Taking sport too seriously

In light of recent sporting endings, the next couple of posts are pretty inevitable. I watched my favourite footballer play in the flesh, just once. I watched him score a goal while captaining his country in the biggest sporting festival of all. It sounds great, doesn't it, though in truth, for Ryan Giggs, one imagines that playing for Great Britain against the United Arab Emirates at the 2012 Olympics was approximately the 465th most significant football match he ever played in. I'd almost watched him playing at Wembley more than 20 years earlier - just got the wrong year! I watched England Schoolboys at the old Wembley in 1988, when Lee Clark scored a hat-trick. The 1989 England Schoolboys team was captained by Ryan Wilson - captaining a country, just not his country. Within a couple of years, he'd made his Man Utd debut and now, a lifetime later, he's called it a day. He and the other greatest British team sportsperson of our lifetime announced their retirement...

After the previous rambling, tangential, self-indulgent entry (of which, I assure you, there'll be many more), time for a relatively short and straightforward tale, which takes this overarching theme exactly to its halfway point. I've found the 'Defining Moments in Sport' strand the hardest of the four to fulfil - I suppose, because worldwide sport is so compartmentalised, and because that part of me which thinks that I should always be objective wonders if I should include something from the 2008 Super Bowl or something to do with LeBron James, and whether something in some non-global sport like cricket deserves to be seen as a defining moment of all sport. What are the truly global sports? They're relatively few. Football, Athletics and, in a sense, the Olympic events in general (though only intermittently). Basketball, actually, though we don't like to admit it in the UK. Tennis, Boxing and Cycling up to a point, even Golf up to a point - somehow, the con...

An exclusive, all-male club with questionable rituals, practices and entry criteria at one of the UK's poshest universities and it's called the KK. Oh dear. The Kate Kennedy Club is its full title, though I can't quite remember who the titular Kate Kennedy was. Some excluded female of some sort or another, I suppose. Notorious throughout St Andrews, membership of the KK was envied by some, disdained by many. In truth, many of us were happily prepared to bite the hand that fed us, for though we mocked the KK, they sure put on good events, including the biggest, most enjoyable student ball of the year, and an annual six-a-side football tournament where everyone who was anyone vied for what, in the grand scheme of the things, was a minor sporting bauble, but happened to provide me with one of my proudest sporting achievements. That was almost exactly 15 years ago. 35 now, I haven't played competitive football for over five years, having had my leg broken in November 20...

Different sports evoke different chemical rhythms, some more satisfying than others. The powerful adrenaline rush (rush isn't even a strong enough word) of watching a big boxing match between two powerful punchers with vulnerable chins, one of whom you care about, is pretty impossible to match. You are on the edge of a heartbeat constantly, fearing not just defeat but harm but yet hopeful of harm being dealt. I don't know how relatives and friends manage to watch their boxers. Then there's test cricket. It may have a reputation as having a sleepy, relaxed rhythm, but I don't think that's accurate, for either player of spectator. Sure, you can regularly switch off, take a break, whether after a ball, after an over or after a session, but you have to switch on again at any point. And yes, things can tick over quietly and undramatically for extended periods, but the point is that any single ball could change everything, could change the momentum. If cricket is grippi...