‘Twas the Night Before ROK-U

Tomorrow is the start of the ROK-U Spring season. It will mark a bunch of firsts for Kris and I. Our team, the Wonju Knights, will be playing our first games together. It will be our first set of games as captain and assistant captain. It will be my first true trial as a handler. How do I feel. PUMPED!

Over the past few days, however, I have been feeling less than enthused for the weekend’s festivities. This may strike you, the reader, as odd. Regular readers will know that Ultimate is one of the things that has kept me going in Korea. I enjoy almost every aspect of it, from the challenge of competition to, sometimes, talking to other human beings about mutual interests (gasp).

Despite the many draws that I have to Ultimate, I always feel profoundly disinterested and disheartened in the days leading up to any major event. I feel useless at the game when I think about the people that I will be playing with and against. I perpetually bring myself down by how bad at the game I perceive myself to be. At many points, I flat out consider not going, so my team will be better off without me.

In my heart, I know that these thoughts are largely unfounded. Sure, I’m not the most experienced, skilled, fastest, fittest, or smartest player on the field. Sure, I might make a play that might cost my team the game. I may also be hit in the temple with a small stone flung from a fellow player’s foot and die.

Before every major sporting or competitive event, I travel down the roads of ‘What If?’ and ‘I’m Not Worthy’. These treks to Downertown are bad habits that I haven’t quite been able to shake.

What Ultimate has allowed me to do is grapple with and fight off these thoughts on a more regular basis. By no means do I avoid them completely. I still make myself feel like I have less aptitude for my pursuits than a slug has for playing the guitar. But I am also doing it for far less time than I used to. The self-shaming used to last several days, sometimes longer than a week. I would just feel like dirt, and I used to associate this with things that I love. This, of course, is less than optimal use of my emotional resources.

Over the past year and a bit, I have become far more self-aware, particularly of my negative habits. I still tend to gloss over my positive character traits. Nevertheless, I am working on it, and Ultimate has helped me do so. By dealing with this problem more often, I have been able to detach the negative emotions from the activity itself. I now know that it is just maladaptive behaviour that I need to rectify.

What this dissociation has helped me to do is get over it far more rapidly, and get back on the hype train more readily. A year ago, the night before an Ultimate weekend, I would be running through the possible illnesses I could fake in order to get out of it without losing face with my friends. Now, while the negative thoughts still linger, I try and focus on the positive. I try to see more angels, and fewer demons.

Apart from the more frequent resolution of my inner conflict, the other major help in this regard has been Kris. She has gotten my lazy, self-hating butt out of bed more times than I can count. Previously, when my activities weren’t ones I shared with Kris, it was far easier to skip. Now, she holds me accountable. And it has helped me climb the mountain of self-positivity.

So, here I sit, feeling not-so-down and amped for tomorrow’s play. We may win, we may lose. We will finally get our swag kit that we have been waiting for for weeks. Most importantly, I will have fun with people I enjoy spending time with, playing the sport we all love. I may be average at best at it, but that won’t stop me having a great weekend.

Sport or, How I Learned to Socialize Whilst Sweating

I sit with most of my body aching at present. My shoulder is sore. My calves are tight. My back occasionally reminds me that it is not at tip-top performance either. Finally, my throat is hoarse, and my voice gaining husky sultriness and quiet awkwardness in equal measure. Why is this? Bonding over sport, namely Ultimate and rugby. There were losses. There were wins (although these were fewer). Most importantly, friendships were formed or forged even stronger through the simple acts of playing and watching sports that we love together.

In school, I found sport largely an odd phenomenon. Sure, I played sport all of the way through my schooling career. I was in the 3rd cricket team in my final year. I batted at number seven at earliest, and bowled one over per game if I was lucky. I occasionally latched on to the optimistic thought that my fielding was that good, but most of the time I realized that I was profoundly average. The sport that I enjoyed the most in school was hockey. Although I did not achieve a higher team placement than cricket, I felt like a more integral part of the team than I did in cricket.

My first truly great sporting experiences lay on the hockey field, but on the club level. When I say club level, I do not mean the kind of club level where the players are all sporting six-packs, there is constant training, and my team is expected to win the title each and every year. I mean the kind of club level where the players are all sporting six-packs of beer, there is no training whatsoever, and the team is expected, well, to hopefully remain in the same league and not get relegated.

It was great fun, and I had many happy memories from my club hockey days. Some of these great memories came from on the field, but the majority arose during the shenanigans that took place off of the pitch. One memory that springs to mind most often is the one and only time I have seen my father truly drunk. Here is a picture from that night.

Doesn’t he look majestic? I was a year or so shy of legal drinking age, and fairly responsible. I ended up driving us home, because he was incapable of doing so. It was a night I will never forget.

Whilst hockey was my first foray into social sport, I feel that I truly found my outdoor sporting community in Ultimate Frisbee at Wits. Everywhere else, I had felt a little bit of an outsider, for one reason or another. I was too slow. I was too young. I didn’t drink enough. The list goes on, and many are likely to be overly critical perceptions from my mind. But in Ultimate, while I wasn’t the most integral part of the lineup, I still felt like part of the team to a degree that I had never felt before. Some of my strongest friends from my days at university come from the Ultimate team, despite me only playing in my final year in the university. I even played with my supervisor for my Honours thesis project whilst doing my thesis. Witsies will always be there to jol (have a good time for all of you not from South Africa), and that is what I loved about Wits Ultimate and the Ultimate community as a whole – everyone simply wanted to have fun.

This feeling continued into Korea, where the emphasis on the community is even more intense, especially in ROK-U, the main league in which I am playing now. ROK-U is largely comprised of expats from countries as varied as Russia and Canada, with several stops off in South Africa along the way. As a result, when game weekends are planned, so are organised social events for the teams to mingle and grow their expat connections within Korea. Ultimate people are great. Everyone is a little weird, and no-one cares, because you are all there together, in a strange country, playing the game you all love.

This past weekend, there was a two-day game weekend in Daejeon, which is pretty central in Korea. At one of these parties, the South Africans in ROK-U all bonded by staying up until 2am to watch our national rugby team, the Springboks, suffer a narrow defeat to the rugby juggernaut that is New Zealand. It was a heart-breaking affair, but I will never forget the sounds of a handful of South Africans (some more drunk than others) screaming at the top of our lungs at a television screen in the corner of a bar. It really was one of those special moments.

So, to everyone looking to meet new people, try sport. I’d say try Ultimate, but I may be a little biased. I am sure there are many sporting codes being played really close to you that you never knew existed. You don’t have to be serious, or even fit. I most certainly am not. Just get out there. Spend a little bit of time away from the digital overload. You won’t regret it. Not even when everything aches on a Monday evening and you have to carry heavy shopping.