& a blog

i couldn’t sleep last night. i’d a rather too substantial afternoon nap, and wasn’t feeling ready for bed (though it was 2 am). so i turned on the television, and tuned in to my new favorite station, setanta sports. setanta is the yellow and black branded dream that broadcasts english premiership soccer, worldwide and rugby, crazy irish sports like hurling and gaelic football, and apparently also australia rules football.

in just the last two days, i’ve watched more than healthy helping of setanta. in fact, i’ve to date caught two enlish premiership matches, an english soccer round-up show, and a rugby match between new zealand and south africa. rugby is a fascinating sport, and seems to be the origin of several american sports terms such as “turnover.” in rugby, if you are rolled into your opposition during a tackle you have to give up the ball. often you are turned over in the tackle, hence the term.

rugby was exotic, but australian rules football was FAR more otherworldly. first, the sport has more players on the field per team than virtually any other team sport in existence. according to the commentators, aussie rules football teams have 22 (!!!) players on a side. but you almost don’t notice, because the field is absolutely massive. there is no offsides in the game, so players can go anywhere and frequently try to cherry pick from ample distances away. any and all possessions are contested, with the exception of catches made from kicks which result in “free kicks.” these “free” kicks are nothing like their soccer brethern simply meaning that an individual can kick from the place of catching the ball unrestricted.

with it’s oval shaped field, aussie rules football looks a lot like quidditch. combine the field shape with the scoring system, which requires players to kick the ball through one of three field goals, and we’ve got a damn-near muggle derivation of wizarding’s greatest sport. as i kept watching in the wee hours of the morning, i kept expecting a snitch to enter play and for the aussies to designate seekers to find the golden orb.

watching aussie rules football enabled me to come to two conclusions about myself and my strange love of sport. the first was a sudden conception of the definition of sport, games whose play require human bodily interaction. in this capacity, sailing, car-racing are sports, but chess is just a game. athletics, like timed races, gymnastics, or evaluated executions of form, must also be excluded from sport proper (my definition) as they fail to implement the human body in the strategic execution of plays, which is to say that sport must be multidimensional. it must engage athleticism in the calculated consideration of rules, boundaries, limitations, tools, and skills, in such a way as to manipulate those forces against a foe.

the second realization was that i love sports because they are almost perfect articulations of semiotic systems. like language, they can be considered synchronically or diachronically, namely, as at the moment of the individual game or across the history of the game and all games in the development of the sport. like semiotics, sport is almost always, by nature, arbitrary, but that arbitrariness is cloaked in the guise of its essentialism of it being totally natural, the only way, the way it is. this naturalism is embedded and indeed exists only in the individuals who play the game, and patronize it. which is to say that it is sports fandom that essentializes sport, and makes it static though it is by nature a dynamic arbitrary system.

watching aussie rules football reveals all this, because i have absolutely no way to make sense of it, so i must decode its structure (system) rules (grammar) and play (phrasing). by watching the phrases develop into certain conclusions, and observing refreed interventions, i am not able to perceive how the game is played, but how it cannot be played, which exemplifies saussure’s belief that a word is everything is it not, in order to be defined as what is.

strange semiotic dreams in the post-midnight fantastic. i have ordered a rare roland barthes essay recently re-released by yale on the very subject of sport as cultural sign. it has the very french, obvious noveau philosophe title “what is sport?”

i wonder if aussie rules football comes up.