Sunday, August 28th, 2005
Sports is from Mars, shopping is from Venus
This piece almost never got written.
The first time I sat to write it, India was playing Pakistan at Karachi and the team amassed 349 runs. I abandoned the computer keyboard for the television remote and jabbed away furiously, surfing 100 channels looking for Ten Sports and finally finding it housed on Doordarshan. In the second half of the game, I put a cushion on my lap and my laptop on the cushion. Some three hours later, I heard a faint beep, looked at the cursor blinking on a blank Word document and a red cross on the battery icon at the base of the screen. The game went down in history and I’m afraid my piece, too, was pretty much history.
The Editor let me off with a warning and a new deadline that, alas, coincided with not only a cricket match but with Formula1 in Malaysia. The TV screen and the computer screen, each vying for attention, spun around my head like Schumacher and Montoya whirring around the Sepang International Circuit. After a leisurely Sunday lunch (which was served in the presence of Messrs Afridi, Haq, Razzaq and Akhtar), I bit my nails to the quick as India’s batsmen slumped. Just as I was giving up on the game and the series and returning to the comp, Dravid and Kaif pulled off a spectacular rescue act. India was back in the series.
The next morning, I desperately needed a rescue act as I was summoned by the Editor. She didn’t want to negotiate any more deadlines. “Why,†she asked, “are men so darned obsessed with sports?â€
To be honest, I’ve been asked that question before. And it is always a woman who does the asking. Why are men so obsessed with sports? Why do men read the newspapers backwards? Why does a turf war erupt on a 29-inch battlefield every time there is a big game on at prime time? Why do men trot off to catch a game at the expense of nearly all else? Why? Why? Why?
Between you and me, asking a man why he is obsessed with sports is a bit like asking a woman why she is obsessed with shopping. Of course, a woman would instantly take umbrage at the counter questioning. She will proceed to rubbish the generalisation that women are compulsive shoppers. She will say that assuming, for a moment, that women are, indeed, shopaholics, there is nothing wrong with being so. She will then look you squarely in the eye and still want to know why men are sportaholics.
Well, since you really want to know, babe.
Some of us love to play sports and all of us, even the ones who play, enjoy watching sports. We play golf because it’s a great way to network and anyone who tells you otherwise is fibbing. If we want exercise, we run, swim or cycle. Or play squash, baddie or tennis. It’s a thrill. It’s a release. Corporate combat is a purely mental pursuit and it’s nice to occasionally have the physical satisfaction of thwacking a tennis ball or smashing a shuttle. It is, plainly put, a legit way of quickening the heart rate, breathing hard, moaning, groaning and sweating profusely, all in public. Go on, call us exhibitionists.
And, as I said, we like watching. Sports channels are eye candy, mind candy, ego candy. Unlike the politicians on news channels and the fat cats on business channels, the folks on sports channels are lean, mean, hungry and raring to go. An athlete at his peak is truly a man in full. Sport, even with the onslaught of Astroturf, lighter racquets and heavier bats, ultimately remains a supreme test for powers of concentration, endurance, tenacity and the human spirit. Victory in the sports arena is so much more real than coming up trumps in office politics.
To return to an earlier question, maybe, just maybe, it is our preoccupation with sports that has driven women to seek refuge in shopping. Women have become so accustomed to men behaving like slobbering lapdogs in their presence. They can’t, for the life of them, fathom why we would be distracted by men, no matter how metrosexual some of those men may be.
But if we want to be like our sports hero