Partly, it’s a slow news day, but this story seems to have pushed people’s buttons quite hard:
UGLY parent syndrome is rife in suburban footy, parents say, after the suspension of two clubs over an off-field brawl.
The Riddell District Football League has banned the Rockbank and Diggers Rest junior footy clubs from playing this weekend, following an off-field brawl involving parents and players at the Diggers Rest Reserve on the weekend.Police called were called amid accusations of hair-pulling, assault and even a steering wheel lock being pulled out of a car at the height of the mêlée.
I haven’t been involved in junior sport since I was one myself, over a decade ago. Ugly parents weren’t unknown then. Is the problem getting worse?
As an under-aged Australian Rules player in Melbourne in the 1970s, I never quite saw anything as bad as that, but there were certainly instances of parents inappropriately and aggressively approaching or abusing kids from opposing teams, and umpires. The worst thing I saw was an incident in an under-18s game in 1977 when one of my teammates was accosted roughly (but not injured) by an opposition supporter.
What I would say is that amongst the parents who did regularly turn up to cheer the kids on, there wasn’t really a culture of disapproval of parents who overstepped the mark. The main focus of displeasure was those parents who never turned up to watch the games and help out with team preparations, yet always made sure they turned up for free food and drinks at the annual Presentation afternoon (especially if they thought their kid was a chance of winning a trophy).
It’s time we got tough on crime!
“Partly, it’s a slow news day,….”
How could that possibly be, when a gnomb is deemed not to be a fascist and another gnomb, who may well yet prove to be fascist, admits to not being ‘a saint’?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8163918.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8163593.stm
i distinctly remember a mother at an under-10s rugby match screaming ‘fuckin’ KILL ‘IM’ all game…
Kymbos: wrong Melbourne daily, that’s The Age‘s current obsession.
“Is the problem getting worse?”
All problems are getting worse Robert. Do try to keep up.
There are plenty of ugly parents away from sports fields.
In our local cafe for example, a particularly ugly parent placed the following take away order:
1 skimmed milk late
1 decaf soy late
2 ‘babycinnos’ for the litle brats. Hate them to miss out.
When the order did not arrive in the required time, said parent got even uglier.
Well Adrian, he’s hardly got grounds for complaint when he ordered them late.
boom tish
Ugly parent syndrome was my second taste of being on the receiving end of racism (after the fairly harmless ribbing for being a kangaroo at primary school in North London). A few of the ethnically dominated suburban Perth soccer clubs – mostly the Serb and Croat ones – would routinely vilify us poor Subiaco City skips.
Nothing compared with the “death to all Serbs/Croats/Macedonians/Greeks” graffiti on the clubhouses though. I can’t remember where it was, but one changing room wall – Swan Valley somewhere – had nearly been sandblasted right though removing the bile.
Very strange.
O ye of stout timber, with grain straight and true, thy boom tish can only be in earnest.
Right?
You’re in good form today, FDB.
Unlike some. Too latte I suppose.
As a coach of a junior Australian Rules team for well over a decade, I can say that I prefer parents taking a tyre-iron to each other rather than bleating to the coach demanding to know why their scared, stupid, co-ordination-challenged son is sitting on the pine.
When the order did not arrive in the required time, said parent got even uglier.
.
Why? they ordered them late. N’uk.
Haven’t noticed a problem in soccer – the few cases of ‘ugly parents’ have mainly been abusing their own kids and all the other parents look anguished when it happens.
A few incidents around Senior matches, but very rare, and often based on misunderstandings – ‘skippys’ not realising that the local Italians interpret what they’re saying as racist.
The only brawl I can think of was after a match but it was instigated by people with no connection to soccer and ‘known to the police’ for turning up to events to start fights.
Ah, is this a subject where Robert has decided that data is just an aggregation of anecdotes?
d
The parents can’t be that ugly, otherwise how did they become parents?
Call it hypothesis generation
Before the lawyering thing took over my life, I got to see a fair bit of this as a HS Phys Ed teacher. All I had to go on was my own experience of school sport as a kid. I know data isn’t the plural of anecdote, but this is what I noticed.
When I was a kid, there was a certain amount of low-level aggro that never got any worse than being low-level aggro. It just burbled along and lasted the whole game. As an adult, I’d notice parents being impossibly ‘good’ for half a game, but then something would go wrong (bad refereeing usually, but there were other causes; ‘sticks’ in hockey from the same player, a couple of rough tackles etc), and suddenly all the pent up aggro would explode into something really silly.
