Fair Weather Fan: Learning to Watch Aussie Rules Football

Football season is over. As an avid follower of American Football at both the college and professional level, I get a weekly sugar rush of entertainment between the second week of August (beginning of the NFL preseason) and the second week of February (the Super Bowl). Not being particularly interested in baseball, basketball, golf, tennis, etc., I begin to experience a deep psychic void around this time every year, when the horrors of the offseason begin to sink in. As the spring/early summer period deepens, I have taken in the past few years to watching other sporting events, becoming a temporary fan. Recently, the substitute sport has been soccer: I watched the World Cup in 2010, the Women's World Cup in 2011, both times feeling a hint of the old Fan Intensity and both times quickly losing interest at the tournaments' conclusion.

Looking ahead this year, we've got Euro 2012 coming up...but not until 8 June. There's the 2012 Olympics in London...starting on 27 July. What sports am I supposed to watch until then? This year, I have decided to preempt my own desperation and pick up a whole new sport to watch.

In January I remembered that in September of 2011, I became aware of the Australian Football League and watched the last game of the season, the Grand Final. Though I understood the game rules only by analogy, I was quite enthralled. Well, I thought to myself last month, with the 2012 AFL season kicking off in March, and with the preseason tournament, the NAB cup, having already started, why not give this weird alternate universe football/rugby thing a go?

Difficulties would ensue. I had to learn how the game was played in order to meaningfully spectate. Also, I had to deal with the fact that games being broadcast live from Australia come on between 3:00am and 5:00am, times when I am never awake. More on these problems, and the intricacies of not-football, in a future update.

Begin

This blog is me using the world as a training dummy with which to practice my writing and interpretation skills. Hopefully you can get some enjoyment from it too, but if not, no worries. I'll be talking about whatever entertains me at the moment, which might be movies, sports, music, politics, etc. I'm going to keep the tone light and nonjudgmental.

With that said, let's go exploring!