In 2010 I was a 19-year-old girl who hated sport with all the furious fire of a thousand suns. I wouldn’t watch it, endure any discussion of it, and every attempt by friends to convince me of its greatness was met with eye rolling.
Thanks to a childhood as the archetypal weedy, uncoordinated kid who was always picked last for the team, the idea of sports to me was poisoned with negative emotions.
Sports was the enemy. Combining this with growing up in the AFL mecca of Melbourne, the furious passion for the sport around me only served to feed my loathing.
I couldn’t comprehend any part of the intensity, obsession or emotion of footy fans. Seeing grown men cry over a team they’d arbitrarily chosen losing filled me with utter confusion. I’d ponder over this incredulous opiate of the masses with my pseudo-intellectual (read: wanker) uni mates, and laugh along with them about the ‘sportsball’ and the below-90 IQ we’d arrogantly assigned to its devotees.
Essentially, I was a real idiot.
It all turned around during a particularly miserable summer, spent stuck on my mother’s couch in a country town with a broken ankle. Here, I begrudgingly discovered the glory of the Australian cricket team.
After the initial whining and grumbling, I found myself worshipping at the altar of Ricky Ponting, idolising Brett Lee, and working on a tragic crush on Michael Clarke (thankfully, that one didn’t last.)
In another year or so, thanks to high-speed internet, I discovered the magical world of US sports. I fell in love with ice hockey, choosing the much-hated Philadelphia Flyers as my team. This choice attracted a flood of disgust from pretty much every other hockey fan, and feeling like an underdog only serveed to fuel my devotion.
Soon NFL and NBA are added to the arsenal of sports I understand, and my transformation into what I’d once considered the enemy is complete.
Upon moving from Melbourne to Canberra, I found myself immersed in the NRL, realising that the rest of Australia don’t see AFL as the centre of the sports universe.
Loving sport has changed my life for the better. There is this whole incredible world out there I’d been missing out on. Blindly hating sports cut me off from the rollercoaster of emotions I’ve learnt to embrace – the hopeless misery I felt for days after the Flyers were knocked out of the Stanley Cup playoffs, contrasted with the dizzying elation of watching the NFL team I’d picked at the start of the season winning in the Seahawks vs Broncos Super Bowl blowout nobody expected.
The shared euphoria, hugs and high-fives with anyone and everyone at the pub in a Seahawks jersey. There’s no match for the sense of community and kinship that sports enables you to share over something so simple.
Hating sports because I didn’t enjoy AFL was like only ever watching The Phantom Menace and then deciding to despise the Star Wars franchise as a whole (I kid, AFL is nowhere near that bad).
My point is I’ll never again eat a dodgy prawn and then decide to walk away from the entire buffet. Here’s to the many years of joy, misery, sweat and tears to come.
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