Sport is back. Oh, yay.
Following blissful months free of discussions about why one person can complete a specific physical task better than another person (and why that means they should be paid a million pounds a day), sport has returned.
I am less than thrilled, for I am an antisocial man whose main experience of sport has been wondering why I am forced to know it exists.
I believe people should be allowed to like whatever they want, but I’ve never understood why it was considered socially acceptable to require me to like it as well.
So, for me, sports being suspended for Covid came as something of a relief.
Happily, I no longer have a job which involves pretending to care about sport.
Previously, I drifted into sports journalism by accident, because the main qualification was being one of a dwindling number of people who had not been fired.
For two years, I was the managing editor overseeing the sports desk of a major North American newspaper and that went pretty much as well as you might expect.
Often my colleagues had to explain why some guy had incorrectly hit the one thing with the other thing, and why 50,000 people were screaming at him as a result. I found it baffling.
I have always endured the presence of sport with patience and strategic silence. Many conversations began with the assumption that it was fine to be obsessed with why that was never offside come on ref you have got to be kidding me, but it was somehow a flaw in my character to talk at length about why Star Trek’s Enterprise D is the best one, or to be absolutely certain that Judge Dredd’s kneepads should be green, not gold.
Now the hiatus is over. We are returning to a world in which someone’s groin pain is worth 350 words, two pictures and a pullquote, and people will scoff at nerds like me for objecting.
Our society has learned much from the pandemic, but the progress only goes so far.
Enjoy your sport, normals. Just leave me out of it. I’ll be worlds away, with a comic book.
