John: a New Year’s Revolution?

Feb 4 2010 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

I COULD never get the hang of sport. This is largely because I was never any good at it, and life is too short to bang away at something in which you’ll never excel, not in a month of blue moons.

The phrase ‘two left feet’ could have been invented for me. And two left hands when it comes to darts, pool and snooker.

I am one of the very few people in the history of rugby to have scored an own try – that is, a try behind my own team’s goal.

The fact that it was foggy is no excuse. It should have dawned on me that nobody was tackling me not because they couldn’t see me, but because I was running the wrong way.

That in fact was the first and last time I was ever intentionally on a rugby field, green or pitch.

In my young reporter days I took up golf, but on one terrible occasion I teed off from the third level place where you put tees and got the ball to go straight down the hole where the flag said ‘7’.

The people with whom I was playing golf said that this was not, technically, a hole in one. I was dispirited, but rather glad I’d not invested in a set of golf sticks.

Playing cricket for Huddersfield Choral Society (I kid you not) I once bowled my own foot. It hurt.

I persisted in tennis for a short while but used to find that the net thing got in the way.

Badminton was better, because the net thing was higher and you could get the feathery cork thing underneath it.

In crown green bowling I am advised – too late, it seems – that the object is not to get the big black ball in the gutter round the edge.

From not being able to play any sport, it is but a short step to not being interested in the mass of statistics one needs to accumulate to show enthusiasm for it.

I couldn’t name you one Huddersfield Town player. I think Dennis Lawton used to play for them, but maybe that’s the actor.

I can name only one Giants player, Eorl Crabtree, and that’s only because I was talking to his dad a few weeks ago and the name kind of stuck in my mind. Did you know his uncle was called Shirley?

So does this mark me down as a person who is scared of competition? I think not.