Lives
Playing for laughs
Sporting life
by Emma John
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ADAM Q
I was not a sports fan from birth. My parents were both excellent athletes who met playing hockey at college; bizarrely, they produced two daughters who had the physical dexterity and reflex responses of a pair of bungling pandas. I spent much of my childhood baffled by my mother’s tempestuous support for various football, rugby and cricket teams, and indifferent to her extraordinary depth of knowledge on everything from world snooker champions to Olympic decathlons.
My own sporting conversion did not arrive until my mid-teens, when I finally asked her a fairly basic question about the Test match she was watching on TV (“why are those two men dressed in white running up and down in a little box in the corner of the screen?”). That innocent inquiry triggered a chain reaction that led, within a few short months, to a lifelong obsession with cricket, coupled with an insatiable hunger for whatever else was available on terrestrial TV: rugby (league and union), motor racing, tennis, athletics, darts, you name it. I’d even watch Ski Sunday if nothing else was on.