The sports fan is a lonely soul now. Isolation, cocooning, lockdown – all of these, he could deal with. Indeed, back in the day (February), they were states of being he actively pursued. The weekend just gone was supposed to be the semi-finals of the Champions Cup, the world snooker final, the start of the GAA championships. You’d have had more chance of spotting the Sasquatch than catching a glimpse of the sports fan out or about.
Different story these days. Now the sports fan is holed up like everybody else but she has nothing to be holed up with. She has had the essential narrowness of her field of vision suddenly and loutishly thrust in front of her face. She always knew she was big into sport. What she didn’t really have a grasp on was just how little she was into everything else.
Now, don't misunderstand. The sports fan is no dullard. He loves a good book. What he specifically loves is to have a good book open on his lap on a Sunday night while the house is quiet and the golf is on the television. Or beside him to reach for in the down minutes of Monday Night Football. Or in front of him on the train to Thurles for a league game, to dip in and out of between snatches of hurling talk.
It was in the spirit of this long-standing and, she thought, sincerely-held love for books that the sports fan looked on the bright side when sport disappeared. She presumed that all this extra time meant she would demolish the book pile beside her bed. She immediately ordered another half-dozen online in anticipation of the impending blitzkread.
This is not how things have transpired. The sports fan is currently between pages 27 and 53 of three different books. The ones he ordered arrive in four-day intervals, posted reminders of his shortcomings, sent by his own hand. Of all the services provided to him by sport, he never imagined that one of them was to shield himself from his own inadequacy.
The TV is no help. One night, soon after the sportectomy came down, the sports fan found herself hopping around the channels like a bluebottle in a summer window. Not watching that. Not watching that. Nope. Definitely not. Next. Oh, come on. Seriously, who watches this shit?
The sports fan always knew that there was a world of Other Stuff in the unexplored channels outside of the 400s. What the sportsmageddon has taught him above all else is that while those places are grand for an occasional visit, it’s not in him to live there. He gave the Discovery Channel a whirl one night. After 10 minutes, he picked up one of his books. After five more, he started flicking through Twitter. He was in bed by half-nine.
The nostalgia stuff was okay for a few weeks but in general the sports fan is finding it mostly leaves her cold. She leaps to change the station on the radio when Morning Ireland goes to the archive slot. They dragged back over Saipan one morning last week and she nearly kicked a hole in the wall. She loves a good sporting controversy as much as the next fan but without the mystery and the gossip and the in-the-moment conspiracy theories, it's just not the same.
The whole thing is discombobulating. The sports fan hears people joke about not knowing what day it is and his first thought is that this is no joking matter. Day? Try month, pal. This is because the sports fan doesn’t see the year like normal people see the year. He doesn’t have months like you have months. Instead, he has jigsaw pieces of the sports calendar that click together to carry him to Christmas.
The sports fan has never needed to know what month it was. Sport has always told her. April would have been Masters month, May was Munster hurling, June was Ulster football. She had the Euros for June/July, the Olympics for July/August. August/September was the All-Ireland finals and the Ryder Cup and then it was the Premier League and rugby and NFL and winter. They're all just flakes in the snowglobe now, floating and drifting. To when or where, nobody can tell.
It should be said, of course, that the Shergarification of sport is not entirely without its upside. For one thing, the sports fan has been donating less and less of his, eh, know-how to Paddy Power and Boylesports over the past seven weeks. The last bet he had was a Lucky 15 on Gold Cup day and by God when all this is over, he's marching straight into his local office to smack the slip down on the counter and demand the €8.43 he took them for. Oh yes, that will be an enjoyable walk.
But otherwise, the days pass with little to look forward to. Because the sports fan is a sports fan, she finds it very hard to buy the roadmap for sport laid out last Friday. She saw Leo and Tubs spitballing about a behind-closed-doors All-Ireland final on the Late Late and fumed at their smiley, blithe half-interest. She’d like just one politician with half a clue to explain how team sport can co-exist with social distancing. Until then, everything else feels like a bottle of smoke.
Luckily, this is what you might term an area of expertise. The sports fan knows plenty about obfuscation and reading between the lines and the identification of flat-out untruths. The Kremlinology involved in following any sports team will generally teach you all you need to know about paranoia, endurance and existential dread. If you think the models and graphs put out by NPHET are hard to decipher, the sports fan has the team page of an intercounty match programme to talk you through.
So the sports fan will be all right, thanks for asking. We are lost but we are hardy. We are bereft but we are hopeful. Mostly, we are sitting here, waiting for it all to come back. And promising ourselves we’ll have finished at least one poxy book by the time it does.
