Week one: Grandstand. Week two: Match of the Day. Week three: Sportsnight. Week four: The Big Match. With the entire canon of British sports broadcasting thus exhausted, week five would likely have seen this space given over to a full-page advert for Findus Cannelloni (“Successful cooking for working wives!”).
How times have changed. For one thing, it will be quite some time before discerning households trust Findus to deliver their frozen pasta fix. For another, I can now sit in front of my television on a Friday afternoon and be confronted by live ice hockey.
To be more precise, an Olympic ice hockey qualifier between Great Britain and France on ESPN. Being as inquisitive of nature as I was oblivious of remote-control location, I decided to give it a go. And so began one of the most confusing half-hours I have ever spent in front of an electrical appliance.
The first befuddlement was this: where was the puck? A hockey puck, you see, is just three inches in diameter and can travel at speeds of over 100mph. When it is not zipping across the rink like a photon leaping at superluminal velocity from the violent fission of a radioactive nucleus, it is lost in a whirr of flailing limbs and flying sticks, obscured by large angry men, padded and wadded as if carrying out essential maintenance work to the sun.
Attempting to follow the puck made my eyes hurt after a while. Great Britain, meantime, were 3-0 down, which was predictable enough for a country in which ice denotes a potential lawsuit rather than a potential sporting surface. Perhaps they were having trouble locating the puck as well. Perhaps they were being distracted by the frequent blasts of funfair music that accompanied any break in play.
So I turned to the commentary for guidance. This proved equally baffling. I didn’t catch their names, but the main commentator was an American or a Canadian who had evidently been dared to use as many household objects in his commentary as possible. “Bellemare tries to get it through the tray.
Just whistles right through the crease. France call for it off the point.
Right off the glass. Hecquefeuille! Bombs away!”
The expert summariser was a Briton who clearly had long-standing ties to the sport, but was so devoid of insight as to be practically unlistenable — a sort of Niall Quinn of the rink, if you will. “GB have got to get themselves in this, and that means scoring a goal,” was just one of his many phrases that will ultimately fail to get printed on a commemorative tea-towel.
“Penalty to GB!” the commentator cried. Some good news at last!
Unfortunately, despite its ostensibly tantalising purport, “penalty to GB” meant it was Britain being penalised. Apparently one of the British players had been found guilty of “slashing”, whatever that meant, and had to leave the ice. Off he went to buy himself a toffee apple, and possibly a ride on the whirling waltzer.
Then Britain scored. It happened as abruptly as that. Such is the blinding speed of the game that the naked eye is often ill-equipped to keep pace.
All I can tell you is that they were playing ice hockey, just like normal, when all of a sudden the British guys started throwing their arms in the air and embracing. Even after the third replay, I was still none the wiser.
Likewise, I was content to plead ignorance of the sport as a whole. In an ideal world, I could devote hours and months to studying and appreciating the game: its nuance, its lexicon, its characters. Should ESPN continue its ice hockey coverage, I could even become a regular spectator one day.
But it will never happen, and for this we can blame the dizzying array of choice that modernity has provided us. In this cash-poor, time-poor, post-Olympic landscape, every sport claims to be the best possible use of our time. This has benefits. Never has it been easier to find sport. But by the same token, never has it been harder to discern the indispensable from the inessential; to tell the difference, as it were, between minced beef and minced horse.
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