Team sports are good for teaching kids how to feign enthusiasm and harbour resentment
Charlie Brooker | Team sports are good for teaching kids how to feign enthusiasm and harbour resentment | Comment is free | The Guardian
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Ministers are concerned that Britain's schoolkids aren't doing enough team sports. Good for them. The kids, that is. Not the ministers. I'll dumbly and instinctively side with anyone trying to bunk off games. Apart from preventing obesity and heart attacks and diabetes and high blood pressure and premature death, what exactly is school sport good for?
The benefits aren't merely physical, grunt the experts, through their thick, sport-liking mouths. Team games build character. I can't argue with that. They certainly helped strengthen the more cunning and resentful elements of my personality.
Yep, like most dweeby types, I hated having to "do" games at school, mainly because of an inherent physical laziness, but also because of the psychological challenges involved. In my eyes, PE was a twice-weekly period of anarchy during which the school's most aggressive pupils were formally permitted to dominate and torment those they considered physically inferior. Perhaps if the whole thing had been pitched as an exercise in interactive drama intended to simulate how it might feel to live in a fascist state run by thick schoolboys – an episodic, improvised adaptation of Lord of the Flies in uniform sportswear – I'd have appreciated it more. But no.
It goes without saying that the vast majority of sporty kids weren't bullies at all – but like a bigot blaming anyone vaguely brown for the actions of 19 arseholes on 9/11, I developed my prejudice long ago and still enjoy feeling it fester. Thus I harbour a deep and unwarranted suspicion of anyone with the faintest interest in sport. If you can glance at a shuttlecock without being sick, I will never truly like you. That's what school sport did for me.
And I wasn't even bullied on the pitch myself, not being quite wimpy enough to be the very last pick (towards the bum of the list, yes, but not the absolute final quivering cheek hair). But I watched the more hopeless specimens being shoved around, threatened, and insulted simply for being "bad at games", and understood I had more in common with them than their aggressors. If – as seemed likely – the big kids finally managed to kill their prey, they'd start on me next. And what then? How could I avoid a thumping? What did I know about bullies?
Not much. My only significant run-in with a bona fide thug occurred during an entry-level metalwork class, when a rough and intimidating boy demanded the immediate use of a lathe I was operating. Having been taught by every children's TV show ever made that the best tactic with bullies is to stand up to them, I gruffly told him to wait his turn. He stared at me with a sort of bored, affronted blankness for several seconds before hitting me unbelievably hard on the arm with an iron bar.
As I rolled around on the floor in agony, watching him blithely operate the machine, I decided it would've been far smarter to meekly relinquish control of the lathe, then get revenge 29 years later by paying a henchman to burn down his house while he and his family slept inside. Not that I did that, you understand.
I have absolutely no conception of how exhilarating that might feel, nor do I know whether you'd victoriously punch the air upon receiving an emailed cameraphone snap of his terrified wife leaping from an upstairs window with her hair on fire.
Anyway: back to the football pitch. Standing up to the bullies was no longer a viable option, but nor was magically becoming brilliant at sport. So I quickly adopted a cloaking strategy. Like any nerd worth his salt, I'd spend entire matches psychically commanding the ball not to roll anywhere near me – but whenever it did, I'd do my best to appear willing to participate by 1) charging straight at it, and 2) pulling a disappointed expression when I inevitably failed to do anything worthwhile. Incredibly, this half-arsed pantomime was enough to let me off the hook. The kids who did nothing to mask their terror were the ones who got belted.
From within my protective pantomime bubble, the self-defeating stupidity of the bullies became fascinating to behold. I realised that, in a sense, their motives were pure. They genuinely cared about the outcome of the game, the idiots. Hence their rage at being forced to work with substandard squad members. But they had no grasp of basic psychology. They couldn't see that each time they monstered a wussy team-mate, they merely reinforced the role of the ball as a harbinger of terrible consequences, thereby increasing the likelihood that said wuss would continue to shy away from it, subsequently causing more frustration for themselves.
I tried politely explaining this to one of the boot boys once, during a brief fit of self-righteousness brought on by the sight of him booting a mute, shivering weakling hard up the arse. I pointed out that they both looked equally unhappy, and that he was essentially kicking himself. He contemplated this for a moment, then flobbed at me and kicked the weakling slightly harder. I'd have been a crap Jesus. But at least he didn't have an iron bar, thus unwittingly sparing his family from an inferno decades later.
All of which means the sole concern I have regarding the current enfeebled state of competitive sports is that fewer school football matches means fewer boys learning how to outwit dunces or feign rudimentary competence in the workplace.
On the flipside, apparently more kids are doing weird non-team sports such as archery and golf. Yes, golf. 66% of boys get to play golf at school these days. Striding around the wilderness wielding a club? On school time? Never played it myself, but God I envy them.
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