I never saw anyone reach for an implement, however (that’s going upscale in a big way) but I have seen lapels grabbed and heard a great deal of filthy language delivered at close range and accompanied by a quantity of flying spittle.
Have no idea if that means anything. Often when I raised the matter at a later date, the perpetrators would be ashamed and apologise.
In my case, my son was last year in a division of soccer that had one of those teams led by a win-at-all-costs zealot. His son was the lead bully in his team and enforcer on the field. Nothing was off limits including direct and public abuse of referrees who were often little more than children.
While most of the teams got along, there was scarcely a game in which the bad behaviour of this particualr team wasn’t a talking point.
One one day, a make up game for rain, we confronted this team again and once again it was on. After a ruling to which the offending coach objected, he tried ordring his team off the ground. The referee (a boy of about 16) ordered the coach of the the sidelines away from the sidelines. He then started carrying on and having had enough I simply told him out loud that he was embarrassing his son and his whole team and that if he couldn’t cope with kids have a game he should find something else to do, and that if he didn’t I would personally draw up a letter outlining his conduct and have the association barr him — at which point most of the parents of his team clapped.
He scurried off pretty quickly and the game then continued in a much more sporting fashion.
I note this season that a number of his players joined our team and some of the others. I haven’t seen him since.
Sometimes it’s just one or two people who stand for the mob.
He s
“As a coach of a junior Australian Rules team for well over a decade, I can say that I prefer parents taking a tyre-iron to each other rather than bleating to the coach demanding to know why their scared, stupid, co-ordination-challenged son is sitting on the pine.”
Fortunately my boy is still in juniors where they don’t keep score, but I’m paying cash money for him to be in the team, so yeah, I’d be damn well expecting that he take to the field every game. Either that or you give me back the money I paid.
d
Further to Darryl #22, one of the reasons for the whole rejigging of junior sport in the very young age groups in recent decades is the recognition that the “scared, stupid, co-ordination-challenged son” is going to stay that way unless he gets a go on the field and gets to enjoy himself in a context where winning isn’t everything.
I played junior football before this change of heart took place. It wasn’t such a problem for me. In Under-14s I was at the very oldest end of the two-year age bracket, I was big and I was an early developer. But there were other boys playing with and against me who were at the younger end of the two-year age bracket, who weren’t big and who were late developers, and there was no surer way of killing a kid’s enjoyment of a game than to place him, when he was physically still a child, in a position where he was likely to be shirtfronted at full speed by a bigger kid who was physically virtually a man. And in those days the bigger kids had all the encouragement and approval of their parents for going in as hard as the rules permitted.
I agree with you Paul, and Katz, you’re one of the most sensible commenters on this forum as a rule – I couldn’t believe it when I read @16. Do you really think that?
This is an enormous topic. Just to touch on one tiny iceberg tip of it, we have witnessed a tsunami of violent and abusive behaviour in professional sport in the last few years. I can’t imagine that this and the violent and abusive behaviour of people where children are concerned, both in the sporting context and towards teachers, has nothing to do with it.
I also can’t believe that masculinist scorn of the unco Boy on the Bench has nothing to do with it, either.
That’s undoubtedly true, but is it significantly worse now than it was in earlier years?
AFL football is a lot less violent – at least on-field – than it was a couple of decades ago.
Katz … I couldn’t believe it when I read @16. Do you really think that?
I’ll own up to a touch of hyperbole, Helen.
Fighting parents and importunate parents are two sides of the same coin. They live their own dreams and/or rehearse their own frustrations, disappointments and sense of personal inadequacy through their sons.
I don’t wish to suggest that such folks are in the majority. They comprise a small percentage of the parent body. But they are troublesome and require high maintenance. Moreover, often they embarrass their own sons severely. The sons are often emotionally more mature than their dads.
Let me also say that in general, emulating the best of AFL practice, junior players tend to be more team-orientated and willing to accept and play to team disciplines than ever before.
In terms of efficient, scientific, patterned footy at a junior level the game is in very good shape.
Coaching is more fun than it has ever been, apart from the helicopter parents.
What Paul said. My complaint is not just the ‘unsatisfied customer’ whinge, but the suggestion that only kids who are good at sport should get to play sport. I also find the whole focus on ‘winning’ rather distasteful, but maybe that’s just a result of me only ever having played on losing sides as a young ‘un.
d
When something like this happens I apply my theory, what is mine: there’s f__kwits everywhere.
I missed Paul’s comment.
I coach 16 and 17 year-olds, some of whom are almost grown men physically. I agree with him in relation to sport and sub-teens. But some of my players aspire to play at higher levels.
