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Saturday's Aussie rules game at Sydney Cricket Ground had been just what a local writer, Peter FitzSimons, had warned me it would be: an upturned bowl of spaghetti and the fall of Saigon, all rolled into one. One oval bladder and 36 human beings loosed on a green surface nearly twice as long and almost three times as wide as an American football field, the bouncing ball jitterbugging insanely as men in sleeveless shirts and tight shorts dove and kicked and punched and scooped at it, cloud-scraping 60-meter punts pulling a half-dozen bodies skyward, each trying to springboard off the small of the other's back, 30-point leads vanishing in a hop, kick and a bump, all befitting a sport whose inventor, Thomas Wills, killed himself in 1880 with a pair of scissors.
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