Citius, Altius, Fortius, ... ?

I have a slightly unusual taste, be it in sports or for that matter in ladies. And no matter by the end of it how much you would have wanted me to talk about the latter, fortunately this post is only going to focus on the former.

Basically I have an inclination for boring sports which in the thesaurus of a Football fan don’t even feature under the broad category of athleticism. These sports, some say lack the rise and fall of the dynamics of real sports. And what brands this feeling as true love and not as mere infatuation is the fact that I really do detest the interesting sports. Give me a match of football, and I am as uneasy as a wrestler on concrete surface, make me watch an F1 race or a Test match and I will drool the floor wet.

This bias in my mind sent me thinking on a long vacation, and I am glad I found the answer to this huge mystery yesterday. To be fair to every sportsman, there is a good deal of physical skill involved in every sport but what I discovered was that my mind craves for that extra touch of mental focus and concentration. I am not saying that the interesting sports lack the mental aspect; it’s just that these sports don’t play big on that element of mind games, whereas the boring sports at the highest level have a greater contribution coming from the mind than from the body.

What I mean to say is that in a game of cricket or for that matter a darts match, almost all the athletes are at the prime of their physical skills with little to choose among them but what distinguishes them is their ability to control their nerves.  The winner is the guy whose nerves crack second. Other than the penalty shootout or taking a free kick, this element is mostly missing from a football match.

The sport is progressing at such a rapid pace that going along with the flow or following your instincts is all you do, whereas in a cricket match you have to plan and strategize as the game unfolds. The extra time in between- the boring bits meant for having a drink and a chat- is the most grueling one for the players in the middle.  And this is what pleases me. Why? Perhaps, because the interesting sports are all about speed and power – sections which I totally suck at. My mind like an old Pentium processor needs some time to figure out what’s going on and hence makes a game of cricket or a long NASCAR race more palatable to me where the situation is frozen for some time.

And for this very reason I feel that people who ridicule the slower sports and lobby for their sport as the only real sport should first search for that logical part of their brain which might’ve caught some dirt since their sport suffers from psychological swamping. I think their skewed thinking speaks for them and also for their sport.