Yeah, sports is everything

May 21, 2012

There are many clichés stories about sports, but the one I like most is when an obviously-not-understanding-female supposedly says to her partner-who-has-just-lost-a-big-soccer-game, “… but honey, sports is not everything.”

By Kalungi Kabuye

There are many clichés stories about sports, but the one I like most is when an obviously-not-understanding-female supposedly says to her partner-who-has-just-lost-a-big-soccer-game, “… but honey, sports is not everything.” And the long-suffering-guy answers, wearily, “you’re right, it’s the only thing.”

That one almost always brings a big laugh among the boys, but the girls usually just shrug it off as if to say “we shall never understand these people.” If you are unlucky and the little lady is not terribly amused, you might have to go without dinner and sleep on the couch for a while.

But if women really wanted to understand men all they got to do is understand, and appreciate, the relationship between men and sports.

First and foremost, man is a competitive being. Everything else comes from, and is as a result of, that. It might come from that primordial instinct to propagate ones lineage that makes a lion chase all other males from a pride and have all the lionesses to itself, killing all other offspring if any. There has to be only one bull in a kraal, so to speak.

Modern man is not going to kill off another guy for a woman’s sake, although there are some who occasionally do so, and if you read the Bukedde newspaper you will see plenty of evidence of that happening. So sports was invented where you can figuratively kill off the other guys and rule the kraal with your mates.

There are different kinds of sports, some individual disciplines like boxing, martial arts and tennis; to team sports like football, basketball and cricket. Some prefer to be the lone hunter going for the kill to make him king of the hill, while others think of their fierce tribe going out to annihilate all the other pretender tribes and take all their women.

There are lots of men these days who do not get the chance to take part in sports, so they do the next best thing - they watch it. And, don’t be fooled, watching sports is almost as intense as actually playing it.

Which brings me to last weekend and the end of the 2011/12 English Premiership League season. By default soccer, and especially the Premiership, has become the sports of choice for many Ugandan men. In watching it they relive all the battles they have never fought and celebrate all the triumphs that would have come with them.

And to some of them it is almost life and death, as in when the team they support loses they will go through life like it just ended. It used to happen to me that when Manchester United would lose a game, for the next three days I would just go through the motions till it all wore off. It didn’t help that there would be dozens of Arsenal-supporting, vanilla-stealing-thugs rubbing it in my face.

Eventually I managed to deal with that (it helped that United does not lose that many games) and life does go on, though occasionally I still feel like pushing the other guy’s face into a wall. Like that silly waitress who said the malaria I had last week was because we lost the Premiership. A pox on her.

If women understood, they wouldn’t complain that men waste time watching soccer. You say men don’t have passion? Watch them at a soccer game in a sports pub, there is so much raw passion if you could bottle it you would richer than Mark Zuckerberg.

They don’t show emotion? Go to a basketball game and this very macho guy will be jumping for joy at one time, and then be severely depressed the next minute, and then jump for joy again.

You say men don’t cry in public? After a very intense rugby game between Uganda and Kenya recently, both teams were crying - the Ugandans for joy and the Kenyans for sorrow. And it was the girls consoling them and telling them ‘baby, don’t cry’.

They also come at us with “if you’re going to feel so bad after losing, why watch it at all?” Again, women don’t get it. Victory is nothing if you’ve never experienced a loss. You have to experience the bitterness of losing before the sweetness of victory can be that overwhelming high that every passionate being craves for.

And sport actually makes men better human beings. While women will talk and gossip, after which, depending on the way the conversation went, they will not talk to each other for months; men will beat each other up on the sports field and then share a beer afterwards.

I’ve been a sportsman all my life, and I know you cannot win all the time. But hopefully I have won more times than I’ve lost. So at the end of it all, when it’s all said and one, let them say, that was a good innings, mate.

And to paraphrase the late Bill Shankly, a Scottish football player and one of football's most successful and respected managers, largely responsible for Liverpool FC’s ancient glory: some people think sports is a matter of life and death, but it's much more serious than that.

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