The Sporting Life

Every once in a while I like to check in on the exploits of our (former) local hockey heroes...ugh.  One of the things that has been difficult to adjust to in Oz is the sporting culture.  In this country sports play a very prominent role and folks take their sports very seriously.  Australia consistently finishes near the top of international sporting events per capita, including Olympics, Commonwealth games, etc.  However, the popular team sports hear are just...different. 

"Think like the Kookaburra, be the Kookaburra, fly like the Kookaburra!"

One of the few familiar sports in rugby.  I like watching rugby in short spurts but I certainly wouldn't consider myself a fan.  Recently the New Zealand All-Blacks won the rugby World Cup to quite a bit of fanfare (over hear at least).  Rugby is the game in New Zealand, more popular than all other sports combined.  I guess they haven't won the World Cup in something like 30 years, so it was a very big deal here when they won it.  In Australia it's also a popular game but not like in NZ.

Another fairly popular sport here is soccer.  This isn't surprising when you consider the number of people from the UK that call Australia home.  However, like Canada they call it 'soccer' here rather than 'football', 'footy', 'the beautiful game' or 'just another reason to get drunk and start a fight and burn stuff' (aka, hockey playoffs in Vancouver).  Most people that do follow soccer here don't actually follow soccer here.  Rather they follow the exploits of the 'lads' back home.  Teams like Man U, Chelsea, Liverpool and other sleep aids are very popular here.

Water sports like swimming, surfing, sailing, etc are quite popular.  Swimming competitions are televised here.  I didn't know they held swimming competions outside of the Olympics until I moved to Australia (not really true but it helps my point). 

When we toured the schools with the kids they were commonly asked "what sports do you do" to which they replied "hockey".  The common answer is "we have hockey here" until they realized we were talking about real hockey.  Field Hockey is quite popular in Australia.  Ridiculous!  But as the saying goes "when in Rome, teach the Romans how to fight on skates..." or something like that.

"Hurray! We just got paid for fixing a match!"  Big scandal in the cricket world right now, or so I'm told, due to some Pakistani cricketers taking a payoff to intentionally lose.

A sight commonly seen across Perth on a Sunday morning and what is seen can not be unseen.



Right now the big summer sport is Cricket.  For the life of me I can not understand how this game is played, and I've honestly tried.  However, any single game that takes more than 3-4 hours to play I am no longer interested in unless it's in quadruple overtime.  Some cricket games go on for days and they may not even have a winner at the end of it!  If you drive around Perth any given Sunday, you will see the local fields filled with a bunch of men standing around spread out and all wearing white.  They are either Cricketers or a group of lost and confused sailors.

A couple of familiar sports here are tennis and golf, both of which we plan on participating in.  There are oodles of tennis courts around in most communities like there are outdoor (ice) hockey rinks in communities around Calgary.  Thus far we have only discovered two things that are cheaper in Perth than in Calgary:  1) parking; and 2) Golf!!!  Golf here is abundant, year round and cheap.  As a matter of fact, you can get a private golf membership on a very nice course for $6000/year.  However, if you try to retrieve a ball from the bush you may be putting your life at risk so in many cases stray golf balls are not retrieved from the bush.  As a result, with the way I play, it will likely cost me double the green fees in lost golf balls alone.

Levitating is encouraged in netball and takes many years to perfect.

Netball is a popular girls sport here.  It's like basketball but when you catch the ball you can't move but only can pivot.  Basketball is also popular here but, like in North American, unfortunately we haven't managed to convince them to lockout the players and cancel the season here either.

Aussie Rules Football: the team that loses the least blood wins.

The king of sports in Australia is Football.  No, it's not the "what an exciting 0-0 match" variety I alluded to earlier, nor the 'two yards at a time in a cloud of smoke' that is almost a religion in the US.  I'm talking about Australian Rules Football, or just "Football" in Australia (this drives the Poms nuts).  If you've never experienced the game it's like rugby except that when running with the oblong ball you have to bounce it (or dribble in basketball) every few steps or so and if a ball is kicked in the air and cleanly caught then the player that catches it is hands-off to other players.  Otherwise, they have carte-blanche, more or less, to try to decapitate one another.  This game has some potential...