50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Many of us are ‘addicted’ to sport. I use the inverted commas, because in the usual sense, being addicted is obviously a bad thing, but being addicted to sport can seem relatively harmless.

Because, of course, it is relatively harmless to be watching a lot of sports on TV, in comparison with, say, hanging around in alleyways late at night, waiting to buy heroin.

You can’t make a meaningful case that being addicted to the cricket or the golf is more or less the same thing as being addicted to gambling enormous sums on the cricket or the golf.

There is something essentially benign in the love of sports, which takes a lot of the badness out of the ‘addiction’.

And yet it is astonishing to think of how much of our lives it consumes, at the best of times. This being the worst of times for sport, we have been able to think about this at our leisure.

Indeed, there has been too little thinking at a public level about this deeply important matter — is there still this attitude that to be without sport for a long period of time, is to lack some form of mere recreation? Yes... yes, there is.

Incredible as it may be, there is still this official sense that you have ‘life’, and then you have ‘sport’ as a kind of adornment to life, albeit one that is not truly vital to your existence — more a form of garnishing, than the actual meal.

Yet for hundreds of thousands of people, this is not how it works at all.

Sport is so intrinsic to the way we live, the very seasons are marked not by changes in nature or the weather or any of that trivia, but by the great events of football and racing and snooker and even darts.

Interestingly, during the shutdown, there have been suggestions that TV stations should show some old football matches and the like, because these events would immediately transport people back to that period in their lives.

But nostalgia will never make up for the great emptiness that we have felt, as we have contemplated another week, another month— maybe in some cases, another year — without engaging in some serious way with a competitive sporting fixture.

How are we enduring this terrible deprivation?

I do not know.

Personally, I started to watch a lot of sport when I stopped drinking, or rather I resumed watching a lot of sport — one of the things about drinking is that eventually it takes up a lot of your time, and you can lose touch with some of things you love.

So I found it deeply reassuring that this great natural resource was still there for me as a sober person, and while I became ‘addicted’ to it again, I did so with no feelings of guilt, or very few, anyway.

Clearly there is very little excuse for any person in any condition or state of mind to be watching, say, the Formula 1 racing — but let’s just say that I wouldn’t turn it off if there was nothing else on.

To have nothing, not even one of those sports that aren’t really sports, has been an experience which one can only liken to the lifestyles of the most ascetic monks of ancient times — the Skelligs must have seemed like old Manhattan next to the challenge of looking at yet another day without a game of ball.

And I have no idea how this will affect us in the long term, because none of us has known such a thing before — will we simply go crazy when we are again inundated with sports, like one of those dogs who hasn’t seen their owner for a year but who still remembers everything when they meet again?

Or will we somehow get used to life without this ‘addiction’, and perhaps resent its return to dominate our days?

No... no, we won’t.

“It will not make up for the emptiness we feel, without the ‘addiction’ to sport”