2353: Be a Better Sportsman, Online or On the Field

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One thing that I don’t think school P.E. lessons focused on enough was good sportsmanship. The people who were good at sports did well and enjoyed themselves; the people who were bad at sports (like me) got picked last for teams and put in places where they didn’t have to do much, like goalkeeping. (Which always seemed a bit weird to me, given that the goalkeeper is the last line of defense in a football match and consequently should probably be quite good at protecting the goal. I was not.)

The upshot of this unfortunate tendency was the reinforcement of these positions: the people who were good at sports continued to be good at sports and grew to expect everyone on their team to be on their level and would sometimes even become abusive towards those who they perceived to be not pulling their weight; the people who were bad at sports grew increasingly bitter and resentful of games that, while competitive, should be fun.

Bad sportsmanship hurts everyone. It means the good players don’t get to nurture up and coming talent, help people improve and introduce new players to the activity they love, making them more likely to be able to get a good game. And it means the less skilled players feel ostracised and like they will never have an opportunity to learn more about something they might actually be quite interested in.

It’s unfortunate that this happens in online games, too. I don’t play a lot of competitive multiplayer games, but I can comment on it a bit with regard to Blizzard’s new title Overwatch, whose ranked competitive mode launched late last night.

For the most part, the Overwatch community actually seems pretty good; the game is a team game with variable character skills and statistics, so everyone needs to cooperate to achieve a common goal. If you don’t, you lose; it’s pretty simple. Unfortunately, there are players out there who seem to believe that if they just make unhelpful comments and call the rest of their team “noobs” that they somehow have the moral high ground and are justified in complaining and whining.

The trouble, I think, is that this particular type of player doesn’t like to lose. It’s more than that, even: this particular type of player thinks that they have a right to win every game they play. Whether this is due to overconfidence in their own abilities, a misplaced sense of entitlement or having grown up in the obnoxious “everyone’s a winner!” culture of many educational establishments these days, I don’t know, but it’s not a helpful way to be.

A competitive, two-team game by its very nature has a winner and a loser. Every time. You cannot rely on always being the winner — more than anything, that would make the game itself pretty pointless if the outcome was already known before you started. And being on the losing side doesn’t make that game a bad experience, either; some of the most interesting, exciting Overwatch matches I’ve had to date have come when I’ve lost, but it’s been close. And in those matches where it wasn’t close, I can usually learn something from the experience. You take it on the chin, you try again, you get better — perhaps you even help out people you were playing with that you know could do something differently.

What you don’t do is rage and piss and moan at the rest of your team (or worse, just say “………”, which is pretty much the least helpful thing you can possibly say — literally saying nothing is more helpful than that) because that sure as hell isn’t going to make them want to play with you again.

And what you absolutely shouldn’t do is go off in a strop because you’re not absolutely dominating the other team, which is what happened to me in one game I played earlier today. Said player decided he had the “perfect” way to play and wanted everyone to fall into line with him, regardless of where his teammates skills’ and expertise lay. The match was pretty even — our opponents scored 2 points on offense, then we scored 2 points on offense, then our opponents scored another 1 point on their final round of offense, meaning we still had the potential to win, or at least draw and push the match into Sudden Death… and Salty McSaltyson decided that no, he wasn’t going to stand for having to actually put in some work to winning, he would, instead, leave the match altogether, leaving us down a team member and thereby at a significant disadvantage. Shortly afterwards, another player left in frustration, putting us two people down and therefore completely unable to be competitive at all. The rest of us, to our credit, carried on playing until the “you can leave without penalty when this timer expires” timer expired, but then it fell apart, leaving our team with a loss that could have been avoided. It was a shame, since it had been a great match up until then; our opponents were gracious and apologetic about it, so at least it wasn’t a completely negative experience, but still.

That one player being a twat spoiled the match for eleven other people. I doubt he even thought about that when he clicked “leave game” and accepted the penalty the game gives you for leaving Competitive games early — but it really did spoil the whole match which, like I say, could have gone either way in that last round.

Be a better sportsman. Accept that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. And if you think you’re better than other people — you might well be! — how about actually offering them some advice and help to get better rather than just being a dickhead? Everyone benefits in the long term.

