Butt What the Fuck?

Those who know me know that I'm not much for organized sports. I find most of them boring to watch, and I can't play for nuts. The sport I probably have the most patience for is basketball, because, honestly, which other game has the score change every 10 seconds? (I know there's tennis and shit, stop being a smartass) Football, of the US variety, bores me to death, with commercials every 20 seconds or less. The other football, of the sort the whole rest of the world plays (which is still the only real football - apparently in the USA you use your fucking hands to play football. What kind of a joke is that?) bores me too, but not as much. 22 men chasing a ball back and forth over 90 minutes or more, with total scores seldom exceeding 5, is really not my idea of entertainment.

Which kinda makes me an anomaly, I suppose, in soccer-mad Singapore. After all, this is a country where people profess undying allegiance to teams and players half the world away, whom they've never met, and probably never will meet in their lives. But it's not as if I haven't tried. Way back in 1990, I tried watching some matches in the World Cup, and stayed up to watch the finals, which saw Germany beating Argentina 1-0. I bought the sticker book and lots of overpriced packs of stickers. Hell, I even got the game Subbuteo, which is quite possibly the lamest game in the entire history of mankind. I really tried.

But nope. Couldn't do it. All of those were just attempts to get into a game that I absolutely did not care about. And to be honest, I wasn't the only one. My friends then were all into basketball. They were on the school team and played amazingly well for primary school students, regularly beating other schools in tournaments. Naturally, they were into the NBA. And when you're a kid, your tastes are pretty much determined by what your friends like (you could say that also holds true for adults, but to a lesser extent). No one really gave a shit about the World Cup, but we'd watch the NBA Finals together, cheering on our favorite team, the Chicago Bulls (but of course). It was The Age of Jordan, and we were his little groupies.

To be fair, I suppose our school conditions played a part. Having a tiny compound near a red light district meant that we didn't have a school field, but several basketball courts paved in rough concrete instead. When I think back, it kinda looked like the exercise yard of a prison. Anyway, no field = no soccer. And if you've never played soccer in school, how can you be expected to like the game?

Which brings us to the recently concluded World Cup.

I'd been kind of avoiding the whole damn thing, which was hard to do since huge posters everywhere screamed out promotions and tie-ins related to the event. But I was adamant. I didn't like soccer, and I had better things to do with my time. Then a day came, probably around the semi-finals, when I was bored and continued reading the sports pages in the paper instead of skipping past them like I usually did.

I'll say this about the sports journalists - they're really good at what they do. Given that I know how boring the damn games can be, they wrung every last bit of drama and emotion out of the games they were covering. Of course they followed a certain format, but it was simple enough so that the layman could follow it, and most articles contained flourishes and phrases which would make any writing teacher proud. And ironically enough, I became a closet fan - but only of the writing. Secretly, I devoured the sports pages in the Straits Times every day, while maintaining a nonchalant attitude about the whole thing on the outside. Gradually, I even began to root for certain teams - and all this only through reading, having not watched a single match.

I know it's lame. It's like preferring to read erotic writing to watching porn, or even (gasp!) doing the actual deed. What can I say? I'm a geek, through and through.

When the finals rolled around, I'd read enough that I wanted to watch the live telecast at 2 am. Stephen said he was having people over to watch it, so I kind of semi-invited myself shamelessly. To really get into the spirit of things, I even had my cousin place a S$10 bet at Singapore Pools for me. It was on France to win. What can I say, I love an underdog.

I'd brought my laptop along, intending to do work during the game because I thought I'd be bored. Yeah, right. That never happened.

We had a little pool of money going as well (with everyone chipping in S$10), and since the people at Stephen's were pretty much split equally on who they supported, it was a lot of fun. But the match itself was the most dramatic match I'd ever seen (not that I've seen that many - you can probably count the number on both hands), and my work was quickly forgotten as I got into the highs and lows of the game. Zidane scored in the 7th minute for France, then Italy responded with Materazzi's header shortly after. The attacks went back and forth, with France pretty much in control from the second half on. I thought that France really had a good shot at the title.

I'm a terrible predictor of winners and things like that because I tend to pick with my heart instead of my head. And as it turned out, the heart was wrong, as it had been on so many occasions before.

The game went into extra time. And then it happened.

Photo by John MacDougall/Getty Images

Zidane's infamous headbutt. And we all stared at the screen, dumbfounded. What. The. Fuck.

(If you follow the link for Zidane, you'll get a short recap of the incident, as well as his career. It's probably better than anything this non-fanatic could write)

And even though I tried to keep rooting for the French, inside I knew it was all over. Without their leader, and with their best players all substituted out and on the bench, the most France could manage was prevent Italy from scoring any more goals.

Everyone knows what happened in the penalty shootout. Again, Zidane's absence hit them hard. They were without one of their best penalty takers, and it affected them emotionally as well.

It was over. And with that, went my S$20.

But you know, the money didn't bother me. It's just the price of a CD. No, I just felt bad for Zidane. What a horrible way to end a World Cup. What a horrible way to end a career. It's strange how a week ago I didn't even care who won or lost, and here I was feeling bad for someone I didn't know at all.

It also hit me that sports, like everything else in this corrupt, commercialized world, had lost what it was about in the first place. Fair play, honor, esprit de corps. I'm not saying Zidane didn't do anything wrong. He did something stupid in reaction to being provoked (in a later statement, he said Materazzi insulted his mother and sister), and in the process committed hara-kiri with his team's chances at the title and his reputation. But fucking hell, I've done something along those lines before, and I can understand how he felt. It's just the thought that a team would resort to doing something this despicable in order to win, that a manager would urge his players to do such a thing... that disgusts me. Where's the honor in that?

But perhaps I'm just too much of an idealist. When wars are fought not by men charging at each other on the battlefield (not that that was a particularly smart way to fight), but by bespectacled nerds hitting buttons in faraway bunkers, blowing up faceless targets and taking out innocent civilians as collateral damage, it's really a silly notion to expect sports to hold on to the pillars of fair play and honor.

That's why I'm a geek, and a cinewhore. I don't need honor in a movie. And maybe I should just stick to movies in the future.