They’re not supermen

Just before last week’s blog was posted, the tragic news came through about the death of John McCarthy.

For the uninitiated, McCarthy, an AFL footballer for Port Adelaide and before that, Collingwood, became lost and disoriented on his end-of-season trip to Vegas. From a 9 metre casino roof, he attempted to jump onto a palm tree about one metre away so that he could climb down.

A fall ensued and the impact took his life about thirty minutes later.

I didn’t want to halt last week’s piece by jumping to conclusions about how this event occurred, or why he was apart from teammates, or in such a fragmented mental state a mere few hours after landing in the ‘city of sin’. They are still questions that need answering, but from more developed minds than I…

It has, however, had me thinking about the invincibility that so many sports stars feel.

For those who play a contact sport such as AFL, NFL and rugby, the courage they have to demonstrate on the field means that there is nothing to fear off it.

Nothing.

And this is where we start to encounter problems.

It’s just a game – some September perspective

I’ve recently come off a two week sabbatical from being online. I’m thinking about some pretty big questions in life, career included, and I have felt my head get more and more lost in the outside world.

While the sporting viewing has been kept to a minimum since the year without sport ended, the proliferation of online content* has meant that I’ve struggled to keep my head in the game, focus on what truly matters and avoid the peripheral shenanigans that characterise so much of the online media. (* = crap)

Here are two major items that severely hijacked my time in the past few months –

1. Dwight Howard to ‘my’ Lakers. I know not everyone is a basketball fan, so here’s a little context to this one – the best big man and most sought-after free agent in basketball came to my team. A couple of years ago, my head would have exploded when this happened. This time, there was soooo much pre-emptive analysis that I was just glad it was over and done with. (And he’s now wearing purple and gold…!)

Giddy up!

And that was just one trade. Multiply this by the amount of player movement and it quickly becomes relentless. This in a league with about 30 teams times 12 players times a sport where loyalty means that a player will actually have his agent notify his former team that he’s signed elsewhere, instead of having them reading about it on the news wire.

2. The Olympics. Not only are the Games themselves almost impossible to keep up with, especially when taking into account the time difference between Melbourne and London, but there are so many stories within the story of the Olympics.