Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 309, 21 March 1928, Page 4

Mundane Musings

The Sports Fiend

It’s a splendid thing to be wholesome and healthy, and good ut games! What a pity it is that the girl who is lucky enough to be all three has so little tolerance for people who lack the attributes that make for these things. The really healthy girl is hardly ever sympathetic about illness. She has a firm conviction that no one need be ill; that headaches are akin to original sin, that an inability to play j games hard and enjoy them is sheer laziness, that to prefer a book of verses underneath a bough—even alone) —to a game of tennis, or a swim, or some golf is despicable. And the girl who is really first-class at a game—isn’t she a terror? If she plays tennis, she turns almost purple with rage at the sight of a happy game accompanied by a certain amount of ragging! For the beginner and the painstaking player who has no “games sense” she has some- j thing more than contempt! She feels that they are cumberers of the ground who should have been buried long ago; that the payment of a club sub- 1 scription gives them the right to a court seems to her to be merely idiotic —and she does not fail to say so. Her merciless-eye makes the nervous player shake with terror! As for her unhappy j relatives, they have to endure her alternate fits of depression and convic- j tion that she will never be a cham- ■ pion, and her triumphant certainty ; that, given enough attention and encouragement, she inevitably will! The tennis fiend lives for tennis. She will rise early to get in a game before breakfast, and she will keep dinner waiting because she must make the most of the waning summer evenings. In the winter a wet day is a tragedy: in the summer it is a catastrophe! The unforgivable and inexcusable idiosyncrasy in the eyes of the sport fiend is failure to concentrate on a game—preferably her game! That charming and amusing creature, Senorita de Alvarez, ought not to succeed according to these tennis fans because she dare to play golf and to dance—and how well she dances!—and to read books!

It’s quite simple, really! Any psychologist will tell you that the sports girl suffers from an infantile complex; she probably was good at games at her school and encouraged too much; she began by being contemptuous of any girl who “swotted” and came, perhaps, under the influence of a school mistress who was intolerant of a delicate pupil! And so she walks—or. rather, tramples—the earth, full of pride in her prowess and her interest in sport. When middle-age descends darkly upon her—as it does even in these grand-motherless days, what will be her refuge in the barren hours? Not herself, it seems.