This personal essay recounts the author's childhood passion for sports, inspired by both his father and the radio commentators of the era. He details his imaginative games played in his backyard, emulating his sports heroes and adopting the vocal styles of famous commentators. While his approach to sports has evolved with age, his enthusiasm and appreciation for the game remain.
When I was a kid growing up in Greensborough, what was then regarded as an outer-suburb in Melbourne, I was sports crazy. I’d inherited Dad’s love of cricket and Australian Rules football and shared his gratitude for Mum’s forbearance with our enthusiasms.
There, in the wide-open spaces of Dad’s carefully cultivated lawn, with the pages of a newspaper compactly folded into something vaguely approximating the oval ball and held together by a tightly wound elastic band, I’d rush around kicking the “football” into the air, racing to mark it, and shooting for goal (with a rotary hoist and a tree stump serving as the big sticks).All the while, casting myself as a star in the theatre of my guileless imagination, I’d spout commentary in line with whatever game I was playing. God knows what the Bamfords on one side and the Woods on the other thought was going on, but I was very serious about what I was doing. My models were the champions of the time, usually Essendon footballers and Victorian and Australian cricketers. For my calls, I drew on the vocal styles and verbal wizardry of the radio commentators of the day: Phil Gibbs, Doug Heywood and Norman Banks for what were then VFL matches; Alan McGilvray, John Arlott and Charles Fortune for the cricket. Distinctive voices that have reverberated across generations. Nowadays, from the comfort of the armchair at a carefully calibrated distance from the large-screen TV, I allow others to do the work for me both on the field and in the commentary box. But I still take sports and the talk bestowed on them very seriously. And all of those years I’ve spent watching and writing about films and TV shows have kept me attentive to the often-extraordinary camera coverage of the games (regularly a five-star achievement) and dismayed by the sometimes disappointing ways in which it’s cut togethe
SPORTS CHILDHOOD MEMORIE COMMENTARY ESSAY
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