Fandoms and/or Mr Brenchley

So this will almost certainly be a rambling autobiographical essay with no useful conclusion, but hey. That's more or less my definition of a life story.

So: andrewducker posted a thoughtful piece about football fans and geek fans and being mean about other people's enthusiasms, and a lot of people were thoughtful in response even when they didn't agree with him, and that was interesting; and it engaged me I think particularly because I have been on both sides fanwise, and I have been mean and snarky in my time, and mea culpa.

Look, I am now and I always have been - to nobody's surprise, I take it? - a bookish near-sighted unathletic geek. In part, that's genetic; in part it's cultural; in part it's personal choice. I have told too many times the story of How I Met Tolkien, but I was a dyed-in-the-wool SFF reader long and long before that, I already knew he was God. And I hated all sports and didn't see the point of them because that went with the territory: the sporty kids bullied and mocked us, we scorned them with our long words and cutting repartee.

And then I was a teenager and really nothing changed. I was ferociously sarcastic about flannelled fools and muddied oafs and so forth, and did everything I could to avoid playing sports of any kind, and would never dream of spending an hour watching any; why would I, when there was always another book?

Only my best friend at the time was from Guyana (which we still rather quaintly called British Guiana, at least in my household, tho' it had been an independent country for a while by then), and one thing about Guyana, it may not be an island but it has close cultural links with the Caribbean nations, which are not limited to but very much include the West Indies cricket team.

So: it was 1973, and m'friend Shiv made it very clear to me that he was very happy to spend the summer holidays hanging out with me, but this would have to include listening to the cricket on the radio. As the only real alternative was spending time with my sisters (I was at boarding school by then, and had lost touch with most of my local friends), I made the sacrifice. And so spent much of that summer listening to Test Match Special, which is a cultural artefact in its own right - and before the end of the series, I was totally a fan. Initially of the broadcasters and the programme itself, rather than the sport that they described; the contributors in those years had created a magical combination of poetry*, clowning and expertise that might have been designed to snare the heart of a teenage boy.

Was it inevitable that my love of listening should develop into a love of the sport I listened to? Perhaps: they were the first commentary team (of my acquaintance, at least) to have their own statistician, in the late but immortal Bill Frindall, and the geekery of numbers infests cricket** as it did me, as does the love of language and the fascination of what's difficult. So yes, cricket became my new fandom, to the point of my actually going out with friends to the park and sorta kinda playing the damn game from choice.

So there I was, a bookish geeky glasses-wearing teenage boy who had found a geeky sport to love (where some of the players even wore glasses, yet), and I thought I was done with discovery, I'd stop there. And go on mocking football fans and resenting tennis fans (Wimbledon coverage cut into and sometimes even replaced cricket coverage on the TV: aaaargh!) and so on, because hey. There are limits, y'know. The flannelled fools may have turned out to be my fools after all, but never those muddied oafs...

Except that then I moved out on my own, to the other end of the country and a whole different kind of life; and I shared a house with students, who were very happy to watch other sports than mine. And had teams they supported, and so forth: and enthusiasm can be as infectious as expertise, especially when accompanied by alcohol and friendship. So I learned to watch football and rugby, and to care who won; and sometimes if we were very drunk when we got in from the pub we'd watch late-night golf beamed in from America, because hey. Sports! Into the early hours! How could that not be better than going to bed...?

We will not mention the afternoon indoor bowls. Snooker we need to mention, though, because snooker got us out of the house and down the club two or three nights a week, for years on end. It's a sport! And we played it! And we were very bad, and I particularly was terrible and always would be, but actually it's good to have something that you're passionate about and really bad at. It's good to allow yourself to fail at something, over and over and over again.

And now I am in America, and if there is saturation football coverage worldwide I have not actually noticed that, because America***; and if there has been saturation snark on Twitter and so forth I have not actually noticed that either, because Twitter and so forth; and as it happens I don't watch a lot of sports TV any more because wife, but I have just spent the evening at chilly rinkside watching a friend play (ice) hockey, because I just may have a whole new fandom; and I promised you a post without conclusion, and this is it.


*"Poetry?" you repeat, a little dubiously? Yes, certainly poetry. John Arlott was a published and respected poet, as well as a cricket commentator. I have spent twenty minutes listening to him describe a rainstorm, where ordinarily the BBC would have cut away to classical music until the rain stopped and play resumed, but he was hypnotic: they left his mike on and he kept on talking and there was beauty and power and mystery in his words, and I call that poetry.

**I even wrote a clerihew about it, which those of you who know Bradman's Test average ought to appreciate, by God:

Sir Donald Bradman
Would have been a glad man
If his average Test score
Had been 0.06 more.

***Oh, and I forgot to mention the American football, didn't I? From the early eighties, when Channel 4 started piping it to the UK, that was another passion of ours. With Superbowl parties and everything, tho' we had to stay up all night to watch the actual game...