World Footy News

The following is an extract from the article The Amateur: Australian Rules Football, Yet Another Metaphor For Life by Spencer Hall in series where he tries various sports for the first time.  For his first taste of Aussie rules he joined Westside Bombers in the Atlanta metro footy league.  The article appeared on the SB Nation website.  The full article can be found here.  

 Everyone adjourns for beer. I turn in my jersey. I touch my knees, both still functioning. Ears: intact, and still sitting firmly attached to my head. The violence promised by reels of AFL Youtube maim-montage never materialized. Oh, one player was firmly decleated on a boundary kick, sure, with our best defender running through him like an enraged PCP-smoking hobo through a wet cardboard box. It looked magnificent and sounded even better,  the rush of air flying out of the poor victim's lungs followed by the audible thud of him hitting the grass.

For the most part, Aussie Rules is about fast processing in a crowd. Imagine a zombie movie on fast-forward where you carry a particularly tasty head full of precious brains. Your brains are nice, but the zombies really want the foie gras blue-ribbon brains you're carrying. You then have to run through a mall full of them while advancing it forward both quickly and accurately while using your feet and a ridiculously inefficient secondary way of hitting it forward. The head is really slippery. You have to kick the heads into a Macy's at the end of the mall. You are wearing hot pants. This would make a really amazing sequence in a film and serves as a decent metaphor for understanding Aussie Rules.

As for learning anything worst case scenario lessons, Aussie Rules has one you can carry to any department of life: when in doubt, act quickly and kick the ball forward and hope someone competent can do something with it. Everything else is assuming you're competent. This would be a bad assumption for the general "you" in life, and for the specific "me" on the field.* The final lesson: Aussie Rules understands people  are not good at things most of the time. *All of them. Any of them. Yes.