Now this post about sports and how they have changed me was supposed to get written a while ago, in between the last post and now though, something happened... The 2013 version of Madden NFL football got released for consoles, and if there is one thing I like as much as sports, it's video games. As a result I have been living out my digital fantasy of playing wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, I'm having a hell of a rookie season too, in case you were wondering. I know you were.
Anyway, on to the actual story, you guys didn't come here to read about video games.
Haha, look at me pretending people are actually reading this!
Just after my 8th birthday my father walked out of the house and never came back. Well actually he did come back, but only for visits, that's kind of the point of this little bit. Every Tuesday night he would come over for dinner, which usually meant pizza (pizza was the food that my mother apparently craved while she was pregnant with me, it was also the food that we ate when my absent father visited... pizza is my favourite food... yep, I guess it's like that). It also meant that I got to stay up later, which is actually a pretty big deal for any little kid, but I was always sure I was missing something when I went to bed. I was always awake late anyway (some things never change, I played Madden until 5am last night) but I was alone in my room, with my books and toys, playing silently so that I didn't get told off for not being in bed. But Tuesdays, well Tuesdays I was allowed to be awake and well, because there was a fair amount of awkward and not a lot of interaction between my parents, we watched the television.
Now I had always liked sport as a general rule, but I was never really into a sport until September came, and with it, football season. In 1985 American football was broadcast on Tuesday nights, at 10pm. My bed time was 10:30 on Tuesdays but when football season started I somehow talked my way into staying up until the end of the game. Do you have any idea how much of a big deal that became?
I was an 8 year old, who was allowed to stay up way past an already extended bed time.
It was, at the time, the most masculine thing I had ever seen (and I was the oldest boy living with his single mother so this was important.)
It was something that was just between me an my dad (my little brother was too young and had to go to bed) we watched, he explained the rules, we talked about it, it was great.
I picked the game up very quickly and had a solid understanding of the rules, positions, tactics and mechanics of how the game works. This really was another sign of me being on the spectrum, though it would have been harder for people to see it. It turns out I can do this with any sport that I care to show an interest in, making me be better at most sports than my physical skills would usually allow.
It became a symbol for male bonding for me.
Other kids at school watched it too it turned out, well the kids who had parents who were wealthy enough to own VCRs anyway. They of course had to wait until after school on Wednesday to watch it, then talk about it on Thursday. When I first overheard them talking about it I was thrilled, but I did not join the conversation, it took me a few weeks to get there. But then I found this out, boys who have nothing else in common and would never normally even look at each other, can talk for hours and be friends if they like the same sport. And hell, if you happen to have the same favourite team in that sport, then you're pretty much best friends. So for the first time ever in my schooling career, I was interacting with other kids outside of the classrooms. We set up a field at lunch time and played full contact, no pads gridiron.
More news for me at this point, if you are good at a sport, then other people will like you too and want to be on your team. My mind was blown, I had no idea that this was how male interactions worked in primary school. I was a fast, strong kid who had decent hand/eye co-ordination (apparently I played with balls a lot as a child) and in my small northern suburbs school, among the small subset of people who knew what gridiron was, I was the best. Not because I was the most athletic, but because when I watched the game, I was studying it, figuring it out, and apparently the other kids were just going "woah, did you see that!" Suddenly I went from being the least popular kid in school to being the kid that got picked first in P.E. It fed something inside me and I did not want to let it go, so I became interested in more sports and I watched them and I studied them and I played them.
I thought that I had found the secret.
To be continued...
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