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All About Sports
In the late 1960s I was told by a prescient
osteopath, long before anyone had heard of PPS, that I should avoid
unnecessary exercise. Moving my body around, especially when adorned
with 20 lbs of stainless steel leg braces was likely to provide as
much stress on my body's frame as was strictly necessary. This was
advice I took to heart. I was never a wheelchair jock, which is why
I think I am tickled by this photo.
 The
reality is that sitting still in this marathoner's rig was the
scariest thing I had done in a wheelchair since failing to notice a
flight of stairs outside a Chicago hotel in 1982.
The word chair as applied to this contraption
is a misnomer. It's really just 3 wheels attached to a wire frame. I
sat on a piece of foam supported by three velcro straps and unless I
concentrated really hard on leaning my weight forward, it reared up
and tipped back. On 3 wheels, it can go really fast - apparently.
The track in the background is where I push
for a mile or two several times a week so I can avoid swimming with
a less guilty conscience. Oh what one will do in one's post-50 fight
against mortality.
Lately I have taken up wheelchair curling.
Yes, that's throwing 44 pound granite rocks 140 feet down a 12 foot
wide sheet of ice, making them stop precisely on a painted target.
Yeah, right. There's no brushing, and only 6 ends before you get the
drinks in. In March 2005 I organised the first ever
International Wheelchair
Cashspiel.
As far as sports proper,
 Junior
Hockey is what passes for major league sports here. We take what we
can get. The local team are the Kelowna Rockets, who are finding
that their new stadium does not in itself guarantee any more success
than they had in the old one.
Junior hockey is a strange game, more akin to the WWF
than the NHL. Boys in their mid-teens are lauded on the evening
sports casts for showing a willingness to fight, for fisticuffs is
what the home crowd comes to see. The sports segment of the local
news invariably opens with hockey, even in July. Junior hockey's
greatest fights would be the perfect local sportscast.
Nationally, Canadian sports fans are promised
an end to their season of mourning as the NHL threatens to come back
to a Hockey Night In Canada broadcast near you - that's you, not me.
The Okanagan Sun, the Junior Canadian Football team described as
the best Kelowna could buy, and the Okanagan Challenge soccer team round out the local sports tableau.
 I've
always been interested in baseball. As a child I tuned my English
transistor radio to AFN, the American Forces Network, and listened
to play by play and tried to interpret rules of a game I had never
seen. The poetry of the radio commentary kept me enthralled until
1980 when I moved just down the road from the Oakland Coliseum and I
learned to love the spectacle, sitting in an almost empty park as
the Charley Finley era wound down and Billy Martin's brand of Billy
Ball, and then the Bash Brothers brought success to the green and
gold.
The mid to late 90's brought hard times for
the A's after the heady success of the Bash Brothers inspired 3
consecutive World Series appearances. The Coliseum, once one of the
league's most attractive parks, is now a football stadium where they
attempt to play baseball.
Lon Simmons, one-time
voice of the San Francisco Giants
and the Oakland A's
had for me the archetypal baseball voice, just as John Arlott meant
cricket for so many generations of followers of England's summer
game. Bill King, the A's lead announcer has for me never made
the transition to the pace of baseball. His voice is far better
suited to the furious bursts of action on the basketball court or
the football field though his memory astounds and his disdain for
umpires remains unabated.
The Raiders,
continue to live on past glory and the 49ers
well they're Cate's team so say no more.
I started watching Crystal
Palace Football Club in the late 50's and once went a stretch of
ten years without missing a home game. In those days the car park
was a mud pool, the terraces were open on three sides of the ground
and Palace were perennial lower division wannabes. I helped my
father run the work Pontoon Pool and always wanted him to have the
Palace but he said he'd like to win sometime.
Cliff Holton, with his green knitted
woolen gloves, was my '60's hero; reputed to have a fiercer shot
than the great Bobby Charlton. One of the players Palace fans loved
to hate was Millwall's Harry Cripps. I wrote
an in memoriam piece about his passing, late 1995.
When success came to Selhurst Park a lot
of the family feeling was lost. Arthur Waite, the long time Chairman
gave way to a new breed of Thatcherite technocrats and Chairman Ron Noades,
surely an anagram, sold off one end of the ground to a supermarket.
Since then the ongoing story has been whether the club would survive
the attention of various hightech millionaires playing SymSoccer
with one of the FA's oldest clubs. 2005/6 sees Palace attempting to
regain the Premiership place they lost after one season to a
Charlton equalizing goal 10 minutes from safety.
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