#oneaday Day 937: The Olympics Are Closed

The Olympic closing ceremony finished not long ago, a little late, and now it’s back to normal for Britain until the Paralympics start, at which point everyone will suddenly get interested in sport that isn’t premier league football again for two weeks and then forget all about it when that is finished. (Incidentally, people, you can stop saying “don’t forget about the Paralympics” any time you want. They’re still quite a way off. I doubt anyone is going to forget they’re happening — and more to the point, I doubt the media will let anyone forget they’re happening, either.)

The closing ceremony was… well… uh… a bit poo, really. After the genuinely impressive spectacle that was Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony — noteworthy for its greatest achievement, which was stopping British people from being snarky for two whole weeks — the closing ceremony just couldn’t match up, and seemingly made no effort to.

This is nothing new for Olympic closing ceremonies, of course, which always tend to be a bit poo, particularly when compared to the opening counterparts. But this was just… bizarre, really. And not especially good. There was a lot of celebration of British music that wasn’t that good — Jessie J, Tinie Tempah, Taio Cruz (no, I didn’t know he was British, either) were particular lowlights — and some utterly sacriligeous bollocks in the form of Jessie J butchering Queen with her characteristic out-of-tune caterwauling. Apparently the Spice Girls were involved at some point, but since I had left the room to go for a dump as soon as a video of John Lennon came on whining his way through “Imagine” showed its face, I missed them. And I’m not sorry. The Spice Girls never were good live. They were, however, responsible for this .gif of David Cameron clapping on “1” and “3” (twat!) and Boris Johnson dancing like your embarrassing uncle at a wedding:

Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the closing ceremony was the palpable sense of relief as 60 million British people all unlocked their underpants and let rip with one of the biggest waves of snark I’ve ever seen. Everyone was obviously backed up from two weeks of genuine pride in the country, the achievements of our athletes and the fact that holy shit you guys, we did an Olympics and it didn’t suck! It was obvious that everyone felt a lot better after ripping the shit out of the closing ceremonies, so it is, of course, entirely possible that the whole event was designed with precisely this in mind. In which case the whole thing was a wonderfully-crafted work of art that managed to get two weeks’ worth of clogged-up snark well and truly ejaculated from the British public just in time for us to go back to the humdrum mundanity of everyday life tomorrow.

Or perhaps it was just a bit poo, really.

Still, regardless of how it ended, the Olympics have been an impressive spectacle and it’s been nice to see people taking pride in athletes who obviously do what they do for the love rather than the money. There have been many comments over the last two weeks concerning the obvious differences in attitude between the (mostly) very sportsmanlike Olympians and the whiny, overpaid, spoiled little crybabies that are premier league footballers, and it’s true. I hate football precisely for the attitudes that are typically on display from the oafs who are at the top of their game, and there was not a trace of that throughout the Olympics… well, for the most part, anyway. Winners often appeared to be genuinely humble and proud of their victories, while those who missed out on gold didn’t tend to blame the referee, the other team, the other manager, the fans or anyone — they simply remained gracious in defeat and, in many cases, promised to come back fighting even harder at the next opportunity.

That’s the true thing that should be celebrated from these Olympics. The opening ceremony was cool, sure, and the closing ceremony was entertainingly bad, but neither of those two things are what the whole experience is about. It’s about taking pride in the sporting achievements of one’s country, and if it can even crack the jaded, cynical old heart of a curmudgeon like me then it’s truly something to be applauded.

#oneaday Day 861: Cycle of Life

Today I took ownership of a shiny new bicycle. It is red.

Technically I took ownership of a shiny new bicycle (that was red) yesterday, but said shiny new bicycle was far too big for me, meaning that my testicles suffered considerable (and uncomfortable) compression when attempting to stand astride it, and making actually getting on to the saddle without looking like some sort of Special Person an impossible task. It didn’t do wonders for my confidence, so I took it back and exchanged it for a smaller one. Now I can ride it without feeling like I’m going to fall off. At least, not quite as much.

I haven’t ridden a bike for at least five years, I think. I used to do it a fair bit and have always enjoyed it, despite not being very good at it. I’m fairly clumsy and cack-handed and balance has never been a particularly strong point, meaning that I’m not very good at doing things like signalling, or riding without my hands clamped firmly to the handlebars. (Any tips for getting over that particular phobia are most welcome.) I’m also not particularly good at going uphill, changing gear (with either hand) or bumping up onto a pavement. But I can, at least, pedal, move forwards and stay upright without falling off into heavy traffic and dying, which is a start.

