Now that I’ve given you a quick bit of historical background on gymnastics, I have to explain our own family’s participation in this august and ancient sport.
When you go to watch a gymnastics meet, you get bad seats. It doesn’t matter whether you go early, or late, or whatever, you will always get bad seats. There are no good seats.
This is different from, say, baseball, which is very clearly a spectator sport. The whole game of baseball is designed to lull you into a sense of relaxed good cheer, with all of the boring time between innings, and the fact that even when all the players are actually out there, they aren’t doing anything, ever. They are just standing around, and every two minutes or so, the guy on the little tiny mountain will throw the ball, and nobody else will move, except the guy in the black outfit, and all he does is say a word. Then, the ball goes back to the guy on the mountain, and you wait two more minutes for the guy on the mountain to throw the ball again. This is all that happens for hours, and then you go home. Baseball is designed so that you just sit there and relax. The field where they play is aesthetically pleasing, and you just sit there and watch nothing, and perhaps you drink a beverage that is designed to slow your heart rate, and when you go home, your blood pressure is lower, and you’ve eaten some comfort food, and you feel better . . . it’s just like visiting your therapist, except you don’t have to talk about your feelings or your childhood.
Basketball and football are just the opposite; there is lots and lots going on, all the time. When you leave a basketball/football game you feel slightly worn out from trying to keep up with all the action. Watching live golf is more like baseball . . . pretty fields, nothing ever happening with the added benefit that the ball might kill you (this is also true in baseball). Nascar is boring and you will suffer hearing loss and a car wreck might kill you. Soccer is a mix of baseball and basketball; there’s lots of action, but it’s boring action, and the fans might kill you. Tennis is mostly boring, except that it is culturally important to be quiet while watching a tennis game, so that you might get to hear the players curse. This is not good for your soul.
So . . . watching sports is a mix of deadly, boring, exhausting, and morally decadent. Therefore, we have recently invented new sports, and called them extreme. The whole point of extreme sports is to have a sport where spectators are relatively safe, but the participants are the ones who might die. One of these extreme sports involves motorcycles.
Motorcycles are terrifying machines in and of themselves. They have only half of the requisite number of wheels, and they have an engine that you place between your legs while you ride your motorcycle. Just not hurting yourself at all should be cause for celebration whilst riding a motorcycle. Other extreme sports involve boats, snowmobiles, hang gliders, and chain saws.
Back to gymnastics. Gymnastics are not like watching other sports. Recall; baseball=boring, basketball=tiring, golf=death. All of these are great ways to enjoy an afternoon. But gymnastics tries to mix two opposing emotions. Most of the time, gymnastics is boring. There are hundreds of girls, all doing the same routines, one after another. So you get to see, say, 1,349 little girls all do the exact same series of moves on the bar, one after another. This is boring. However, suddenly, your own daughter is standing there, and then she is on the bar, and the boring is replaced by abject, stultifying terror.
Your heart is pounding, almost painfully, and you are gripping your legs so hard that you are leaving bruises. You realize that if she falls off that bar in the wrong way, she could break any variety of bones, including her neck. Your daughter, the one that sometimes trips over air, is spinning around that little bar. You realize, suddenly, that she is right now doing something on that bar that you could not do, not even if somebody offered you a BMW. She goes around and around, and then she stops, and goes around a couple more times, and then she sort of flies in the air, and she lands on her feet.
The terror subsides, but only for awhile, only while the 1,349 other little girls do their routines. They all look safe and under control, and you realize that the adults are standing there, about 2 feet away, there’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all. Then, she is doing her balance beam routine, and you aren’t breathing again. That beam is FOUR FEET IN THE AIR! If she falls, she will undoubtedly break some bones, perhaps her neck. Then she jumps lightly off, and the terror subsides, but it comes twice more, for the vault and the floor exercise.
We’ve been to two gymnastics meets. Both times, Anna competed against three other girls. The first time, Anna scored poorly–she came in last in everything, except the beam, where she came in third. The terror was awful, and was mixed with disappointment and sadness. The second time, Anna scored well–two firsts, a second, and a fourth. She got first overall. The pride at her success did not ameliorate the terror, not at all.
These two gymnastics meets lasted about 3-4 hours apiece, and it was 3-4 hours of boredom, punctuated by 4 separate minutes of absolute, hideous, overwhelming terror.
And, from watching the olympics, I know that the terror does not get better. I’ve watched the olympics. They always show the parents of those little pixie girls, and I can see it on their faces, faces that have aged 30 years in the single decade that their daughter has been doing this thing.
How I wished she got into something that doesn’t bring so much terror, something like skydiving, or the Marines.
Anyway, Happy Christmas, and may your children not fill you with terror.
