My Sports Pages

My Sports Pages by Neil McCall

Occasionally - usually when an England team has gone done to a
humiliating defeat or a scare story about teenage obesity surfaces -
there is a bewailing of the paucity of competitive sport in our
schools, but my response is "about bloody time!"

I was educated at an all-boys grammar school in East Leeds; the school
itself was fairly small but the sports fields were huge; I hope they
have been sold off to a developer of luxury homes or allowed to
degenerate into a nature reserve, for they were the scene of regular
humiliation for me. Picture this; a long line of boys, and two big
jocks, maybe the rugby captains, selecting their teams one by one until
they come down to the dregs:

"You can have McCall!" says one.

"I don't want McCall - you can have him!" argues the other.

"Well, if you take McCall AND Greensmith, I'll have the kid with the
wooden leg and pleurisy!"

"All right, then!"

No amount of merits for mastering irregular French verbs could make up
for this kind of crushing scenario, and I remain convinced that school
sports are nothing to do with education but a complete waste or time
and money, as are P.E. teachers.

P.E. teachers ? now there's a topic! I mean, everyone knew that such
"teachers" weren't out of the intellectual top drawer, in fact they
weren't even in the filing cabinet but were a kind of furtive rodent
which hung around in a corner of the gym, excluded from the erudite
staff room conversation; they couldn't don the flowing gowns of Oxford
or Cambridge, instead they were despatched from places like
Loughborough, probably with a notice hung around their necks requesting
fellow passengers to make sure they got off the train at Leeds. But you
had to be polite to these meatheads, as they, along with the headmaster
and deputy head, retained the power of corporal punishment. Not
officially, of course, but cricket balls are hard, rugby tackles need
to be demonstrated and there are a thousand and one ways in which
injuries can occur in the gymnasium or out on the sports field.

Our school was divided into four houses, just like Hogwarts, only ours
were named Irwin, Manston, Smeaton and Scargill to honour some former
Yorkshire landowning rabble. There were ninety kids in each year group,
so the four house rugby teams took up sixty of those ninety kids; easy
to get out of, you'd have thought, just conspire to be in the bottom
third, but unfortunately in our year Smeaton seemed to be a collection
point for all the sporting duffers and the year captain thought I would
make a good prop forward, not because he discerned undiscovered
sporting talent, but because I was big and fat and hard to push over in
a scrum. So there I was standing over a heap of bodies - I believe it's
called a ruck or a maul of some such term - waiting to see whether the
ball would appear.

"Go on, get in there, McCall!" cried the meathead of the moment.

Now I was at a complete loss as to how this would improve the flow of
the game as the ball was clearly underneath this mound and wasn't going
anywhere but, hey, he was the man with the tracksuit and I dutifully
and pointlessly threw myself on to the pile like a Hindu widow at a
cremation ? oh, how I hate that bloody stupid game!

Mercifully, in later years duffers like me were excused rugby and sent
to do a cross-country run, which involved haring out of the school
grounds and on to Selby Road like a madman and then, once out of sight,
walking back to school by a way which, though roundabout, was
considerably shorter than the official course. And in the sixth-form we
were even entrusted to do archery, a sport of which I mildly approved
as it was about as energy sapping as Subbuteo.

At Poly, of course, I determined never to play any sport ever again,
but circumstances conspired against me; when the course intake had been
whittled down by the removal of students unwilling to study, and those
who had nervous breakdowns at being away from home, our numbers were
reduced to a mere seventeen. Six girls and eleven lads (this was a long
time ago!).

"Are you going to join out footy, team, Neil?" they asked.

"Nah, I'm useless at footy," I truthfully explained.

"But we need you, otherwise we'll have to get someone from another
course to make up the numbers," they pleaded - co-opting one of the
girls was NOT an option!

I'd been bullied, coerced and forced into playing team games at school,
but never before had I been needed.

"Oh, all right," I conceded. And, as long as nothing much was expected,
I actually enjoyed it.