Why I feel safe in a sporty world
Sunday morning. 7.02am. The boyfriend and I are debating who braves the kitchen tundra (heating now off as it is ‘summer’) to make coffee when he gets an email from Sky Sports.
‘Congratulations,’ it says. ‘Looks like you are an ultimate fan. You have tuned in to more sport than 73 per cent of our subscribers.’
While I consider this to be a somewhat dubious accolade, he’s chuffed. If I’m honest, I can’t believe that there are 27 per cent of people more committed to on-screen sports consumption than he is, but there you go.
It makes me think about sport and relationships. About how your partner’s love for it can impact romantic harmony.
Obviously, there are extreme examples. One woman in Turkey recently divorced her husband because of his ‘excessive attention’ towards his bicycle and his ‘different kind of bond with it’. She said his repairing it in their living room had ‘irrevocably damaged their relationship’. (When I told a friend, she said her husband’s bib shorts had irrevocably damaged her retinas.)
While not on the Turkish lady’s level, many friends of mine have husbands whose sporting hobbies verge on obsessive. I mean, nowadays doing a marathon seems entry level. You are only truly committed to the cause if you do an Ironman, or the Marathon des Sables (the seven-day, 250km race in the Sahara).
I wonder, is it all a bit selfish? The training, the researching, the actual doing of it? After all, it takes these men away from their families for hours, weeks, months. This sometimes appears to be the plan. Because, interestingly, men’s newfound passion for an extreme sport often coincides with the arrival of children. This seems to me like a very convoluted way of escaping toddler bedtime.
Even for armchair sportsmen there are a lot of hours to be assigned, what with the endless loop of the Six Nations, Masters, All-Ireland, Wimbledon, Tour de France and World Cup. The boyfriend very much enjoys watching these in his leather padded Joey/Chandlerstyle reclining chair (with, 2023 update, a USB!).
But it’s not only the watching of it, no. There’s the coverage of the event, yes, but also the pre-match build-up, the post-match analysis, all the newspaper opinion pieces. I often ask myself why, when I am not into watching sport, did I actively choose someone who is? When dating I could have picked someone who didn’t know a ruck from a lineout or give a fig about the offside rule. I could be with a guy who wants to check out the V&A’s latest Dior exhibition, who knows who Slim Aarons is and happily chats about tablescaping. But I didn’t. Why?
Truth is, I like that my boyfriend can bond with the meaningful men in my life via the shorthand of sport – gentle ribbing about glory supporters, missed chances and relegation zones. All the vocab I’ve heard a million times but just fades into a reassuring background hum.
My brothers and my dad chat endlessly about football; my cousins discuss cricket and rugby ad nauseam. My now departed dear uncle was so into cricket that he vetoed various dates for my wedding because of clashes with certain test matches. And when someone did dare hold a nuptial on the same day as a sporting event he’d bring a radio and earpiece to listen to proceedings. Occasionally, during a lull in the speeches, you could hear Geoffrey Boycott’s dulcet tones, at which my aunt would give him a Paddington Bear hard stare.
And so I feel safe in a sporty world. While there are limits to sports consumption (my uncle pushed them), it’s good that my boyfriend and I have opposing interests – I might disappear up my own backside if I dated someone more me than me.
Anyway, we’ve found common ground: tennis. He admires the skill of Rafa and Novak, while I’m more for the physiques. In fact, my favourite line on this came from my friend V’s mother:
‘If there was a God he’d have made
Rafa play naked.’ Amen to that.
SHE SAID, ‘IF THERE WAS A GOD HE’D MAKE RAFA PLAY NAKED’