Today we had a demonstration of wheelchair basketball in front of the whole school. A bunch of guys from a team that had members playing in this year’s Paralympic Games came into the school and did a demo 3 on 3 game in the gym. If you’ve never seen wheelchair basketball being played, let me assure you that it’s an excellent spectator sport. It’s quite different from standard basketball and I’d actually put it as being more like equal parts basketball, netball and demolition derby. The guys that played today were in great shape, zipping back and forth, rocking up to balance on single wheels for long shots and pulling some amazing manouvers in order to avoid the other team. What I didn’t get was the students’ apparent lack of enthusiasm for what was going on. They clapped politely whenever anyone got a point but that was it. No cheering, no whistles, not even claps for turnovers or great shots.

This baffled me especially as it was a genuinely engaging game to watch. Hell, I can near guarantee that if a bunch of guys strapped themselves in superfast wheelchairs and hurled themselves up and down a court, occasionally pausing to collect themselves from the floor after high speed collisions, in front of a crowd of Aussie schoolkids, you’d have some pretty raucous cheering in roughly 10 seconds. I read an article in an American newspaper once that pointed out that they felt that one of the reasons the Sydney Olympics had been such a huge success was that there was always a crowd cheering for the competitors regardless of whether there was an Australian competing in that particular event or not. They contrasted this to US coverage in which if there wasn’t a US national competing you could pretty much forget that the event was happening at all. I had exactly the same problem with the Olympics when they showed them this year in Japan. I don’t care about a qualifing round for 50 millionth place in Judo when it’s being shown to the exclusion of track and field or swimming finals, regardless of who’s in them. Surely there has to be some interest in world class athletes even if they’re not from your country. Surely.

One thing that has really struck me about Japan is that for a country that puts a lot of resources into junior sports at a high school level, they seem to garner very little enjoyment from it. Just about every student at junior and senior highschool is required to join a sporting club after school, every day, for pretty much their entire school life. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the students just mucking around playing sport for fun though, it always seems to be very prescribed and regimented. If they’re not doing drills, they’re running up and down the hill leading to the school. Maybe it’s just me, but I think if you take away the enjoyment aspect of sport and replace it entirely with theory, technique and mindless repetition you lose sight of what I think are the two primary objectives of any sport, namely to keep fit and, above all, to have fun.

Posted in Japan on Thursday December 16, 2004.

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