Ick!

When too much sport is never enough…

Ah, Saturday night and there’s more sport on the teev than you can shake a whippy stick at:

Wallabies versus the All Blacks in the first rugby union match for the Bledisloe Cup, Australia versus Singapore in the last warm-up game before our debut into the Asian Cup, the New York Mets playing the Philadelphia Phillies in the baseball and the Richmond Tigers playing St Kilda in the Aussie Rules; all at the flick of the button.

Yep. Did some serious channel surfing between games. The good news? The Wallabies, Socceroos and Mets win! The bad news? The Tigers lose and are still stone motherless last with only one win and a draw from twelve games - but let’s not talk about that.

But the worst of all: Every time I shifted to a particular sport, there was some guy hoiking a loogie! I think the baseball was the nastiest.

I mean, come on! In rugby, soccer and Aussie rules, there’s a blood rule that anyone with a cut, must leave the field to cover the wound; it was brought in as a health issue and rightly so. But these guys go grubbing about in the dirt, tackling each other, all over loogie spattered turf! What is it with men expectorating on national – and international – television? Do they have asthma? A cold? pneumonia? It certainly can’t be because they think it looks cool, or tough. It’s downright stomach churning.

Spitting on public street is regarded as anti-social and nasty behaviour. We teach our kids that it’s not nice, too. So should gobbing chunky phlegm or thin streams of pale saliva onto a sports ground be any more acceptable? I think not.

Bravo to baseball for encouraging gum instead of chewing tobacco, but could all teams, no matter what sport, please take the next step and ban expectorating?

Eech… herrrcchh… pittoo-ee!

Just… swallow it, or use a tissue.