Thoughts, ideas, opinions and postulations on sport and adventuring
I got off the train at Osaka and did not have the foggiest idea where to go. Or even in what direction to head. The jumble of busy streets and incomprehensible signs gave no indication. Boasting a Japanese vocabulary that might have stretched to half-a-dozen words on a good day, I was steeling myself for the ignominy of approaching a perfect stranger and asking plaintively, … [Read more...]
“I hope you enjoy this, John! Fond regards, Judith.” I’d been living in Connecticut for three months. New England, forested by trees of red, gold and amber foliage, was wrapped in Autumn’s melancholy. Back in Oz, the semi-finals of the footy season would be kicking off. I was homesick. ‘Hooked on League,’ the autobiography of Penrith hooker Royce Simmons (co-written … [Read more...]
I was woken by my cat Portnoy at sparrow’s fart for his usual breakfast of Friskies and a stroll around his domain, after which he would retire to bed for the duration. Stumbling around in the pre-dawn cold and dark, it entered my head that I might switch on the tele and see what was happening in the World Cup. I arrived just as the nerve-wracking penalty shootout between … [Read more...]
Before he took a hammering at the hands of Terence Crawford in Las Vegas, Australia’s fleeting world welterweight champion, Jeff Horn, claimed that the scales had been doctored before his weigh-in for the bout. He needed to strip naked and then still lose another 8oz to get down to the 147 lb limit for his division. Given Crawford’s clear superiority in the ring, you’d have to … [Read more...]
We’ve all heard the joke about the good ol’ boy from Bumcrack, Alabama, who likes two kinds of music - country AND western. Well, I am similarly mono-cultural in my appreciation of footy. Being born and bred in Sydney in that golden age before the AFL’s South Melbourne arrived in town to re-brand itself as the Swans (until they won the 2005 grand-final, whereupon coach … [Read more...]
