My Local and Global
Sports Story
By Tim Lewis
Almost everyone I know has a sports story to tell and I’ll tell you mine in four sections:
- Land of My Father: My Dad’s sporting journey (available Oct 2021)
- Land of My Father: My shared sports journey with Dad (available Oct 2021)
- My Sports Story in Pictures
- My Local and Global Sports Story
My Local and Global Sports Story
By TIM LEWIS
My Local Sporting Landscape
From the late 1960’s my Dad and I watched sport together. Together we followed our local football side the Cardiff City Bluebirds and also supported Wales’ national men’s rugby and football teams. In addition to attending games we enjoyed watching cricket on BBC television.
It’s always struck me how many similar stories I’ve heard about people’s first visit to a sporting venue. A Baltimore Orioles baseball fan once told me how he remembers going to see the team at the old Memorial Stadium. As a young boy he felt immersed in a loud, blue collar atmosphere one far removed from that of Camden Yards which the Orioles have called home since the early 1990s. Nonetheless the sounds and smells of those early visits to the ballpark have remained with him.
I went with Dad to see Cardiff City at the old Ninian Park stadium in the late 1960s. This was a world apart from the ‘sanatised’ images I had seen to that point on TV.
What struck me was the noise levels, the shouts of programme sellers and the wafts of tobacco smoke making their unannounced attacks for my young nostrils.
One of the most exciting parts of the day for me was climbing the stadium steps with my Dad and – coming out of the relative darkness of the grandstand – seeing the enormous floodlights looking down on a sea of emerald green grass.
Like the Orioles baseball fan, the experiences of those early visits set us up for a lifetime of commitment to our teams.
The Global Sporting Landscape
In 1981 – at the age of 21 – I spent a summer teaching at an American sports camp in Pennsylvania. During this time I became aware of the passion the staff and campers had for sports such as gridiron football, baseball, basketball, and ice hockey. When the summer camp finished I experienced professional US sports in cities such as Baltimore, New York and Washington DC. Watching contests with large partisan crowds increased my awareness and interest in the local and global impact of sport.
Media: The international Promotion of Sport
The more I travelled, the more the relationship between sport and the media came into focus as I saw localised sporting cultures given global exposure.
The degree to which sports media simply reports sporting rituals (such as the New Zealand Haka) or indeed ‘enhances’ them for a wider commercial audience can be debated. Whatever your view is, there are few more famous examples of sporting theatre ‘covered’ by the media than the All Blacks rugby team’s Haka.
Here are some photos I took in 1990 of an impromptu Haka at an Auckland rugby club
The Emotion of Sport: The Pain and the Gain
Rudyard Kipling suggested Triumph and Disaster were imposters that needed to be treated as such.
I would suggest that in a sporting context both impose themselves in a very real way.
Anyone with a sports story to tell knows the glorious “gain” of success and almost certainly the inconsolable “pain” of failure.
The Pain: We were almost there!
From my own history of following Welsh sport there have been many moments of despondency, indeed it is a challenge to pick just one. However in November 1993 Romania’s football team came to town for what was the final qualifying match for the 1994 FIFA World Cup to be held in the USA.
The pre match anticipation in Cardiff was greater than any I had experienced as the Wales team attempted its first qualification for a major football final since 1958.
The media played its part in ‘ramping up’ a ‘history in the making’ event with adverts featuring Welsh players Ian Rush, Ryan Giggs and Dean Saunders next to the slogan “The World at Our Feet”.
In the gloomy days that followed the 1-2 defeat to Romania, a non Welsh football supporter told me that whatever the pain the Welsh fans were experiencing, for the rest of the world the result didn’t matter.
It was at this time of sporting despondency that I asked myself the following:
How could two groups of people chasing a high-tech pig’s bladder around a field possibly matter?
The answer for the genuine sports fan who – after a significant defeat – can’t escape their ‘if only’ thoughts, it does matter!
Despite my homespun “high-tech pig’s bladder” philosophy above, I was consumed for years as to what had been snatched away from Wales after losing to Romania. In a post entitled “The Winter (and following Summer!) of our Discontent” (available Sept 2021), I develop the theme of emotionally investing in people chasing pigs’ bladders around fields.
The Gain: We were almost not there again!
In September 2014 I along with several hundred other Wales football fans in the Estadi Nacional sports venu watched our team and our watches. The time showed that we were about 10 minutes from yet more gut-churning failure as the scoreboard read Andorra 1 Wales 1.
As we – the Welsh faithful – poured our emotions into the every pass, kick and tackle I began to consider once again how could two groups of people chasing a high-tech pig’s bladder around a field possibly matter?
Then moments later Gareth Bale’s retaken free kick hit the back of the Andorran net and at that moment as the Welsh damn of anxiety broke – it mattered! It mattered! It mattered!
In a post entitled “Finally! The Finals!” (available Sept 2021) I outline a Euro ‘16 Finals in France where the lavender of Provence smelt sweeter, the baguettes tasted more French and finally we, the Welsh were part of the party!
I hope you all continue to enjoy your sports stories and journey!
PS Sport matters
At least it does for Tim and Gareth Evans watching Wales beating Australia at the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan!
