School sport is now poetry in slow motion
With GRAHAM SPENCE's London Letter taking a short absence of leave - and contrary to rumour it is not because the author is investigating the finest brewskis on offer or casting flies to unwilling fish in the English countryside - CARL DE VILLIERS' Zululand Letter ponders the phenomenon of fat children on the home front.
Paging through last Monday’s Zululand Observer sport pages, brimming with photos of Zululand schoolchildren busy doing sport in various events in the region, the first reaction was one of warm approval.
A fine catalogue it was of our primary school cutie pies running, jumping, kicking or passing balls, creating a blissful perception of our young cubs following a healthy lifestyle.
But something in the picture was off beam, the revelation only coming on closer inspection.
The line between being cutie pies as opposed to simply eating pies – and too many of them – has become blurred.
Calling them little dumplings are more accurate, since a large percentage of the pupils caught on camera are clearly not just a little overweight, they are full-blown Beast Mtawarira clones – plus heap fulls of extra body fat.
In fact, even some of the little girls show encouraging signs of attracting the attention of the Sharks front row rugby scouts. There are, as far as I know, no rules forbidding girl wrecking balls from being usurped in male Super Rugby or Springbok teams.
Humpty Dumpty on steroids
My one fear is that this rise of the little Hulks is going to change the face of school sport.
The first signs are already visible at primary school level, where rugby coaches hell-bent on victory pack their teams with Humpty Dumpties on steroids. The ball is passed to these blubbering Goliaths at every opportunity, who then simply truck through to the try line in tank-like fashion against opposition whose firepower is limited to pellet guns.
This will gradually erode the true art of the game, where brute strength and size will eventually become the be all and end all at the cost of athletic prowess – poetry in slow motion. Soon the time will come when, to ensure equal opportunity and fairness on the sport courts and fields, teams will have to picked on size and weight, rather like boxing where the heavyweights and flyweights are grouped into divisions.
On a more serious note though, what is abundantly clear is that by far too many of our pre-teen children are being fed to an early death by their parents – and something must be done about it.