Cycling is good exercise. I’ve been doing a lot on the exercise bike at the gym recently — up to an hour at a time — and it got me thinking I should get back on the “real cycling” at some point, particularly as the weather is so nice at the moment. Observations so far are that real cycling is significantly more challenging than gym cycling (at least on the resistance level I’ve had it set at, it seems) but you get to be outside and have the nice feeling of the wind rushing past you, which is most pleasant and one of the reasons I’ve always enjoyed getting on a bike as a means of transportation and recreation.

That “transportation” part is a good thing about real cycling. At the gym, you pedal and pedal and pedal for hours and don’t go anywhere, you just make the little numbers on the screen go up. On a real bike, you can actually go somewhere that is too far away to walk. Granted, the speed at which I cycle probably isn’t significantly faster than walking (unless I’m going downhill) but at least it makes some places that were previously inaccessible without jumping in the car a little more, well, accessible. This is nice. I could probably even cycle to the gym if I tried hard enough, though I then have to consider the fact that I also have to cycle back after exerting myself lifting heavy things and/or all the other stuff I decide to torture myself with.

I would very much like to get fit and lose weight, as has probably been made clear numerous times on these very pages. The more alternative activities I have to help achieve that goal, the less likely (hopefully) I am to get demoralised or bored with the whole thing. I’m doing pretty well with watching what I eat and trying to get more exercise on a regular basis — this is just another means to that end. We’ll have to wait and see if it helps. Hopefully it will.

#oneaday Day 764: Sports Day

Sports and me have never really got on. There are a variety of reasons for this but the long and the short of it is that said antipathy towards each other meant that 1) I was usually picked last for the teams in PE (when I wasn’t, it was usually Steven Finnegan instead) and 2) my body isn’t exactly a rippling temple of man-beef.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to get involved with sports over the years. I was in my Cub Scout football team, for example, a team so terrible we were sponsored by a junkyard. Our best result ever was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 20-0 to them. No, that’s not a typo. Twenty-nil.

Despite my ambivalence towards sport, I do also have some fond memories of various school sports days, particularly if it happened to be a nice day out at the time. I can’t remember a lot about primary school sports days, but secondary school sports days tended to be a pretty big deal, bringing most of the school to a standstill for a wide variety of track and field events.

My tutor group (the erstwhile 7FMQ, later 8QU, 9QU, 10QU and 11QU) were the very souls of apathy for the most part. There were certain events that people just plain didn’t want to enter, which would have put us at a significant disadvantage on the leaderboards (yes, this was in the day when it was still acceptable for school sports days to have “winners” and “losers”) had I not stepped in.

I’m not sure why I stepped in, given that I knew full well I was crap at sports, was not very good at running and wasn’t particularly agile. Therefore, you may be thinking, it would be somewhat foolhardy for me to enter both the 800m race and the high jump, but enter them I did, and I learned a number of things. Firstly, that I was surprisingly quite good at high jump, and secondly, that I was very poor at pacing myself when running — something which I still struggle somewhat with today.

The problem stemmed from the fact that I had never even considered running a long(ish)-distance race before, so I didn’t really know how they worked. As such, I was off the starting blocks like a fucking rocket and exhausted by the end of the first lap. This gave the rest of the pack, who had been pacing themselves somewhat more modestly, ample opportunity to catch up. I don’t think I finished last, to my credit, but it certainly wasn’t very far off. After the race ended, I went back to my tutor group’s area of the field, lay on the floor and didn’t move for a very long time.

The thing that sticks in my memory about that race, though, is not the fact that I ballsed it up so spectacularly. It’s the fact that for once, the rest of my tutor group was rooting for me. I spent a lot of my school days feeling like something of an outsider thanks to my awkward social skills, my weird accent, my crap hair and my forehead and nose’s tendencies to flare up with greasy zits. I was a geek and someone who did well, too, which made me pretty much the polar opposite of “cool”. Thankfully, barring a few exceptions, I was mostly left to my own devices to hang out with my equally geeky friends (most of whom had better hair than me) but this meant I didn’t feel a particularly strong sense of camaraderie with the rest of my tutor group.

Until that day. I heard them cheering for me as I ran past them on the first lap, and staggered past them on the second. And when I finished, far from being admonished for my poor pacing, I was congratulated and praised for getting out there and giving it a shot. It was a surprisingly special moment that’s stuck with me over the years. And while in short order things went back to being the way they had always been, for those few short minutes when I was on that track, I meant something. I was cool.