Running around in shorts
Iam an avid consumer of news – to a point. That point would be right about where the sport starts. All news, be it television, radio, print or online, has a sports section, pages and pages of it speculating about how A will play B, and what X’s chances are against Y, and how much Z was bought for and is he – it’s always he – worth the money? Then there are the hirings, dumpings, injuries, and of course the talking heads dissecting it, every livelong day. Imagine this with ballet …
Where then are the daily screeds devoted to the latest from the worlds of science, of art, of literature, of food, fashion, and family? Where are the reams about health and medicine, about travel, films, music, philosophy, and the weather? Where is the hobby bulletin that could just as conceivably become vital to every single newscast, if given a little push?
I’ll tell you where it all is: crushed into the “news,” battling for space alongside politics, business and crime.
And still this news ends with sport, without fail. There’s sport even when there’s nobody on the pitches.
Now I appreciate the need for exercise, I understand that there is pleasure to be had in watching a game and supporting a team, but the fact that so much oxygen is reserved for sport, every single day, has given what boils down to running around in shorts a relevance that is utterly manufactured, yet made totally believable.
Sport is treated with a weight all of its own – given masculine, important heft – while everything else must battle it out to be deemed relevant enough for inclusion in the general news.
But sport is just another entertainment, just another inconsequential diversion.
Will the world end if Liverpool doesn’t win? Clearly not – they lose an awful lot – but before every game you’d swear the nukes were incoming, then 90 minutes later it’s over, the world turns, and the pundits yap on, pocketing their cheques, until next time.
Perhaps the coverage we give sports has allowed it to grow disproportionately, bulging grotesquely into a lamented moneyfest of cheating, gambling, doping and egos, into a monster that suckles itself.
Maybe, just maybe, some of that spotlight could be deflected elsewhere, because there is sport, and then there is everything else.
And I’m a big fan of everything else.