As a child I was occasionally forced to take part in various forms of sport or gymnastics, something which I found both pointless and painful.
My first encounter with sport took place in Tasmania, where I attended a small school in the town of Burnie, which gloried in the name of Upper Federal Street State School. Actually its name was almost bigger than the school itself, as it consisted of only two classrooms.
AFL….. Refined Street Fighting
Anyhow, the sports of choice there were cricket and a weird game that only Australians could have invented – Australian Rules Football, or AFL. This is a serious contact sport that is a sort of amalgam of football, rugby and American football (without the armour) and street fighting, and in those days seemed to me to be a matter of rendering as many of the opposing team unconscious as possible by whatever means you could think of… So punching, kicking, hair pulling and so on were all standard techniques.
Well I played this abomination once, saw it for what it is, a free card for bullies and not an activity which any sane person would voluntarily take part in, and resolved never to be trapped into playing it ever again.. a vow I stuck to through thick and thin.. Refusing to even go anywhere near the field where this “game” was “played”.
Anyone for cricket??
After this, I was then introduced to the weird game known as cricket. Boredom refined to a high degree, interspersed with moments of real pain. To explain this a bit… Most of the time in cricket (I gathered) one stands at some distance from the three people who are actually playing it, i.e the bowler, and the two batsmen. The former is responsible for throwing the ball at the batsman, and the batsmen are expected to hit that ball far enough away so as to allow them to run madly back and forth between the working position of the bowler and the set of wooden posts known as the wicket, where the guy who hits the ball stands waiting for it to come his way.
OZTHOUGHTS 