As a teenager, sports were pure heresy to me. I had practiced many different sports as a kid, but never quite had the passion for any of them; what I played most was Tennis, and that wasn't because I liked the game, that was because I loved hitting things. Other than ball-hitting, I did some judo, some basketball, some athleticism, some football, and I even was a scout (I guess it doesn't quite count as a sport, but any extrascholar activity was the same thing to me as a kid, and that's the frame of reference we'll adopt). I didn't like sports and mostly practiced them because it seemed expected of all kids to do so, and so I did, and usually quit not very long afterwards, to do something else which I wasn't into either. Later on I was old enough to decide that I didn't want to practice any sport and that I'd much rather stay home do something else. As a teenager, then, sports were for jocks, even though where I come from we don't really have jocks, or a term for them, and so my schism wasn't so much based on reality as it was based on Nirvana. "What?" Yep, Nirvana, the band. As lame as it sounds, I had based much of my vision of school life on a Kurt Cobain biography, in which there were dumbass muscular jocks, sensitive intelligent artists, and nobody else of importance, seemingly. That said, my best friend in those years was an elite swimmer who adored Radiohead, so I wasn't like shunning sportsmen and sportswomen, I just didn't think of sports in any positive light.
|