The Sports Trail

Posted on 10. Apr, 2009 by Kerry Banks in Travel Blog

courtesy hubpages.com

Everyone seeks something different in travel. For some it begins and ends with foreign food. Others prefer art and museums. Some take their pleasure in exotic nightlife. For many, the quest involves a beach. I have my own special thing. I always go looking for the local sport. I enjoy sports for their own sake, but I also find that they often offer revealing insights into national culture.

On Malaysia’s east coast that meant standing in a village square watching a top-spinning contest. The Malaysians call this peculiar sport main gasing. The participants use long ropes to violently snap their discus-sized tops onto a mound of packed clay. Then a teammate scoops up the six-kilogram top on a wooden paddle and transfers it to a metal-tipped bamboo stand. Soon there are several gasing “asleep” (as the Malaysians describe a fast-spinning top) on their stands. They sleep for more than an hour. Main gasing may not be Wide World of Sportsmaterial, but it’s definitely different. In North America, you don’t often see the athletes squatting on their haunches smoking cheroots in midgame.

Sumo was high on my itinerary when I flew to Japan. Ancient and mysterious, sumo is half sport and half religion. The ring, the sand that is used, the referee’s robe, his ceremonial dagger, the salt-tossing and the wrestlers’ thunderous foot-stomping are all drenched in Shinto tradition. Unlike most sports, sumo is as much about anticipation as it is action. The rikishi spend up to four minutes simply preparing to do battle. When they finally get to grappling, the bouts rarely last more than 20 seconds. The violence is a release of tension, not just for the wrestlers, but for the crowd as well. When the flesh collides, the usually reserved Japanese cut loose.

When I visited Holland, I went to a bar to watch a World Cup soccer match. The Dutch were playing Brazil and the room was ablaze with Dutch orange. Calling the place noisy would have been an understatement—to order a beer you needed a bullhorn. Once more sport provided a socially acceptable excuse for a normally stoic race to raise hell. The Dutch lost the game, and they rioted that night in Rotterdam.

Thai Kickboxing - thaiphotoblogs.com

In Bangkok, I spent a night with the eight-armed warriors. That’s how the Thais describe kickboxers. Almost anything goes in this savage sport: punches, kicks, elbows, knees, leg trips and wrestling throws. Tough as it is, it was tougher in the old days when boxers would put ground glass into their leather hand wrappings to better maim their opponents. Rituals play a major part in Muay Thai. Before commencing hostilities, the fighters perform a slow-motion dance that is part prayer and part psych. A band composed of pipe, cymbal and drums plays throughout the bout. It’s eerie snake-charmer stuff. Stranger still, the music mirrors the pace of the combat. Adding to the unholy din is the crowd. The spectators bet furiously with one another, shouting wildly and flashing hand signals as the odds shift from round to round. How they sort it out at the end is a complete mystery to me.

Many years ago in Barcelona, I set aside a day for bullfighting, if only to hail a taxi and say, “Plaza de toros, por favor.” People kept telling me that the best stuff was on display in Madrid, but they seemed to take it pretty seriously in Barcelona too. The highlights from the arena played on the TVs in most of the city’s bars. In North America, they show goals and home runs. In Spain, they show deaths. Six bulls died three times a week. Still, squeamishness didn’t keep all the tourists at bay. The day I attended, a young American girl stood up at one point and cheered, “Yay, bull! Go bull!” She was making a statement, but I’m not sure she had thought it through. When the bull wins, the matador gets eviscerated.

Bullfighting may be Spain’s most famous sport, but it isn’t the most authentic item in Catalonia. I found the genuine article one afternoon in an old stone building just off La Rambla, a 1.2-kilometre, tree-lined pedestrian mall. The game was jai alai, or pelota, as it is often referred to in Spain. Jai alai (pronounced “high lie”) is also played in Miami, Tijuana, Macao and a few other places, but it began in the Pyrenees with the Basques. Some claim it’s the oldest ball game in the world. Most everyone agrees it is the fastest. The ball reaches speeds of up to 300 kilometres per hour.

Jai Alai - nytimes-institute.com

The ball is slightly smaller than a baseball but harder than a golf ball. The players catch and fling it against a wall with a cesta, a slim, hook-shaped wicker basket that is attached to their wrists. The three-walled court, orfronton, is long, high and narrow. The front wall is 15 metres tall. A screen prevents the spectators from getting creamed by the speeding orb. Even without knowing the rules, I could recognize the high level of skill involved, but that’s not what impressed me the most. It was the atmosphere; the fronton was such a relaxing place. Shafts of sunlight filtered down through the clerestory windows. The walls of the arena were made of nut-brown wood. Some spectators smoked cigars; some wore suits. All of them were men.

Jai alai is a big gambling game. It was once described as “a lottery with seats.” But the betting in Barcelona wasn’t conducted at pari-mutuel windows. Instead an attendant walked back and forth in front of the stands with a couple of split tennis balls in his hands. When someone indicated that he wanted to make a bet, the attendant tossed the ball up to him with a piece of paper tucked inside. The gambler wrote his wager on the paper and tossed the ball back.

Intimate was the word that came to mind. This cathedral of leisure wouldn’t have seated more than 200 people. A small standup bar served beer and spirits. There were no cheerleaders, no video replays and no commercial breaks; just the crack of the ball on the wall, the hiss of the cestas, and the occasional burst of appreciative applause.

Ninety minutes in the fronton put me in an entirely different place. I left convinced that I had touched the rhythm of Spain.

Photo Credits:

#1: telegraph.co.uk

#2: thaiphotoblogs.com

#3: nytimes-institute.com