Matilda Bosley: Hey Adam, I’m sick of hiding it. I hate sport. Not the doing of sport – that’s fine – but the watching of sport. I mean I just find it excruciatingly boring. It’s kind of all the colours and shouting, and it doesn’t help that I didn’t really grow up with it. But even beyond that, it sort of feels like the whole industry is based on this underlying bedrock of toxic masculinity.
It feels like we all know deep down that sports players are essentially just well-paid reality stars who improvise each show, while we hang on to every tawdry detail of their performance and personal life. Sometimes I wonder if the only reason that we respect Dustin Martin more than, say, Kim Kardashian, and hold male sports players up as “heroes”, is that they are the reality stars for predominantly men’s entertainment, and therefore considered legitimate.
With all the shouting and fist-pumping and mid-strength beer, it can feel like men just like sport because the only time it’s socially acceptable to cry and hug your buddies is when your team wins the grand final. And you have to wait 40 years for that! Like, couldn’t we just – as a society – let men be vulnerable? Then I wouldn’t have to sit through another interview about “leaving it all out on the field” and “doing it for the boys”.
I guess women’s sport is fine, but my top comment (re: boring and incomprehensible) still stands.
I write this to you, however, with a very real wish to be convinced otherwise. My boyfriend has given me a Carlton membership for 2021, so it looks like I will be watching this (deeply mediocre team) whether I like it or not. I want to like it.
Adam Morton: Oh Matilda, if you have to endure a season of watching Carlton (commiserations), think of it this way: sport is culture. Sport is theatre. At its best, sport is art.
I don’t live there any more, but when I first moved to Melbourne I relished going to watch an AFL game at the MCG on a Saturday afternoon (night games aren’t the same). Like any good story, a great game is rich in detail: it has characters, plots and subplots, successes and failures, heroes and villains. Challenges are overcome. Lessons are learned (and not learned).
Unlike reality TV, it is not manufactured – the travails are real and unfold live. The participants have worked to be here and are often executing a high level of skill.
And unlike reality TV, the story is shared – in normal times it can unfold in a stadium or arena with thousands of people watching on. There is a sense of community as a crowd rides the waves of a contest together. As we know after 2020, that shared experience is not something to be taken for granted.
On toxic masculinity – look, it exists. There are dickheads in most walks of life, but their behaviour is far more likely to have negative consequences than it was just a handful of years ago. The cliches of blokey TV commentary are boring, at best. But you don’t have to put up with them if you’re watching live.
As for the hugging, I’m all for whatever gets people expressing their affection for each other. My unscientific assessment is that straight men are more comfortable with man-on-man hugging off the field than previous generations. Perhaps the increased access to live sport has helped with that.
But back to the art: it’s great to just watch talented people be talented, even if that sometimes means separating the artist from the art. Consider these (all male) examples:
The goal of the century by the late, great Diego Maradona.
The extraordinary skill of the best Australian cricketer of the past 70 years.
If you’re so inclined, the last quarter of the 2016 AFL grand final. I am a lifelong Geelong supporter, but the Western Bulldogs’ second-ever premiership, and their first in 62 years, is near the best football I’ve seen.
Enjoy!
Matilda Bosley: OK, Adam, I reckon I could get around some sports theatre – some artistic heroes and villains battling it out, the field their stage (although I think I would still rather just watch this play out on a real stage, with better dialogue).
In order to give it a red hot crack, I sat down with my boyfriend, cold beer in hand and Carlton scarf and beanie on (it was 35C, I do not recommend that part).
I have to say, as much as I could see that the people in the clips you sent are talented, I didn’t really feel the talent and elation like I hoped I would. Again, it was sort of just shapes and noise.
But my partner made an interesting point: watching just the highlights is actually the opposite of why sport is good. That it’s about having to sit through all the boring stuff just waiting and hoping that something fantastic and beautiful might happen. And then, when it does, it’s a thousand times more exciting because you have had to wait years for it. In that way I guess AFL does have the upper hand on Keeping Up with the Kardashians, I’ll give you that.
I think I’m realising maybe I was focusing on the actual physical skill of the players (which I still find profoundly uninteresting) and not enough on the reactions from the crowds. When I was watching the final quarter of the Bulldogs grand final you sent me, I think I felt a little bit of that anticipation and decades-long wait for victory as the fans all bit their nails and watched wide-eyed. That was an amazing feeling for the 20 seconds it lasted before my phone dinged from a Twitter notification and I got distracted.
Also, although I still think my toxic masculinity worries stand, I’ll take your point that perhaps it’s good that men do have at least one outlet for sanctioned public physical affection, even if they have to pay $22 for a warm beer and half a cup of hot chips to do it.
So I think this is where I stand: I have a newfound interest and excitement about following my (quite bad) AFL team through the season this year and experiencing the long-haul enjoyment, anticipation and emotional highs of sport. But also, I’m still kind of dreading it and might bring my AirPods so I can surreptitiously watch trashy reality TV during the really boring bits.
I guess I’ll tell you after the 2021 grand final if you have truly proven me wrong.
Prove Me Wrong is a new summer series in which Guardian Australia colleagues argue over whose tastes on popular culture, food and leisure activities are right ... and whose are wrong.
