Avoiding competitive sports
They say that Coleridge was fond of fireside lurking and rarely joined in the rough games with the big boys. I was never really a team player either, preferring to hand out slices of orange to the opposing side rather than have my face pushed into the mud by them.
At primary school I would adopt the role of commentator instead of participant in football games at break-time. When I went to secondary school I shunned all team sports and took up fencing.
I still think there is something moronic and pointless about team sports, with the possible exception of cricket. No one seems to enjoy the process, it’s just the winning that counts. And if you lose, you allow all sorts of unpleasant emotions to disturb your psyche. Team sports give off an unpleasant whiff of aggressive competitiveness.
The playing fields of Eton turn into the race of life in the capitalist world, with the unpleasant Alan Sugar ethic that seems to motivate so much of human behaviour, mixed with a feeling that if you play badly, you will “let the side down”. At best, then, a waste of time; at worst, a morally questionable influence.
Partly for these reasons, I am pleased that my elder son seems to be following in my footsteps, showing little aptitude for team sports. Much to Victoria’s annoyance, I hardly ever kick a ball around with him, preferring to play draughts, listen to the Beatles or do Sudoku puzzles.
The younger boy shows more sporting aptitude. I am keeping an eye on this dangerous physicality and hope to turn it towards something useful, such as muck-shovelling, dog-walking or rabbit-breeding.
But perhaps the best reason for gently guiding your children away from team sports is that it is going to save you an awful lot of hassle: all that ferrying them around that parents do.
How many mothers and fathers have I met who complain about having to drive their children to sports fixtures on Saturdays and Sundays, when they would rather be in the pub or asleep? This oft-heard moan has been one of the main motivators for me in deftly steering my children in the opposite direction.
For this reason, if for no other, I would urge all idle parents to make every effort possible to discourage their offspring from being good at sport. This is simply good practical advice.
All this is not to say that I am against games. Tests of strength and endurance are as old as the hills. Arm-wrestling, good; leaping over stiles, good; trampolining, good. Horse-riding, stone-skimming, fishing: good. We’ve been practising shooting cans with an air rifle and that sort of thing I thoroughly approve of. One day we might come home with pheasants and rabbits for the pot.
Other sports I hold with are those that can be done while enjoying a drink. Idle sports, I call them, and they would include snooker, pool and darts. We used to play snooker for hours at school and we played table football for hours at university.
I would also support skateboarding for my children. I worked for a year in a skateboard shop. The boys who came in were the arty ones, the bohemians; they, too, had shunned what the Americans call “jock culture” in favour of skateboarding, which is a deeply creative pursuit. Most of them went on to art school, as I remember, and skate parks, unlike football pitches, are relatively parent-free zones.
What the sports on my approved list have in common is that they are self-organised, rather than organised from above.
But please, please, spare me heartiness, spare me cheering and the Olympic ideal, spare me vicarious competitiveness, whereby the children’s victories are seen as a reflection on the parents.
When I think about the Olympics, I feel a surge of anger welling up from deep inside, a rage at the criminal waste of money on this absurd piece of commercialised vanity. There is also something horrifically jingoistic about the whole thing.
Give me instead a child who can ponder and dream, sit under the oak tree and read, talk and think.
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Yes! It’s Friday evening and I’m getting ready to leave work and go home for a weekend filled with: 1 soccer practice; 2 soccer games; 1 baseball game; and 1 birthday party. Nothing whatsoever to look forward to for me and my husband. It’s supposed to be a beautiful weekend but I know I’ll be spending it in my car, driving around the suburbs from playing field to playing field. Only to stand on the sidelines with other parents who halfheartedly complain but truly seem to like the whole thing. I know we brought it upon ourselves by signing the kids up for so many activities. We’ve just moved to the suburbs from NYC and thought this would be the way to fit in. I am reevaluating the craziness as it’s making us miserable.
Yes! And by avoiding sports, you will probably spare them from great physical harm in the future. High school and university sports (at least in the U.S.) have become so competitive, that kids are encouraged to go all out, stress-fracture their shins and spines, twist their ankles and shoulders, tear their muscles, keep their heart rate at 200+ beats per minute. That is when you get the biggest praise from the coach: when you have injured yourself for the good of the team. At the posh prep school where I studied, 14-18-year-old children injured themselves at sports practices daily; every month or so someone in the school would get a more severe injury that would probably stay with the person for the lifetime (such as a stress-fractured shin developing into a full fracture, or something torn in the knee). All this happened under full adult supervision and Encouragement!
But growing up in the USSR, the playground in front of my 8-storey apartment block was basically a set of tall twisted metal ladder thingies, all set over solid concrete. Every afternoon, children aged 5-12 played there without any adult supervision. And as far as I know, nothing worse than a scratch or bruise ever happened to anyone! On that basis, I would conclude that soviet playgrounds were far safer than western private school sports fields.