Eventually, all players must face the reality that competition sport is about winning and losing.
Sometimes fathers dream of their sons becoming professional players and a potential meal ticket. When the prospect of money is added to the mix, the emotional brew can become volatile.
Placing the focus on winning is quite often counterproductive to winning. ‘Go out and win!’ or ‘I want us to win!’ are meaningless instructions from a coach.
The first Presentation Afternoon I ever attended (when I was playing under-10s) was addressed by Peter McKenna who at the time was a champion full-forward for Collingwood and perhaps the most popular individual player in the League. He told us that when he was playing under-10s he couldn’t get a game and that it was not until he was older that he became competitive. Part of his task as guest presenter was to give the trophies out; when he handed me my “Best Trier” trophy I was, at that time, too timid to tell him that I was a Richmond barracker.
To some extent, Katz. For the 99% of us who don’t become professional sportspeople, sport is primarily about participation, exercise and cameraderie.
Sure, I like to win, and I try as hard as I can within boundaries to make that happen. But if sport was all about winning and losing, I would have given it up a decade ago.
I disagree.
Even at club level constant defeat is a poison that kills corporate endeavour.
Strong clubs can survive down years. But when those years become eras, then the club struggles to survive.
The son of a workmate of mine was bashed so badly by an opposition parent that he was hospitalised. This was in about 2000, the child was 16, the basher a full grown man. The 16 yr old’s crime was to be too good at football. It was an unprovoked attack. The attacker was fined and banned for a few years.
My Mum recalls in horror taking my (older) brother to the park to play soccer with the other kids when he was a toddler. But she never went back after she heard parents screaming at their two year olds (still in nappies) to chase the ball etc etc.
Quite right Robert@32
Statistically, most participants in sport lose more often than they win and commonly the balance is quite stark. This is a point I always make when coaching. If losing is unbearable or makes the activity pointless, then competitive sport is unlikely to be something you should be doing. For most people, competivie sport has value only if you can learn how to identify virtue in losses.
Ironically, if you can do that, your chances of winning go up, since rather than being defeated by distress or pressure, you learn how to play more formidably and execute better. You’re more likely to make good use of training and the parts of contests you can control.
Darryl, that’s what the ‘C’ division is for. It’s a bit of an ask for a team of kids who have been playing together since they were the Under 6′s, and who all are ‘into’ this sport etc to have to make way for a kid who turns up one season with his Dad having paid the registration fees.
You really need to know the sport, the division, the club culture and the team etc. before you write out that cheque.
My daughter is a ‘C’ division soccer player in the Under 12′s and loves it. We play our last game this weekend, as ‘we’ didn’t even make the finals. None of her team-mates touch a ball between training/game and the next training/game – they also spend alot of time talking to the opposition players when the ball is up the other end. They do however get a good workout, play to their level and enjoy themselves.
OTOH, the A division team from her club in her age group, which includes a few girls from her school, are unbeaten, have not one goal scored against them the whole season, they train twice a week, they attend rep. and holiday training camps etc. It’s their thing.
I’m 100% sure there are way more ‘ugly parents’ hanging around the A division and always have, and this is certainly a huge benefit being the parent of a C divvie kid.
Helen, I come from a big rugby league family and I was a netball champ as a primary/school/junior high kid and have always followed sport. As Robert posted, sport on the field is far less violent all the way down to juniors than it was in the past and from my own observations – ugly parents seem to have stayed at the same level as back then.
The other big difference to when I was a nipper is that parents and sports clubs etc take an interest in girls playing sport these days. But thankfully I got to play most of my primary and secondary and Sat. morning sport without a parent hanging around unlike my poor brother.
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali was a boxer in a one-on-one contest.
A football club is a large and complex organisation. In a small town it is often the largest formal organisation.
Players and coaches are the pointy end of that organisation. To a some extent the viability of the club relies upon the performance of the team.
A boxer can lose and walk away from his career. His decision has consequences for a few people and no real formal organisation to speak of.
Individual footballers can walk away from a club or from the game itself. If too many players or potential players make the same decision, the club and its infrastructure cease to have a rationale.
Boxers are often driven by their egos. Players of team sports often need to suppress their egos and conform with a game plan.
“Darryl, that’s what the ‘C’ division is for. It’s a bit of an ask for a team of kids who have been playing together since they were the Under 6’s, and who all are ‘into’ this sport etc to have to make way for a kid who turns up one season with his Dad having paid the registration fees.
