This Sporting Life*

This week­end promises to be a sport­ing week­end. There are three major events on this our lit­tle island. There’s the 57th Sin­ga­pore Cricket Club Inter­na­tional Rugby Sev­ens at the Padang, the Wake­board­ing World Cup at Bedok Reser­voir, and the Cor­po­rate Triathlon at wher­ever it is they hold triathlons.

I want to watch the SCC Sev­ens because I haven’t watched one in ages. It’s a palat­able rugby car­ni­val for non-rugby nuts, given the sim­pli­fied 7-a-side for­mat (as opposed to 15s), with a pic­nic atmos­phere. It used to be an even more pic­nicky event, with the old Satay Club across the road from the Padang. This year, as with pre­vi­ous years, rugby clubs from around the world will com­pete in games last­ing a max­i­mum of twenty min­utes, so spec­ta­tors would be able to watch a dozen games in a day. I remem­ber play­ing for col­lege in the schools sec­tion (Sithawalla & John Clarke tro­phies) of the com­pe­ti­tion, and wait­ing behind the goal posts for the oppos­ing team to kick one of their many con­ver­sions, and hear­ing my stom­ach growl when I smelled the satay from across the street. Then when the oppos­ing team’s player kicked the con­ver­sion, one of us would have to run across the road, dodg­ing traf­fic, to pick up the ball from the Satay Club. Once a while, an unfor­tu­nate Vespa rider would get knocked off his scooter by the ball.

Oh, and there’ll be lots of beer, and lots of female spec­ta­tors accom­pa­ny­ing those bank­ing indus­try type blokes who are happy to have them accom­pany the beer, even if they keep ask­ing a lot of dumb ques­tions like why the ref­eree stops the game when the ball is dropped for­ward by one of the players.

Rugby nuts (like myself) like to repeat the silly slo­gan that Rugby is the Game They Play In Heaven, and rugby at the Padang comes close. All sport­ing events should be like that, in the midst of the bus­tle of the city, as if to show that life doesn’t have to stop for sport, because sport is part of life. It’s a pity they’ve not played the National Schools Rugby Cham­pi­onships at the Padang for a decade now. It used to be so grand with City Hall and the Supreme Court across from the main field, and St Andrews Cathe­dral down the road a lit­tle. We’d get stage fright just tak­ing the field. There’d be office work­ers and other passers by stop­ping to watch for a bit, some­times stay­ing the whole game. There’d be peo­ple in dou­ble decker buses point­ing and some­times cheer­ing. So dis­tract­ing, so exciting.

What’s even bet­ter about this year’s SCC Sev­ens is that my favourite rugby club in the whole wide world, Rand­wick, is com­pet­ing for the first time in sev­eral years. Rand­wick is the sub­urb I lived in in Syd­ney, and the club’s home ground is just as unas­sum­ing — one block, one patch of grass next to McDonald’s Coogee Beach. No fences, no sta­dium, and no lights. I used to walk from my apart­ment to watch them play Sat­ur­days (until I had to play for my own club on Sat­ur­days), their first-grade team bristling with play­ers who rep­re­sented Aus­tralia as well, and you were so close to the field could almost touch them.

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The Wake­board­ing World Cup will also be watched by bank­ing indus­try blokes accom­pa­nied by female spec­ta­tors ask­ing silly ques­tions, and I might join them in ask­ing silly ques­tions. I’ve not watched wake­board­ing before, much less par­tic­i­pated as a wake­boarder. I hear so much about wake­board­ing from my friends who remain sur­prised I don’t wake­board. Before that, I always thought being dragged around behind a boat only hap­pened in acci­dents. I might just pop by to take a look, and then decide whether to get some of my chio ger­frens to teach me to wake­board, much the same way they taught me to play pool.

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Triathlon? Fun to watch meh? Stand in one place and every­one either cycles, runs or swims past you, depend­ing on where you’re standing.

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I think there’s only enough of the week­end to catch two out of three, and you know which two I’ll be going to watch.

*This Sport­ing Life stars Richard Har­ris, who in real life played rugby for Mun­ster before a severe bout of TB halted his sport­ing life and he took up act­ing. Har­ris resumed his play­ing career in 2002.