Sports

August 25, 2018

He liked to watch sports games.

When he was a student, he played some sports during Physical Education classes. He played basketball, soccer, softball, swimming, skiing, even judo and kendo. He belonged to a tennis club. After getting a job, since his company had a lot of young workers, he sometimes joined in the company's games of baseball, soccer, volleyball, and basketball. As the members were short, he was asked to join. He was not good at sports but at least he was young and energetic.

He also played tennis, badminton, ping-pong with his friends just for fun. But as he got older, his chances to play those sports decreased. Younger workers entered his company and he was not asked to play anymore. Furthermore, he became more busy, so it was harder to adjust his time with his friends in order to play sports. Now he would go to the gym and exercise with machines, sometimes swim. He could do them alone.

Unlike most people, he didn't have a custom to watch baseball or sumo. But he did sometimes enjoy watching other sports. He watched the Olympic Games. For the

summer games, he liked to watch track and field, as well as badminton and ping pong. For the winter games, he liked to watch curling as well as figure skating.

When BS broadcasting started, he had more chances to watch world level championships. It was around the middle of 1980s, more than 30 years ago. The first thing that attracted him was the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament. John McEnroe was his favorite player. With his rival, Bjorn Borg, McEnroe showed great skills. He was amazed at his hard left handed serves and his soft touch returns. He could also remember the rivalry between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. When their era ended, he lost his curiosity about Wimbledon. Maybe he couldn't feel attracted by too fast serves and, because of it, short rallies.

Another sport he would often watch on BS were the World Cup Soccer Games.
When the World Cup was held in 1986, one of the BS programs served all those games. Maybe they wanted new customers. The number of the teams of that year was 24. For whole tournament, there was 52 games that were played.

He could remember Maradona in Argentina's long beautiful dribbles. He was a short person, and passed through among big players. He was amazing with his rhythm and speed, and his skillful plays.
He also could remember Socrates and Zico from Brazil, Lineker from England, Matthaus from Germany, and Platini from France with their gorgeous plays.

Thanks to FIFA's strategy, World Cup Soccer became popular all over the world and many new countries appeared. Each country's team had its own features. Russia had long range strong shots, Germany had toughness called 'Germanic soul'. France had elegance. Australia used many long passes. African players had flexible movements. Brazil had many individual high skills.

But this year's World Cup seemed to lack of many these features. Actually, recent World Cups didn't attract him so much. He could point out two reasons:
One: Maybe in modern soccer, defense was very important. Even forward players would return to defense, and so it made their offense slow with too few chances to shoot.
Two: Players performed fake actions to gain a foul. They would easily fall down to appear like it was a foul. If the referee called a foul, the game would stop and it would reduce smoothness and the flow of the game.

After watching some of the quarter semi-final games this year, he remembered that he had a DVD of one of the World Cup games that he had bought a long time ago. It was Brazil VS Italy in the 1982 World Cup. It was one of the 2nd stage league games. The publisher of the DVD decided that this was the best match of 1982 World Cup.

While watching it, he had three impressions:
One: As he predicted, the players didn't fall down easily. It made the game smooth. One other thing that he had noticed was that the player who hit another player would give that person a hand and would help him to stand up. Nowadays, this sight was rare. Maybe old players had more gentleman-ship. And no players in the game performed fake actions in order to get a foul.

Two: This was a little shocking to him: No players or coaches argued to the referee about his judging. They were aggressive in their play, but for the referee, they had respect. They seemed more adult than present players. He liked this.

Three: Although the players were legendary people, their plays were not so exciting! Their skills were of course good, but their miss passes were too many. It made the game lax. That was one thing that he preferred about the present game careful pass-works.

Maybe modern soccer was improving more than he had thought.
Maybe if players showed gentleman-ship a little more, World Cup Soccer would become more attractive, he thought.