You really need to know the sport, the division, the club culture and the team etc. before you write out that cheque.”
that’s completely backwards. It’s the club’s responsibilty to ensure whatever standards they have are being enforced before they accept a application from a potential player and it’s their job to manage the integration of new players into a team.
d
Sure. Small town footy is a strange beast. In the city, if your team is uncompetitive it just drops down to a lower-grade competition, but that option isn’t open to struggling rural footy clubs.
But then, rural footy is a semi-professional game. It flabbergasts me that people are happy to raise money to pay players, but it’s their time and effort so who am I to judge?
In any case, it’s the responsibility of the administrators of the league to ensure that clubs have a realistic chance of success, through things like salary caps and possibly even revenue sharing, so that if the Bullioh East Bulldogs are having a down time of it they can go out and recruit a
mercenarykey player or two.Katz, pretty sure you missed the point there. Ali had never lost **at all** until that fight in 1973. Then he decided to take it gracefully but with strength. I mean yeah, he wasn’t very competitive, compared to yer Victorian semi-contact sports in the country. And having lost one he just walked away:
[Ref then tells Ali to stop talking during the instructions prior to the Rumble in the Jungle, 1974, or he will stop the fight.]
Ali also lost, finally, to Leon Spinks, of all people.
Darryl, if you just front up at any activity, sports club, school and expect everything and everyone to fit in around your child, then I’d expect a lot of disappointments, no matter what the supposed fine print says in the administration manifesto.
My daughter wanted to play AFL in Sydney the first year and our local club and the one we chose without looking into it, was a super competetive club. She was put down with the littler kids and even then the boys wouldn’t kick the ball to her!
The team she “should” have been in, were a top little team of all boys who had been playing together for a couple of years and went on to win the comp. There was no B or C divisions in her age group or any girl comps (ie. Sydney AFL), however there was a club across town which had a different ethos etc. but unless I wanted to make a federal case out it, which I didn’t, we moved on. Thankfully, all her friends starting playing soccer in a local girls comp. and we’ve never looked back.
What Paul said @ 31, kids mature at different rates. Long term, I have no idea whether my daughter will remain a park player, book a spot at the AIS, or give it up next season. Most important is have them enjoying themselves and playing a sport(s) at a level which suits them developmentally and physically all the way along and within a club which also suits.
My neighbours who I get on with famously, are very middle class with no background in comp. sport, went entirely silly with their two boys – I tried to suggest a few times, that they lay off a bit… and that it was ‘way too early having been state nipper reps at aged seven to know what the future held’ – anyway both boys were totally burnt out by 13/14 which not surprisingly coincided with them falling in the rankings every preceding year. And they def. bordered on being ‘ugly parents’ esp. behind the scenes/politicking at club level.
Otoh, my nephew who had no choice but to stay at the family footy club in a mostly losing team season after season, was never given any extra privileges or extra pats on the back, debuted in the NRL this year (irrespective of whether anyone thinks this is good thing – I tried to convince him to convert like me to AFL, but he wouldn’t be in it). He did it all himself and also managed to get a “Union HSC” score”
and is doing science at NSW. A proud aunty talking now…… but my point being that so many parents are their kid’s worst enemies when it comes to sport, the performing arts and just ….generally.
And what Katz said @38.
Though I’d add that there are and always has been too many parents who are there just for their own kid(s) fullstop, and do no appreciate the history or wider club/community connection. Just as it is the same old crew doing all of the work at any school P&C.
I volunteer every summer sunday morning at our nippers uniform shop which does a roaring trade with tourists on the Bondi-Coogee coastal walk – and never go near my totally twitch-challenged daughter who is meanwhile being brilliantly trained by parent/clubbies who are teaching her stuff about the surf and lifesaving that I know nothing about. Seeing her for the first time way past the breakers at a heavy surf beach was quite a moment.
A few years ago she was being trained by one of the stars of Bondi Rescue in board training, before that show was on the air – he’d been a nipper at the club, had gone onto become a champion ironman and he was back volunteering to train the little kids in his own time.
Our long volunteer junior sporting club tradition is one of the great things about this country, imo.
And finally Darryl, I’m just saying that it’s so worth it for you and your child’s sake to find a club and level which suits your child and you, and not the other way around.
The surf club we do nippers at is well known as the one of the most competitive clubs on the coast, but it’s walking distance to our home. She probably would have fitted in better to a club culture a few beaches down, which is an ‘all-comers’ club – but as it’s not a team sport – it hasn’t been an issue.
I’ve not had much to do with sporting clubs.The boy played with the local soccer club two years ago and didn’t like it much and we switched to the local AFL club which he does like. (As an aside the junior AFL program is brilliantly structured and delivered, light years ahead of the equivalent soccer league, which seems to assume the kids have grown up in a culture of soccer playing).
