No Left Foot
gerard wright
Gerard Wright is a writer, athlete, and genuinely nice guy. Here’s his story:
I played the sports a typical Australian kid of my background would: Australian Rules football (footy), cricket (incomprehensible to Americans) with much more enthusiasm than success, and, since they’re club, rather than college sports, long past my use-by date, as was also the case with rugby, after I moved here. You could say I came for the game and stayed for the company. I was gifted with teammates who became great friends, made sobering discoveries about my capabilities under pressure, and learned to recognise things about how individuals and teams perform that were invaluable when it came to doing honest work, which in my case was sportswriting. There is something about the expression of a player’s face at a critical moment, his body language, the hands that fumble the ball they once grabbed cleanly. It’s like looking at yourself in one or many, when the moment is beyond them. Likewise, you can recognize a player who just owns the ball and the moment and the result, before anything happens. I played against those guys. This is only worth knowing because sometimes, it informs what you see, what you remember, and how you tell a story. I don’t think it’s empathy, although that’s an invaluable quality in journalism and any real writing worthy of the description, but understanding: been there, did that – or didn’t, as the case often was.
