I certainly was. But now I have entered the light, cast the chains off and left the (often literal) darkened room. Yes, I have freed myself from sport.

No longer must I waste my life reading the inconsequential gossips of the ‘transfer talk’ column. I no longer feel a part of my interior missing when I fail to find out the score at the end of day’s play, or fail to know who is meeting in some Heineken Cup group stage. I have grown up, and feel a benevolent wish to lend a hand to those who, like me before, are unthinking occupants of the nightmarish worlds of Sky Sports.

It usually starts as a child, when rugby is the only bonding mechanism (forgive the sexist presumption) the father and son can partake in without the furious blushes that follow ‘talking’ and ‘feeling’. Sport, played and watched together, can lead to fine moments of parental solidarity and shared joy; I don’t debate this. What I do take issue with is when understanding can only be articulated by watching little men in a box playing with their balls, or by silently peering into bushes looking for a dimpled rock that can be replaced for ten pence. It leads to the child, often obsessed with sport to the exclusion of seemingly any other interests (a pretty solid depiction of my eight to twelve year old self) failing to understand ways to communicate with their families or friends outside of this necessarily limited strata. Fathers don’t need to tell their sons they love them; they just let them win at tennis. This is not the way to help that boy communicate with their future partner, who may prefer squash.

Sporting neuroticism has various degrees, and a myriad of guises; think of the character who fails to find a reason to meet their friends without the buffer of some viewing or competition to act as an excuse. Who, when the conversation is dying, clings desperately to the merry-go-round of different sports to discuss, relieved they have not had to fall into silence and actually think. Knowing more about the Grand Prix grid than your course is not the sign of a fun-loving nature-it is the sign of the immature, scared to confront their own drift across an unconsidered life.
Sport is an opiate, harmless in small doses as an exciting narrative art, but conducive to creating the kind of mindlessness and reality-aversion that we deplore in those hooked on television, World of Warcraft, and cannabis. Worried about the exam tomorrow? Do not study, watch the Champions League/ European Cup first preliminary round qualifier, first leg. It will be something to occupy you, for a bit. And when you are stuck in that job which has zero satisfaction, in a bourgeois life where success is a 32-inch Panasonic Viera Flatscreen television, there the action will be again, the same narratives, the same world of stick men, waiting for you to come and watch!

The defence states, with a cliché, that ‘sport is the ultimate reality television’, and this does have its truth. Muhammad Ali was a fascinating man, physically beautiful and the kind of force of nature that demanded attention. The rise and stumble of Tiger Woods does contain profound human truths that are worth considering. Liverpool winning the European Cup was a fine example of a team overcoming the odds. Not that you cannot find any such narratives in the political arena, classical tragedy, or recounted history, which contain beauty of form just as much as the undoubtedly serene sight of a Michael Vaughan cover drive.

It is the fixation with minutiae that hurts, when appreciation turns into a psyche whose mind is so clogged with imaginary ‘necessities’ of playing schedules that it cannot learn to appreciate the other arts. Those immersed in their Java processing are usually told to get a life, whatever complete universe of symbolism and communication they believe they find in their screens. Sports fanatics, you who are so often given legitimacy by weight of numbers, you too must retreat from your holes and enter the world of self-fulfilment and reflection!

How did I achieve my arms-length position, now able to occasionally consider and be uplifted, now able to turn my attention to other interests without longing? It was a slow weaning period, gradually cutting off ties with Radio Five Live, then not watching every tear-inducingly boring goal-less draw on Match of the Day, then only following Andy Murray when it is a final. The loss may leave a gap, but there is more than enough in heaven and the earth to fill it.