I don’t expect everything to fit around me and my child, my point is just that if the club is ‘serious’ and ‘A-grade’ and ‘competitive’ then they should actually have a selection process in place to QA potential players instead of pulling the kind of crap they evidently did with you and your daughter. The world isn’t perfect and it doesn’t always work like that, but it seems like a no-brainer to me that this is not appropriate behavior by the club towards you, a member of the community who is paying them money to help them achieve their goals (And I’m shocked that they were able to put an older kid in a younger competition. I had to present a birth certificate before the boy was allowed to play to make sure he was in the right age group.)
Maybe this kind of monofocus on ‘make sure we win and screw the kids’ is common in clubs, I don’t know. If it is common I wonder just how great these ‘junior sporting club traditions’ are.
d
Here’s an interesting lesson in sportsmanship that I learned at sort of an early age…
(background: where I grew up, sports were mostly played at pickup street-level, with very little organization, almost no parental involvement, and much bodily contact with asphalt, concrete, and parked cars. Oh, and plus I was one of those classically spastic talent-less kids that always caused teams to lose.)
SCENE: Street-tackle football (American rules), circa 1977:
QUARTERBACK: OK, we’re just a little short of a first down. Everybody execute (complicated play A), and then I’ll pass to you, Teenage Spazzmatic Japerz.
MY SPASTIC SELF: Why bother to do that? You know I’ll miss the pass, and then we’ll be screwed.
QUARTERBACK: Probably true. But the fact is, you’re on this team just like everybody else, and everybody needs to get a shot, so go for it, and we’ll see how we do from there.
(Naturally, I spazz out, and pass is incomplete.)
QUARTERBACK: No problem, we’ll catch up in the next quarter.
That was a kid my own age making that call, mind you, with no parents in sight. And it wasn’t unusual. I always liked that guy — and a lot of other kids who had the same attitude. Not everyone of course, but enough to make a good world. Of course he later became a mass murderer, but what can you do.
(Kidding!)
Darryl, being an AFL comp in Sydney, no-one really cared about the age thang at their young age, this is not the case in soccer or the rugby codes up here and nor once they start ‘scoring’ in the AFL comp up here too.
My point overall was that there are all sorts of cultures at different clubs and within clubs too, just like at different schools and all other activities as I’ve been at pains to point out….from welcoming all-comers to Wankers Inc.
And sometimes there are fights worth fighting and other times I wonder if some parents really have their child’s best interests at heart or are just there to prove a point, whether or not they might be technically within their rights.
Fortunately my boy is still in juniors where they don’t keep score, but I’m paying cash money for him to be in the team, so yeah, I’d be damn well expecting that he take to the field every game. Either that or you give me back the money I paid.
I do however find your attitude as per above, to be just as flaky as the hyper-competitve club/parent syndrome.
The very small reg. fees paid by parents – which cover insurance costs and umpiring etc. are also often subsidised by senior sport and ratepayers for grounds and above all are underwritten by many thousands of volunteer hours from club coaches, managers, club administrators and other parents.
To turn up to any volunteer kids sports club thinking that because you paid $80-200, that it just ensures your kid gets to play every single minute of every single game no matter what type of comp or grade, what sort of team or club you’ve joined, nor how good your kid is etc.. is just pretty sad.
JPZ, that’s a story worthy of a screenplay.
Funnily enough, though I’m more or less ignorant of all the rules and culture of American football, it’s the film and literature of gridiron that’ve produced some of the best sporting drama I’ve seen. I prefer soccer far better as a sport, but I can’t think of one decent round-ball drama.
Sorry for dominating this thread, but similar story jpz, I attended a swat girls school with no sporting history in the 70′s – we had a really old PE teacher who fell of the perch in my first year and wasn’t replaced for years..anyway..
Being from a very sporty background, I organised a bunch of girls to play in the netball and softball comps. At 14, I trained and coached this whacky bunch of nerdy girls who couldn’t catch, bat or throw a ball and we took ourselves off on the bus to games etc.
Of course, in good Disney tradition we went on to win the comp….in my dreams. We lost every game each year and were even chased by the tough girls from Marourbra at the end of the games etc. but they all said it was the best fun ever and so on.
Jo, I’m talking about the QAFL Brisbane Juniors comp, specifically the under 8s & under 9s, which I expect is not all that much different to Sydney. We’re very strict on the age thing, particularly because of the insurance consequences.
