The Best Of The Sporting Life For Me
My own ability at ice skating can be equated with that of an elephant on roller skates trying to get home after one of those famous Finnish Little Christmas events. Yet the sheer beauty of some of the ice skating we see today is amazing. Oh yes the sporting life can give us beautiful moments. Poetry in motion. Even I can appreciate that.
Somehow Figure Skating on ice takes the dance to another level. Those glides are really floating and those jumps with all those incredible twists and turns are pure magic to the eye. There is something about this dancing on ice that is just not found with the ballroom. There is an extra dimension. I think it is all with the floating glide and the speed of the turns. If I really knew what this extra dimension was all about I would not write about it I would do it.
This glide, this floating movement, is also seen, sometimes, in the best of football. Thanks to the internet we can all keep watching those beautiful gliding skills of a George Best. Not only did he glide around and past players, who were left looking like a confused Sumo wrestler stuck in the mud, he also glided and floated over and past some of the hardest tackles that football allows. George Best floated and glided over and past anything that came in his way to dance ahead. It was as if Best danced upon thin air.
Formula One motor racing is hardly seen as a beautiful sport. However that past master, Jackie Stewert, used to say that his dream-like moments were not found in the speed or even in the difficult corners. For Stewert those dreamy beautiful moments came when he was accelerating. It was change in speed that was beautiful. It was something like this glide I am talking about I guess. To accelerate a car is often to glide or somehow float upon thin air.
From a lower division I might use an experience from my own sporting life. Anway I just love to add my own name alongside those big names like George Best and Jackie Stewert. If others will not do it then I must. There has to be some damned fairness in this world I say.
In the kayak on wild white-water I can say a little something. To surf a wave, especially a big and powerful wave, is like floating. It is like dancing on air. It has an exhilaration within. It has something within that sports like tennis or golf or chess can only struggle to achieve. To ride the white-water waves well has an elemental feel to it. You glide with the elemental as if it were a sweet cushion of air.
To check out a rapid, learn it, memorise it and then ride it well is beautiful. With each new wave ahead you simply ride it in the ”here-and-now” intensity because you cannot see the next wave ahead yet. They are too big to see over. You are riding the waves of your mind yet at the same time a harsh reality is always knocking at your minds-door. Get it wrong and it's a wipeout. Get it right and it's a floating that lasts a lifetime.
There will be many that prefer those less than beautiful moments in the sporting life. Of course. Some will prefer the bashing of a boxing brain to pieces. Others might prefer the winning of a bet staked upon the latest Russian pole vaulter to make a new world record by the smallest of margins. Others still might prefer to see beauty as in the latest sports-wear. But surely I have made a point here. Surely my experiences of the beautiful moments in sport are not just my own crackpot ideas.
Go on get floating and gliding you know it makes sense. We are all worth at least that.
Steve Bowles
