Jack is a tremendous young bloke. The just out of teens, tall, blond, lean, good looking lad, quite unremarkably for a tall, blond, lean, good-looking kid from his hometown of Byron Bay, is a fanatical surfer. Byron Bay kids just love the ocean and surfing. His passion and talent for surfing may not be particularly unusual in “the Bay” but there is nothing unremarkable about … [Read more...]
Book Review – “CHEAT – The not so subtle art of conning your way to sporting glory” – by Titus O’Reily
What do Luis Suarez' teeth, Nancy Kerrigan's knees, Cameron Bancroft's pockets, John Hopoate's fingers, an Olympic Games Intellectually Disabled basketball competition and the Barbados national soccer team (oh... and lots and lots of other soccer teams and players) have in common? They all take center stage in some of the world's nastiest and most hilarious sports cheating … [Read more...]
Never cheated in my life!
Cheat? Not me. My high school rugby coach thought that I was a terrible cheat. I went through an entire season of semi-serious high school rugby under the constant threat of being dropped from my team for my cheating ways. I was a rugby hooker. This was the seventies. Rugby scrums were different then. I was never a cheat. Well, not really. Even back then the … [Read more...]
Sport and the question of ethics
"Come on. Get over it. Move on. It's just a game!" Most sports lovers have, at some stage of their sporting lives, experienced what they perceived to be a significant sporting injustice and had their complaints answered with just such a response. But is it "just a game?" Do injustices within the sporting realm have the potential to do real damage to individuals and to … [Read more...]
“Talk it up!” – Nup, says Socrates. “If you’ve got nuthin’ useful to say, then shut up!”
Of all the dumb things that get yelled to members of a sports team from the sideline the most excruciatingly brain free is “come on… talk it up!” When did “talk among yourselves” become a thing? This is particularly so in soccer. Oh, soccer coaches have an array of stupid things that they bellow throughout a match (such as “give her an option” or “come on… let’s win those … [Read more...]