I never said I expect the boy to play every minute of every game, you’re being silly. He often sits out quarters. That comment was specifically in response to Katz and his “scared, stupid, co-ordination-challenged son is sitting on the pine” comment. And while I don’t see that it’s particularly relevant, over the last 15 months I’ve been involved with the club I’ve been a grounds marshall for a season and canteen worker and I was enrolled in the junior coaching course.
I don’t disagree that it’s sometimes/often/usually not worth fighting, and if I’d had the same experience you had with your daughter, I probably would have done the same thing. Live and learn and move on. But I still think that the situation you describe was a failure of the club and its practices (signing up players they don’t want) rather than a failure by a parent to correctly identify details about the club’s internal culture.
d
Organised competitive sports for teenagers is pretty naif. It’s all about the parents mostly, forcing their surrogates to train beyond their comfort zone for the greater glory of the hungry parent. That sucks and I speak from personal experience circa age 14 when it did the most damage.
I agree Darryl, it was a failure by the club in that case, but having been brought up around sporting clubs as a young kid myself, I knew well that clubs are individual beasts with their own cultures and/or represent the culture of the current parent group/administrators and it just wasn’t worth the grief.
I’m sure we could have even asked for our money back and tried to sign up to that other club I mentioned – but it worked out a million per cent better by switching codes next season and playing in a local soccer comp. Far less driving as the local AFL comp is so small you have to drive all over Sydney, whereas soccer is so huge that most of her games are played in our own suburb or just beyond. Total bonus!
I’m happy to read about your involvement in your son’s club. I actually don’t do much for her soccer club which is unusual for me, but it’s a club and sport dominated by ex-soccer playing dads. I actually wanted her to play netball, so I could train her using my special Kath Day-Knight netball skills.
Phil, I don’t doubt that that can occur, but to generalize it to all, or even a majority, of people playing sport as teenagers doesn’t a) tally with my own experience, and b) doesn’t tally with the view that trying to get teenagers to do something that they don’t want to do is an exercise in futility.
Teenagers don’t naturally or instinctively like to compete in order to get exercise and be physically fit. This is a sickness or social pathology needlessly imposed on them and don’t they know it.
I’m with you JillS! Fortunately for me we were privileged enough to live in the urban fringe and keep horses. Obvious problem: only available to the chidren of families above a certain income. Then I got older and discovered road cycling and bushwalking. Obvious problem: not attractive to the much younger set. What’s the solution? My son who isn’t a team sport person does Taekwondo which involves a lot more exercise than I’d expected when we joined. There isn’t so much the problem of differential abilities, and the Ugly Parent syndrome appears to be at a minimum – at least, there may be hissed arguments with the teachers/admins, but no parental shouting or swearing or bashing goes on.
JillS and Helen – not my experience at all! In fact I thought I had the parents from hell when I was a teenager, mostly because they refused to drive me to sporting competitions, watch, fund or do anything encouraging of my wide variety of sporting exploits. Bloody creatives!!
Mind you, it probably had the perverse effect from their point of view that I was even more self-motivated.
Agreed Robert, it doesn’t tally with my experience either. I played competition tennis and hockey for most of my teenage years, and have nothing but fond memories. My father, a very competitive player on the tennis court, was wise enough to take a step back when it came to me. I enjoyed an atmosphere of amiable competition and my teammates and I disdained those who took it too seriously.
My experience in junior sport, which is quite extensive, is that parents are much more likely to bemoan the fact that their sons are obsessed with Australian Rules Football to the detriment of other aspects of their lives, especially their schooling, than they are pushing reluctant boys into playing a game that the boys find unappealing.
In fact, I can recall no unwilling participants, though some do become demotivated over time and drift off to do other things. And good luck to them.
In short, I agree with Rob and KK.
I guess those of us who couldn’t* get enough footy, soccer, cricket, tennis, four-square, snooker, squash, and that game we just made up where you have to bounce the ball off the thing and land it behind that tree over there were just suffering from false consciousness.
Now the scales are fallen from mine eyes, I can see that the real reason I played a game of mixed social footy with forty of my best friends yesterday was the incessant bullying of all our parents. Not for fun at all.
And then none of our parents even came to watch! Bastards!
It’s obvs a personal taste thing.
Some people don’t feel they’re alive unless they’re competing and bashing a ball around with a group of others and good luck to them. Then there are the other ones who think watching or competing in group competitive sport is a form of torture and like to get their hormonal exercise and fresh air highs by cycling, walking, running, swimming, surfing on their delicious self-sufficient own with nary a whistle or flag or relative or shrieking crowd within sight or sound.
