For anyone who knows me well, it really cannot be denied that I absolutely LOVE my sport, and particularly cricket. During the off-season for cricket, I’m dedicated to the AFL and love nothing more than getting along to games every weekend at the Gabba. I’ll even go so far as to fly to Melbourne to go to the MCG to see Collingwood play. And, apparently, I'll fly to Dubai to watch Collingwood play! Cricket though is my true love – it’s a beautiful game and I will fly anywhere in the country to watch the Bulls or Australia when I can. If the Bulls suddenly decide to play in Dubai, the Maldives, Outer Mongolia or Lichtenstein - I'll be on the next plane.
For anyone who knows me well, they’ll also know that, for as much as I love sport, I dislike players with an almost equal intensity. I’m not at all proud of it. It’s a gross generalisation on my part, but will say in my own defence that my dislike of players is based upon actual experience, which has unfortunately scarred me somewhat, and it’s on this experience that I’ve cultivated my admittedly harsh judgement against all professional sportsmen. The antics of Warnie, Wayne Carey, Ben Cousins and the entire Canterbury Bulldogs team have done nothing whatsoever to improve my views.
Being a female out in a public place with men of any kind in the immediate vicinity is somewhat akin to swimming in shark-infested waters with a cut hand. When alcohol and professional sportsmen enter the mix, it may as well be a severed artery.
My disillusionment with professional sportsmen started with a footballer (as it so often does). While still in Year 11 at high school, I met a boy who would go on to play for the Wallabies. We met at a party and he asked me out. I was terribly excited, but then again, what Good Catholic Girl isn’t going to be excited when a handsome, strapping lad asks her out to a party as his date? So, I went to this party with him and all seemed to be going well until the end of the evening, where he made it clear that I was expected to ‘get friendly’ with him – a lot friendlier apparently than a simple thank you and kiss on the cheek to say goodbye. I managed to wrangle myself and my virtue safely away from him on that occasion and imagined that maybe it was simply that he’d had a few too many beers and had forgotten himself. Surely a Good Catholic Boy wouldn’t be so disgustingly common? Surely he remembered that he needs to play by Catholic Girl Rules??? Or not. (Refer to Post 1 on this topic).
When he asked me out on a second date, I thought to myself that he would use this opportunity to make up for his appalling lack of manners on the first date. Ah, to be so young and stupid. Let’s just say that I was unceremoniously dumped after the second date when I didn’t end up naked under him in the back seat of his car, as he’d planned for me to be by about 10:30pm. All of his mates loved him to bits, and when he played for the Wallabies, I’m sure most of Australia loved him as well. As for me, well, every time I saw him on television, I remembered all over again that I was only 16 when I met him, and why I didn’t love him quite so much as everyone else did.
A couple of years later, I managed to find myself on the wrong end of a couple of the Broncos players at a Brisbane nightclub, but then again, I think every woman in the room found herself on the wrong end of those particular boys that night. Come to think of it, it’s a fair cop that every woman in Brisbane has inadvertently been on the wrong end of a drunken footballer at least once in her life. Egos the size of planets, consciences the size of walnuts, morals no larger than a grain of rice. It was revolting and so were they and I don’t plan on saying anything more about them.
A little while ago, I was working a second job at the Irish Club, and one of the Brisbane Lions held his 21st birthday party there. It must be stressed vehemently up front that the birthday boy is absolutely charming and delightful, greatly loved by everyone who knows him and his behaviour is beyond reproach. Unfortunately however, his choice in mates may be a little questionable. One of the other guests, who was also playing AFL professionally at the time, ended up in a serious fight with another person, which quickly got out of hand and exceptionally ugly. This player abused all the staff, smashed several trays of glasses, put his fist through a glass door, causing enormous damage to both the door and himself – there was blood all over the walls from his injuries – and he managed to completely ruin the night for everyone. I could swear it was as though he was in the grip of ‘roid rage’, as he didn’t seem to feel a thing and just exploded without any warning whatsoever. That level of violent behaviour in a person is frightening and extremely unattractive. The staff were all frightened and had to take refuge behind the bar at one stage until security and the paramedics took your man away.
So much for footballers – evidently the code of football matters not.
Unfortunately, my distasteful brush with sportsmen didn’t end there. A former Queensland cricketing great and a few of his mates happened to be at the Brekky Creek one night when I was there with some friends. Well, this cricketer had more than a skinful on board by the time that I found myself the fleeting object of his attention. I felt a pair of hands grabbing me from behind as he swooped on me like a vulture on road kill, and I whirled around in horror to look into a face that had appeared many, many times on television during his illustrious career. The fact that he had a wife (yet another blonde – go figure) and children at home clearly wasn’t the uppermost thought in his very small mind, and he evidently did not regard matrimony as an exclusive carnal arrangement. Judging from the howl of pain and vicious curses flying from his mouth, he didn’t exactly appreciate my entire body weight through a 10cm stiletto heel suddenly coursing through the middle of his foot. At least it got his hands back to himself and off my breasts. Thankfully, as he had the attention span of a houseplant, he moved on to some other poor girl immediately thereafter.
I should have kicked his ass and set it out for the dogs to finish off, but was too shocked and outraged to do much more than escape the scene as quickly as humanly possible. Even worse than the assault upon my person was the level of disrespect with which he treated me and other women around me. As they say in Top Gun “his ego was writing checks that his body just couldn’t cash”.
So much for cricketers.
Since those encounters, I’ve basically avoided all and any sportsmen like the plague of filthy little rodents that they obviously can be at times. I will say though that cricketers are generally nicer than footballers.
Whilst they’re on the field playing cricket or AFL, the players to me are Messiahs. I love my teams and will defend them to the death. Off the field though, I think they’re mostly scumbag Monsters and want nothing whatsoever to do with them on a personal level. Even now, I can barely tell you the names of all the Bulls, and nor can I tell you who’s currently playing for Collingwood. As far as I’m concerned, they’re simply animated chess pieces with numbers on their backs and only useful for playing the game. I love the team collectively, but just don’t really care about the individuals who make up the team.
Of course, the only problem with holding such deeply ingrained and unreasonable prejudices against all sportsmen based on the sins of a simple few, is that one day, you’re going to meet the one who completely changes your mind. And God help you when that happens.
(refer to next post coming up - ‘Meeting Mr Wonderful’).
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment