By and large, I’m not a sports person at all. Just don’t get the competitive side, don’t care about the teams, find it absurd when people talk in terms of ‘we won’ when they had nothing to do with the game etc.
However, I do have a soft spot for tennis. I don’t generally care who wins, I just enjoy watching it.
Having grown up in Wimbledon, the Wimbledon tennis tournament has more interest for me than any other sporting event. For one, it just looks nice – people in white running around against a green background, making graceful movements and playing strategically is just fun to watch, like a goldfish bowl or a really cool screen saver.
The more tennis I watch the more I can get drawn into the mythology of it, so I’m slightly sad that I’ve just watched Tim Henman get knocked out by Dmitry Tursunov in the second round. As those of you watching it or listening to it will know, this is the first time that Tim’s gone out of Wimbledon in the first week for 10 years – that’s a pretty impressive record! He has been the great hope of British tennis for all that time, and it would have been a lot of fun to see him watch it. Fortunately Tennis doesn’t seem to suffer from the same xenophobic rhetoric as many other sports that Brits compete in (I once wrote an article for Third Way magazine about football fundementalism), so supporting Henman seems more like a pro-Tim move than a pro-Brit move. I have very little desire to support the English in any of their sporting ventures…
Anyway, Tim’s out, but it was a fantastic match, hats off to Tursunov. Of the Brit contingent, Andrew Murray is the only one still in. Oh, and Raphael Nadal was knocked out today as well – lots of seeds disappearing!
Soundtrack – Vikki Clayton, ‘Looking And The Stars’ & ‘Live’ (singer/songwriter, who sings with Fairport Convention – lovely stuff)