Heavenly.
And of course we could add an additional category: those who enjoy both solitary and team exercise, competitive or uncompetitive, at different times and in different places. But admitting such a category wouldn’t really suit Phil’s purpose, which is simply to distinguish herself from the entire blogosphere on every cultural and political question, regardless of relative importance.
Indeed Klaus.
“on their delicious self-sufficient own”
A telling phrase. I might add self-regarding, pompous, judgemental, misanthropic… but that would be mean, so I won’t.
“sons are obsessed with Australian Rules Football to the detriment of other aspects of their lives”
Ah yes. The Victorian Disorder.
d
I reckon you’d be a bit of a trash-talker on the footy field FDB.
NTTAWWT.
It may indeed be a disorder. But its existence is proof positive of the fact that these kids aren’t victims of parents pushing them into activities against their will.
Ah, some little boys have long memories and deep hurts.
Not surprisingly, on past form, you both appear to be totally ignorant of the fact that there is an entire radical literature deconstructing the evils of organised sports in the modern era.
Check it out, open your conventional, self-glorying, competitive male eyes.
Learn something new, here’s a radical notion: entertain an entirely new thought!
Go on, I dare you, Klaus & FDB.
I entertain new thoughts all the time.
Stupid ones, not so much.
Anything more you think anyone is interested in knowing about you FDB?
You do like to talk about yourself a lot, don’t you.
Ha! Pot, kettle, etc.
why did you leave out “black”, klaus k. Squeamish?
Ha!
Oh, but you just hate competitiveness.
It’s so *shudder* male, isn’t it?
Why would I be squeamish about that?
Well? Let’s have it, Phil. Make it explicit. ‘klaus k’ didn’t finish the cliched phrase because…
Perhaps, when put on the back foot, you ought not to allude to certain things you have said about yourself when certain other things you’ve said, elsewhere, contradict them directly.
so you don’t think I’m a witch, Klaus?
Phil, I think you’re an obviously intelligent woman with wide-ranging intellectual interests who for some reason desperately wants to pick fights and assert her superiority at each opportunity. I also think that that second aspect of your personality is constantly preventing others from apprehending the reality of the first.
Thanks for the character study Klaus. Impressed that you have been following my comments so closely and not surprised they should irk you and presumably some others so much. That’s what being a leftist entails, as all leftists know.
You very much mistake me though if you think anything I ever write is not what I truly think and feel strongly about. Yes I do plead guilty for often trying to look at and assess things from a critical angle, in the best meaning of the word critical.
No doubt that presses some conventional people’s buttons, but that’s not the primary intention of my expressing them, rather it is me acting on my heartfelt and democratic desire to simply express them, not least in a relatively safe place where radical women are a minority.
See, that relatively straightforward comment @77 is still riddled with your usual assertions of superiority. You assert, rather than show, that you are less conventional, more radical, more democratic than anybody else around. Handily, this assertion is also an alibi for not being liked or listened to. The truth is, you are only half as radical as you reckon you are. Your paranoid critical practice is straight out of the New Left playbook, for one. I don’t think what you do really demonstrates the best sense of the word critical at all.
“presses some conventional people’s buttons”
No Phil, it’s pap like the above that pisses (at least) me off.
It’s not, as Klaus said, what you have to say, but the way you do it. Which is most certainly not just you “acting on [your] heartfelt and democratic desire to simply express [your opinions]“.
Why you can’t just admit that you like a stoush and yank people’s chains on purpose is beyond me. I doesn’t mean admitting you’re wrong, or taking anything back. Perhaps you’re genuinely unaware that’s how you come across, but I doubt it.
Look I have no idea who you are Klaus K or why you are stalking and trying to humiliate me in this way.
I have no interest in your opinion of me and I’d be surprised if anyone else does either. Your OTT derogatory personal comments about me reflect on you badly I would suggest and one could well ask how you have come to poll and thus pronounce so widely on what people who read LP think about me?
I would request that you cease your nasty and uncalled for sexist character studies of me and allow me to comment here as I see fit.
No I called you sexist once too FDB. Because you are. You even described fucking some women here once and how much she enjoyed that. I made a fool of you and you still remember. Tough titty.
Admit it, it is my politics you dislike. It is as plain as day and if I choose to present them in an ironic and challenging way, well suck it up sonny boys because that’s how I deal it. Capice?
I have in no way been stalking you Phil, but I do intend to humiliate you, if only in the sense that I would like to see you adopt some humility. Either that, or embrace the stoush, as FDB suggests. Anything else is bad faith.
