WHERE IS THE BALL?

02.07.04

Goal! I would be a sicko if I didn’t mention anything about yesterday, right? And yet this is a bit unprecedented for me. I was never interested neither in football nor in basketball, even in the most important times, like yesterday.

I remember little Maro who made me be a sports-fan almost by force, just like all the 11- and 13-year olds. It was unjustifiable for her to remain indifferent to big sports events and she was worried that there would be no subject of conversation between my classmates and me. She used to tell my father: ‘Teach him how to be a fan of football at last! He is a boy!’. My poor father replied: ‘But he doesn’t want to. Can he do it against his will?’.

He took me to the pitch once to see Olympiakos. What a drag this was, with the red-and-whites! ‘What team do you support, son?’. ‘None. My dad wants me to be a fan of Olympiakos!’. I opened my mouth widely and held out cries of boredom. I couldn’t wait to go back home and work on my painting.

As I was graduating from the classes of primary school and later of high school, I did exactly the same thing. When the kids were playing outside during breaks, I didn’t even want to watch them. I was sitting all alone in the empty classroom and made whole stories on the notebooks of mathematics or physics. The others were used to it and didn’t even dare to engage in any conversation about teams or players with me. Even my mother was accustomed to my tendency to steer clear of such issues. [She even prompted me often to work on designing comics. I wanted to be a vet since I couldn’t find any other way of having a dog (we’re talking about persistence here, this is no joke!)].

CHOICE OR COMPULSORY CONDITION?

Do you want to know what I have come to understand as years pass by? I understood that we are not the ones to choose our interests but they choose us, and this is something that happens quite often. In other words, I believe that I would really love football or basketball if I could play myself, even with my school’s team. My abstention from things like that seems to be my choice but it’s not (at least not to the extent I initially believed).

Depending on the circumstances of your life, your activities choose you way before you choose them. You can simply make this whole thing a little less painful, if you manage to persuade yourself that nothing happens without you and that your life is exactly as you think it is. Something like that seems to be impossible to me, since none of us is so stupid as to believe that he/she has everything under control. From that point of view, our friend Dada is right when he says that disability is what makes you what you are if you have it, whether wanting it or not.

Someone else could reckon that it isn’t necessary to partake of activities that attract you anyway by simply watching them happening. This is true and under that condition what I’m doing now is writing pure crap.
Oh, we would be in such big trouble if we all had to be players of the National Football Team of Greece (how much money would we possibly earn?) just to watch last night’s game.


BALL OR FUSE-BOMB?

I am really happy that you are getting on well with each other when I leave you alone for a while. Personally, I agree with most things posted and I end up like this: If football is to keep our nationalistic instincts in check by acting as a way of defusing the ostensibly well hidden barbarity (as if such instincts can be judged), then I wish we could have championships every day.

On the other hand, if football or the view of modern mediated sports (this reminds me of Thompson or something) is just a trick to relax the vigilance of masses (and I honestly think that this is what it is), then we may as well take a look on our back from time to time.