I have no idea what others think, and they can judge for themselves on the purportedly sexist, racist or whatever nature of my comments. I’ll cease to follow this line, and if the moderators see fit, am happy to consent to their removal of any off-topic comments.
I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’ll certainly take your advice and leave you to rail and fulminate alone. You’re seriously not worth the trouble. Could you help me out by keeping the same moniker for more than a few weeks at a time?
Ta luv.
Why do uppity women rile you so much Klaus. No don’t answer that.
And, ohh yes I among several others did take you to task in the past for the intellectual terrorism of your academic language which you defended on the grounds that you don’t expect dumb people (like me) to understand your profound (not) thoughts.
You are not only a rightwing sexist, you are an appalling snob and intellectual bankrupt Klaus K. And that irks me about you, doesn’t it?
and you are well past your use by date on blogs FDB. You only post to talk boringly about yourself or abuse others as far as one can see.
You even described fucking some women here once and how much she enjoyed that.
.
Oh really? And why is description of sexual activity and an assertion that your lover had a good time sexist?
It isn’t sexist when you put it simply that way, and you have talked about similar in a way that’s quite fetching, Adrien, on Catallaxy. By contrast, if I recall the details it was the crude depersonalised terms in which FDB referred to his lucky piece of female meat that he’d triumphantly fucked that repulsed the feminist in me.
(follows along, munches popcorn in rhythm to “The Sporting Life” by The Decemberists. Accept no substitutes! Also, their new CD is rather a letdown. Get “The Tain” instead! And for pete’s bleeding sake, do continue stoushing!)
Trash talk alert!
That’s a pretty quick munching tempo j_p_z – I do hope you’re only hitting the quarter notes.
Did you ever listen to Neutral Milk Hotel? I reckon Decembrists owe a little debt there, NTTAWWT. And not just the strikingly similar vocals.
Oh yeah, and umm… something about whatever the topic was. Oh yeah, sport. Any WCE fans reading – suffer in your jocks. Once more, it is my male fantasies of dominating and enslaving the weak which vicariously play out! Mwahahahaha!!!
Now, I’m off to find another conventional paradigm to slavishly defend – wish me luck!
Horslips? If so good taste.
No, although they’re pretty awesome. Neutral Milk Hotel is the band name.
You know what’s sort of weird? I spent my whole (rather misspent) childhood and adolescence playing street sports of a pretty ruff-and-tumble nature, and yet “trash talk” is kind of an alien concept to me. Somehow we just didn’t do all that much of it (w/r/t sports, anyway. People had filthy and inventive mouths otherwise.)
It’s funny b/c when I talk to people who had a more normative team-sports teen experience, they’re all very familiar with trash talk as an idea. But to us most brutal of gorillaz, somehow we missed that chapter, dunno why.
FDB — Yeah I’ve listened to ‘Aeroplane Over the Sea’ and somehow wasn’t massively impressed. Not a bad record by any means but it didn’t blow my mind, who can say why.
Pissboy! Cue up another round of “Stereo” and “Passat Dream” by those Pavement guys! And make sure you keep “Saturation” by Urge Overkill in heavy rotation! Oh, and also, have another dozen or two Veruca Salt fans roasted on the spits. The outdoor spits, not the indoor ones. I’m not overly concerned about the quality of the reverb on their screams.
And now for a feminine cleansing of the spirit. Salve Regina
“…if I choose to present them in an ironic and challenging way,well suck it up sonny boys because that’s how I deal it. Capice?”
Leaving aside for the moment your definitions of “ironic and challenging”, many others here also present their views in such fashion. But if you don’t care how other people take your comments, then you shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t care much for what you say either.
Okey-dokey, back OT.
Of course young humans like to run around and compete with eachother. Yer a bouncing primate full of hormones and muscle growth. The problem is when parents try too hard to relive their own memories of such times through you, coupled with the fact that becoming a sports star turned celebrity is seen as a great career these days. And there’s a queasy Pygmalionish undertow as well.
Personally I got seriously into tennis as a teen because a)I liked running around and hitting things and b) you spent more time talking to girls instead of showering with boys.
And someone’s already probably suggested this above but why not “Iron Home Coach”? And as the lungbusting parents face off against eachother, the kids can bugger off and have fun together.
Ah, and now Nabs, the most narcissistic, self-reverential male blogger on the internet and yet another arrogant sexist prick whose tail I have tweaked. ROFL.
Keep ‘em coming Neanderthals, I’ll outlast all of you.
OK, this thread is going nowhere. I’m closing it now.